This was Berlin Week at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
Prior to giving their first concert tonight in Davies Symphony Hall,
members of the Berlin Philharmonic, including Principal Conductor Sir
Simon Rattle, devoted Wednesday evening and Thursday afternoon and
evening to pedagogical sessions for the benefit of the next generation
of performing musicians. Five members of the orchestra led Master
Classes in trumpet (Gabor Tarkovi), trombone (Olaf Ott), French horn
(Stefan de Leval Jezierski), double bass (Janne Saksala), and flute
(Emmanuel Pahud). Finally, yesterday evening, Rattle spent two hours in
a Orchestral Workshop with the Conservatory Orchestra.
The
constraints of my schedule limited me to a very small sample of the
Master Class work; but that sample provided considerable insight into
how the music actually "works" (as opposed to more populist myths about
"how the magic happens"). I spent about 40 minutes observing Saksala
work with a student on the double bass recitative at the beginning of
the final movement of the ninth symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven, Opus
125 in D minor. There are any number of anecdotes about "killer
rehearsals" of this passage, usually involving conductors with the most
volatile personalities, such as Gustav Mahler and Arturo Toscanini. So
it was nice to blow away the clouds of emotional baggage and observe a
master of the instrument work through this passage with a student who
had clearly cultivated his own experience base.
Over the course of
his session, Saksala approached these fifty-odd measures from a variety
of points of view. Most important was that every detail in the score
mattered. This may be a recitative passage; but it is written in
three-four time. That is how the rest of the orchestra is playing, and
the recitative must mesh with it properly, often in ways that are very
precisely notated. Then, at the level of the notes themselves, there
are the ones that Beethoven marked with staccato dots. Why did he
choose those notes, and what role do they play in the overall flow of the recitative?
However, Saksala did not limit himself to the score. Ultimately everything depends on the sound
of the instrument. He gave a pop quiz on why the bass sounds so good
when it is plucked. The answer turns out to be a miniature physics
lesson. Each string has so much mass that plucking it introduces a lot
of energy that is converted to the vibrations of the sound, which are
then further enhanced by the resonances of the cavity of the
instrument. This turned out to be a lesson in bowing: The priority of
bow work is to let the string resound with the same energy it receives
when plucked.
With these nuts and bolts in place, Saksala could
then work through the passage from a "musical" point of view. He would
criticize phrases after listening to them, talk the student through
alternative approaches, and occasionally demonstrate on the student's
instrument. However, his underlying strategy basically involved putting
the student in a position conducive to his finding his own way, what
many in the education profession have come to call "active learning."
The entire session was intense and demanding, probably as much for those
of us in the audience as for the student. However, I doubt that any of
us there as observers will ever listen that passage by Beethoven quite
the same way again, no matter how many myth-like anecdotes we hear about
it.
This theme of finding your own way was also present
throughout Rattle's session with the Conservatory Orchestra. He
frequently emphasized that he was not going to beat off every pulse with
his baton or emote the rhetoric of every passage being played. The
orchestra had to discover and cultivate these things for themselves.
The conductor was there to make sure that everyone was properly
coordinated.
The object for Rattle's session was music by Richard Wagner from his opera Tristan und Isolde.
In an orchestral setting this opera is best known by its opening
prelude and an orchestra-only version of Isolde's final aria (the
"Liebestod"). Rattle chose, instead, to work with a synopsis of the
entire opera, based on an arrangement that Leopold Stokowski prepared
for the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1936. Stokowski's idea was to provide
through music the basic narrative that links the opening notes of the
opera to the final ones. His version of this narrative includes the
taking of the potion in the first act, Isolde's anticipation of Tristan
returning from an evening hunt (represented by off-stage horns) to spend
the night with her, the night itself ("Liebesnacht"), and the warnings
from Brangäne keeping watch for their safety. Stokowski's arrangements
have often drawn criticism for meddling with their sources, but this is
probably about as clear a telling of Wagner's opera in strictly
orchestral language as one is likely to find.
For Rattle this
opera (if not most of Wagner's music) is a matter of unbridled passion.
Almost all of his rehearsal involved prying the students away from the
notes in front of them and pulling them into that world of passion.
There is no doubt that the word most frequently heard from Rattle's lips
during his two-hour session was "more!" Fortunately, however, he had a
wealth of technical advice to offer dealing with just how one achieves
that "more." Some of it would probably raise more than a few eyebrows.
His approach to the "Liebestod" climax could be described as
"barely-controlled chaos," with the strings fingering each note in
strict time but each player bowing in his/her own way; but, as Rattle
put it, "This is Wagner!" Wagner wanted to transcend the conventions of
musical performance. If one wishes to play his music, one has to dare
to take such transcendent strategies.
Indeed, on the audience side, we
also transcended. For all the interruptions, for all of the many
tactical approaches Rattle took to getting the Conservatory students to
dare along with him, there were moments when we in the audience we
transported beyond the technicalities of rehearsal to the fullness of
performance itself. To return to Saksala's Master Class approach, for
the students it was all about the techniques and insights required to
make the music "work;" but the rest of us could not resist giving in to
those final measures of the "Liebestod" and just letting the "magic"
happen!
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