… I have three more performances. So far my reeds are holding out, but just barely. I just can’t see bringing anything new into the mix; it’s so tiring on the mouth when starting up something new. So these guys are gonna have to hang in there. (Pretty please, reeds?!)
Meanwhile, I’m looking for unusual renditions of selections from the Nutcracker. So here’s one for you! (I know my Nutcracker colleagues will ignore most of these posts, but others of you might enjoy them!)
Not much to post here at the moment. I’m busy with Nuts. As folks on Facebook and Twitter know, Mr. Nut has become the star of my tweets and FB posts. ;-)
Here are a few samples:
Mr. Nut thinks it’s nap time! It’s only intermission:
Mr. Nut is feeling sort of bad about the mouse incident.
In case some of you are worried, thinking I do this stuff during the performance, take heart! I only take the photos before we begin and during intermission. The iPhone is off while I’m playing. I know there are musicians who actually text during performances, but I won’t go there. I think once that door is opened we are entering the danger zone!
And now I have to quickly have a bite to eat and head on over to the hall. It’s a double service day; shows at 1:35 and 7:35!
I’d not even heard of this until I read about it at Classical Notes.
Somehow I don’t think I’ll be going to see this. (But when do I go see movies anyway?)
More clips:
… and, I’m guessing, at tempi I would love to play someday!
I do have vague memories of my very first time playing The Nutcracker. I remember loving the music. I remember seriously studying the English horn solos. I remember working so very hard to be perfect and expressive. And I remember getting so very nervous for each and every solo.
I think I’ve now played it for something like 30 years. I suspect I could play it without the music in front of me. I certainly know all the solos by heart. And I no longer get nervous, unless reeds are in fail mode.
Well, okay … maybe not out loud … but I found it humorous:
When you read the program, the story of Ben Stevenson’s production seems the same as umpteen other “Nutcrackers.” But as it unfolds, it’s quite another tale. The Nutcracker – coming to life in time for the battle, but still short and unprepossessing – says to Clara, “I love you, you’re mine, you alone can change my life.” After the battle, however, no sooner is he transformed into a handsome ballet prince than he says to her, “You must meet my wife.” Promptly he partners the Snow Queen, who keeps saying, very sweetly, to Clara, “Darling, you’re my new best friend – but just remember: He’s mine.”
Next he leaves the Snow Queen behind, takes Clara away with him to a whole new realm, and introduces her to the Sugar Plum Fairy, with whom he seems happier yet, and who likewise makes Clara her very best friend. (“But he’s mine.”)
The ballet ends with him back in motion in his human-size Nutcracker form by her bedside, presumably trying to start the whole process of cheating all over again.
RTWT because the beginning, about the audience’s fancy dress, is kind of funny as well. :-)
I wouldn’t normally post this in April, but the tiger is just too funny (look in the back at the tiger stealing the show):
(Thanks, Rachael Rosenthal!)
So … I finished with the ballet today. Most of my colleagues will return on Saturday and finish up on Sunday, but I’m done, and I’m looking forward to family, friends and … get ready for it! … food! I have enough double chocolate cookies to keep all of us content.
I don’t really get to see much of the ballet when I’m playing, but I do have one of the better seats to at least catch a bit. For the most part ballet is about “heads and shoulders” to me, as that’s about all I can see. But one of the lead guys — and he was on today as the Nutcracker Prince — does this one thing downstage enough that I can see him. It does this jump thing over and over where he nearly does the splits (or at least that’s how it looks from the pit) and touches his toes. I’m sure that move has a name, but I know absolutely nothing about ballet. I think this is a newer dancer, and he’s pretty darn incredible!
[time lapse as I search online, since I think I saw an article by Beth Zare about him]
Ah-hah! Here’s Beth’s article!
Oh … and here’s a video of Ballet San Jose … at :19 you can see the move I’m talking about, although it’s not Meng Lu who is dancing.
And my “Oops” story for you: I managed to drop my favorite Nutcracker English horn reed at the start of the ballet today. Sigh. Now I did manage to keep playing on it; it didn’t appear to be cracked. But when I picked it up from under my stand, where it fell, I can’t even tell you how disgustingly filthy it was! The pit, by the end of the run, is not exactly spotless.
Oh well. Never a dull moment.
