Choosing concert programmes revisited

Last year I wrote a blog post on the issues involved in choosing concert programmes for amateur orchestras. I'm now involved in advising and helping choose programmes for both the orchestras I'm a member of.

The process this summer of working out the programmes for the Amati Orchestra was interesting, and I think it is a good example of amateur orchestra programming done right. The programme went through a number of drafts and I think it is worthwhile to describe how we worked at it.

The players had been canvassed for their ideas and we used as many of them as were practicable. As it is still a fairly new orchestra, they have a policy for the time being to play only out-of-copyright music in order to economise on music hire fees. That's OK, there's lots of good, popular, playing music that is out of copyright, easily enough to fill three concerts!

I had had discussions over a drink after rehearsals with the conductor on my philosophy of choosing programmes, that there are a number of things a good concert programme for an amateur orchestra must contain.

• In order to bring in the audience, it must contain at least one disgustingly popular piece, or at least a piece by a disgustingly popular composer which the audience might mistake for the disgustingly popular piece they know.
• In order to maintain the interest of the players, most of the programme has to be enjoyable to rehearse.
• We can have an obscure or experimental piece in a programme, so long as the majority of the pieces are more mainstream.
• If there is going to be a concerto in the programme, there have to be some good tunes in the purely orchestral pieces.
• We need to avoid as far as possible a programme which requires extra players (e.g. additional wind, harps or percussion) for only one piece, especially one of the shorter pieces. So there is a need to check the instrumentation of the pieces to see that there aren't any serious mismatches.
• The programme needs to be hard enough to stretch the players but not so hard that they despair of getting the pieces to concert standard in time.

Our conductor had no problem in agreeing with all of this. His first draft for our 2013-14 programme was sent out by email to the committee and a few selected senior players, with an invitation for comments. The whole process was managed by email over a week or so.

This was the first draft.

Autumn
Strauss: Overture Die Fledermaus
Grieg: Peer Gynt Suite No. 2
Tchaikovsky: Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture
Elgar: Enigma Variations

Spring
Weber: Oberon Overture
Delius: In a Summer Garden
Smetana: Sarka from Ma Vlast
Rachmaninov: Symphony No. 1

Summer
Mussorgsky: Night on Bare Mountain
Dvorak: Cello Concerto
Berlioz: Sinfonie Fantastique

The conductor is keen to do some Rachmaninov this season, Rachmaninov comes out of copyright in Europe at the end of 2013. I think he would have preferred to put in the 2nd symphony (which is better known) rather than the 1st, but I had warned him that the 2nd symphony has the cellos divisi into four parts at one point, and we needed to ensure that we had a larger cello section before we could do it justice.

Overall I felt that this was a pretty good programme. We have a good soloist lined up to play the Dvorak Cello Concerto. My main concern (shared with others) was that Sinfonie Fantastique is a bit hard and requires too many extra instruments. It needs 4 bassoons(!). The clarinets both need to have a C clarinet and the 1st would also need an Eb clarinet - absolutely vital for the Witches' Sabbath, the solo simply can't be played transposed on a Bb clarinet. We would need 2 tubas, 2 harps, 2 sets of timpani and lots of other percussion with at least 4 percussionists. At one point in In The Countryside there are 4 timpani rolls going on at the same time. Hiring in the extra players and instruments might be a bit expensive.

The conductor regretfully decided that these concerns were valid, so there was some discussion as to what to put in its place. Pictures at an Exhibition was proposed but discarded as being too difficult for the time being. Then there was a suggestion that the summer concert should be a programme of summery music, particularly (though not necessarily exclusively) concerning an English summer. This idea was greeted with enthusiasm.

This led to the conductor's 2nd draft.

Autumn
Strauss: Overture Die Fledermaus
Smetana: Sarka from Ma Vlast
Tchaikovsky: Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture
Dvorak: Symphony No. 9 “From the New World”

Spring
Weber: Oberon Overture
Dvorak: Cello Concerto
Rachmaninov: Symphony No. 1

Summer
Elgar: Cockaigne Overture
Delius: In a Summer Garden
Butterworth: Banks of Green Willow
Butterworth: Shropshire Lad
Debussy: Prelude a l’apres midi d’un faune
Elgar: Enigma Variations

That looked to be a great improvement. The autumn concert contains two big popular pieces. The spring concert has the Rachmaninov as something very enjoyable to rehearse alongside the concerto.

My only concern was with the summer concert. I've played  Cockaigne,  Prelude a l’apres midi d’un faune and Enigma before, and I know that all three pieces are pretty difficult. Although Enigma is programmed as a symphony, in fact it is a series of fairly short movements and so there is much less repetition and recapitulation than in most symphonies, so it will take up more rehearsal time in proportion to its length. Cockaigne is just plain hard, and the Debussy is rhythmically very complex and intricate. I felt that this was one difficult piece too many, and so I suggested dropping Cockaigne and inserting Nielsen's Overture Helios instead. The overture represents a Greek summer's day from sunrise to sunset. It's not as hard, but is rewarding to play, and is about the same length as Cockaigne. (It also happens to have a very striking horn quartet at the start, which is a factor which didn't influence me at all. Of course not! Who could possibly think such a thing?)

And that is what we finally agreed on. Every concert has at least one piece that audiences are likely to recognise and look forward to hearing. There are some great tunes there for everybody to play, and we have calibrated the overall difficulty so that we can do all the pieces justice.

I think that is an excellent outcome, and I'm looking forward to the new season. As it happens, I've played most of the pieces before, but I don't mind that. I've played so much of the repertoire that it's very rare for me to play a concert where I haven't played at