I’m not really interested in becoming a writer (I’ve run this blog through a site that determines my writing level and I believe it said I write at a third grade level. Go figure.), but if you go here you can see that the Examiner has openings for local writers, including the “San Jose Cello Examiner” and the “San Jose Flute Examiner”. There is no “San Jose Oboe Examiner” and I’m wondering if I should picket the paper. (Mostly because it really sounds so cool to say “Picket the Paper” … especially when it’s “Patty Pickets the Paper” or “Petty Patty Pickets the Paper” … hmmm. So much potential.
(Oooh. I also see “Monterey Bay Tattoo Art Examiner” and that does seem right up my alley. Yes?)
Meanwhile, one of Symphony Silicon Valley‘s own, French hornist Beth Zare, is already the Monterey Bay Area Arts Examiner. Yay Beth! Check out her Nutcracker Adventures article. (Maybe it should have been called Misadventures?)
Speaking of Nutcracker … one more for me, today at 1:35. Then it’s goodbye until 2010.
Last week, when doing Nutcrackers, it was warm enough that I thought I could have left my coat at home. (I still brought it, as I’m wimpy that way.) Tonight was a different story. I was freezing after walking from my car to the pit, and never did fully warm up. Now I’m home, sitting underneath a wonderfully warm blanket, enjoying a cup of tea. (I initially had a nice large glass of milk. Cold as it was, it still hit the spot. Am I one party animal or what?)
I sit at the edge of the pit, closest to the audience, right under the conductor’s right arm. There’s a gaping hole next to me; it’s an area that’s underneath the first rows of the audience seating. I think it’s because there’s this hole that there’s a lot of cold air that comes up when we have weather like this. It was draftier than usual. I have to be extra careful with my instruments, making sure I’m not getting water in the octave keys. Ah, the life of the woodwind player! In addition, I think the vents that are outside the stage door entrance must be causing me to breathe a bit of cigarette smoke. (Both the stage crew and the dancers do a good (or is that “bad”) amount of smoking.)
Okay. Whining over. Really. It’s great to see the little kids bouncing their way back to their cars. Too darn cute. Even the ones who, usually at the start of the Pas de Deux, start to cry. (I think that’s probably at about the 2 hour mark, and it seems that some reach their limit about then; our Nutcracker is about 2 hours and 15 minutes.) I also like to hear people chatting as they leave. The other night one man was just ecstatic about the performance. That’s encouraging to hear.
Tomorrow it’s a double service day, so the morning will be a take-it-easy sort of time. I’m trying to remember how I did all of this when our three children were young. I guess that’s why most of us have kids we get too old, eh? I know I couldn’t manage now. Or at least I think I’d be a basket case!
Three more Nutcrackers for me. Then I’m officially off of work until January 4. No students, no playing work. Just family time. Nice!
Today we had only one Nutcracker, and tomorrow is a day off. (So what am I doing tomorrow? Teaching five students. Go figure!) This was the fourth Nutcracker in three days. That’s really not a huge deal … in past years we’ve had doubles on both Saturday and Sunday. I do enjoy having my Sunday evening off (although the Sunday afternoon performance meant I skipped church yet again. Sigh.). As you might recall, I blogged about neglectin my “idiot check” on Friday night. Rest assured that both Saturdays performances and today’s had my More Favored Reeds. (But — ACK! — I do believe the More Favored Reeds are dying quick deaths. Figures.)
Today was a different issue.
We got to “Big Number 5″ (if you have the same parts we have) and this is my first low D# to low B back to low D#. So before starting, I do the nose grease on the pinkie thing (if you don’t know what I’m talking about you probably aren’t an oboist and you probably don’t really need to know!). I slid several times from the D# key to the B before I started to play, just to make sure the finger slid easily. But wait! I get to that moment and my brains says, “Patty, you have absolutely no clue how to finger this!” Really. It didn’t say it out loud, but it said it loud and clear for my brain to deal with. So what did I do? Well, I used the banana key! (Again, if you aren’t an oboist or English hornist this is sort of meaningless to you.) Now the banana key DOES work, but I never use it, and it’s not as reliable as a nice clean slide. So the low B wasn’t as responsive and clear as I’d like.
Never a dull moment.
There was another moment I wasn’t thrilled with. But we’ll leave that alone for now. Mostly I was just shocked by the brain freeze. (I know some of you call these something else, but I do prefer brain freeze, as it really does feel as if my brain is suddenly frozen or locked up.)
And now I’m home, and watching San Francisco Symphony and MTT doing Ives’ “New English Holidays”. Crazy Ives! When I first started playing English horn in San Jose Symphony (RIP) we did an Ives that, at one point, has the orchestra blasting away playing a number of different things (I think it’s a parade of sorts? … it’s been a LONG time! Maybe a reader will fill me in?). All of the sudden everyone stops and there is a lone English horn (me) playing a long held note. I was, at that point, not as tuned in to the EH and the key of F, and I was always surprised by the note that was sounding as I expected the pitch you’d hear on a C instrument. I’m sure I’d be missing that surprise now, and I’m sort of sorry; that was always a fun little moment.
This is part of San Francisco Symphony series called Keeping Score. It’s a series I highly recommend.
There are six more Nutcracker performances left, of which I play four; originally I had thought we’d be out of town for the final two so I submitted my absence request. This didn’t turn out to be the case, but I had to turn my notice in early enough that I didn’t know plans would be different. So oh well! I’ll be done early, and a sub will get some extra work. So … well … “it’s all good.” (I’ve decided “it’s all good” means “nothin’ to be done!”)
And … WOW … just at the part of the Ives with choir. Incredible! I’d love to do this work! And now I suppose I should get the DVD because this is really amazing!
But let’s not castigate “The Nutcracker” just because it is the cash cow of American ballet. And let’s not make the mistake of assuming the tweeness of bad “Nutcracker” productions means that the ballet is itself twee.
Just listen to the ballet’s overture. In good productions the view of childhood that starts here, in the miniature orchestration and quick pulse of Tchaikovsky’s introduction, is enchantingly serious. Gradually the music will build in scale until you reach the colossal, slow, full-orchestral grandeur of the Sugarplum adagio in Act II: no ballet score has a greater span, and this shows how passionately Tchaikovsky was depicting the inner life of a child.
For those of you who don’t hear it constantly, here is the overture:
If you want more check out YouTube. I’m sure you’ll find a lot of it there.
I was going to wait and post this later; I’m in the middle of painting a guest room here (Hmm. Is this really the best thing to do with my free time, I wonder?!) … but I’m thinking I should really post this before I forget. So here goes …
Symphony president Andrew Bales sent me a comment about the Nuts, in response to what I posted earlier. With his permission I’m posting his comments here for all. (I have told him that when I was librarian with San Jose Symphony eons ago the librarian of the Cleveland ballet really did tell me that three players were used for Nuts, but who knows why that was if he now says there were only two. Not a big deal, but thought I’d mention it. I didn’t want all of you to think I was making things up!)
Anyway, here’s his note to me:
The mixed up score for Nutcracker was created with a very specific purpose in mind. Just as musicians play this for generations, dancers perform it more than any other piece of repertory they will ever do. When Dennis and his partner Ernie conceived of this production they knew that Tchaikovsky wrote the score almost entirely in waltz time and this would make for a rather pallid mix over time. They interspersed other works by Tchaikovsky in order to offer them a variety of rhythms to makes dances to. As we are now celebrating the 30th anniversary of this production, it must have worked as both dancers and audiences still seem to love it. So all this mix up is not an arbitrary insertion, but a plan to enliven this stage work for generations.
Second, you noted that budget cuts eliminated the third oboe/English horn and that isn’t true. In Cleveland and in San Jose it was always done with two players, except for a period when the Ballet first came here and the old Symphony contract had more players in its A/B configuration than were ever used in Cleveland. The Symphony hired the extra players to fill out its service obligation to its A/B players so the Ballet had players in the pit
here that were never in the pit in Cleveland. For the old San Jose Symphony, it was cheaper to pay for a few extra players to perform with the Ballet than to find entire new productions that would use those same players.This last point actually led to the formation of the Ballet Orchestra contract separate from SJS. Way back when the Ballet asked for a compliment of about 49-50 musicians and the SJS insisted on 61. The Ballet said yes (read me), but they would only pay for the 49-50 that they had always used. SJS said fine, but after several years and a few budget crisis
cycles the Symphony wanted to be paid for the entire 61-member ensemble. The Ballet said that was not the deal and that it could not go beyond the core it had always used in Cleveland. At that point an SJS administrator decided that the foundations were pushing SJS to do more education work so they would redirect the Ballet services into that field and drop the Ballet. This prompted me to form the new Ballet contract which eventually evolved to the successor symphony to SJS. So the moral is—wait for it — woe be
he/she who fails to play Nutcracker.
& just so you all know, I’m now working on the next set (along with my painting project, that is) … Nutcracker is rolling along just fine, and next up is Scheherazade. I definitely need to start that now, even while I’m only playing second and English horn. It does have some notes! :-)
Since I was writing about Nutcracker, and Cooper joined in the conversation, mentioning the low Bs and the sliding as well, I thought I’d show some of you what we are talking about … AND the different order in which some of our music appears here in San Jose.
Let’s start with the first low D# to B (& back again) slide, which you see on the bottom staff of this page:
(And yes, I really don’t play the first three notes of the solo, as they are cut. You’ll noticed, too, that we are coming from a different part of the work … we have lots of re-ordered parts in our Nutcracker.)
As you can see, too, I have 2 1/2 measures to get back to oboe, and even then I’m leaving out a few notes that should happen before what you see in the 2nd oboe, since it’s impossible to get them in. Here is the very next page:
Another big solo in our first act is preceded by a second oboe part that I play instead on English horn:
But the first act really isn’t a huge deal. It’s the beginning of the second act that is the killer. Here’s the first page (and see all those repeated F#s? I always have fun playing it all in one breath … it’s just a bit of a game for me). Look at the measure prior to the crossed out first ending … more of the low B to D# and then C# back to B. Try it … it’s sort of a bit of fun, really. (I switch from regular D# to left D# as I hold the note, so I free up my right pinkie for the C#.)
But that page is just a big blow and not a killer. Check out this next part though … on the very next page. I have an English horn solo that ends on a low B, and I have to switch from that to an oboe duet (this is from Cappricio Italien) in fewer than 8 beats. I always have to remember to have the oboe ready to go before we begin the act. If not, I’m dead.
But wait! I’m not done yet. After playing the remaining bit of the page above (not completely in the photo), I move on to this:
Yes. I switch from oboe 2 back to English horn, playing the final oboe 2 parts on English horn (thus the hand written portion on that page), and we go directly from Capriccio Italien to “Le Café” (often called the Arabian Dance). And yes, we really do repeat the oboe 1 and English horn solos toward the end.
So maybe now you’ll know what I’m talking about with my crazy whining about low Bs and funny switches and all, eh?
But I’m never bored. I can promise you that! And while I whine I’m actually okay with all of this.
I just like to whine. ;-)
So the Nuts have begun. I’ve played one rehearsal and one performance at this point. Yes, one rehearsal But trust me, I know this work! I had to skip the first rehearsal because I’m not playing the final two performances and my sub needed to get a crack at it. (Hah! get it? A “crack” at it. Man, I’m subtle. Or maybe just a NUT. Oh dear. Sorry. I’ll stop now.) Last night was opening night, and while I played fine I had a rough night. I just felt “off” … (I know, I know, many of you say it’s clear I’m always “off”!). If I played and supported in my usual way I felt a bit sick to my stomach … and today is a dizzy day.
Ever since my major health issue of last year (you can read about the start of that here) I have these. They don’t come anywhere close to how awful that particular virus was, but they remind me that I’m simply not back to “normal” … and I wonder if I ever will be. So I’m staying home, and I’m not moving around a whole heck of a lot. Such is life.
Playing the Nut isn’t like it used to be. I was talking about this to a colleague last night. We were remembering the years of stress. Our parts have some rather significant solos, and it took a number of years to not be a bit nervous about them. Now I’m not nervous at all. That doesn’t mean the solos aren’t difficult, because they do have their challenges (what was Tchaikovsky thinking with those low Bs, eh? And having to slide to them … geesh!). And it doesn’t mean I don’t take the work seriously, because I most certainly do. The day I don’t care I hope I quit. I just don’t fret or cry over things anymore, and my heart doesn’t try to pound its way out of my body as it used to. I actually enjoy trying to think of things to do with the solos. (I”m guessing no one else notices if I hold this or that note in a slightly different way, but it’s just fun and keeps me on my toes after playing various Nutcrackers for — what? — probably over 30 years now!) I do whine a bit but, truth be told, the music is actually good. The other day I switched on the radio and heard some lovely music. It actually took me a moment to realize I was hearing a selection from the Nutcracker! Go figure.
“I think I’m going to stay in the ballet until I’m twenty.”
-Karen Gabay’s daughter, Kalena, who makes her Nutcracker debut as a mouse this year
For those of you who don’t know, Karen has been with the ballet since forever, and I remember the very first time we saw her. (One of my male colleagues melted immediately … that smile, those eyes … well … you couldn’t resist her!) While she doesn’t really know us at all (or not me at least), we all feel as if we know her, as we’ve watched her grow up and go through life. How fun to see her daughter now!
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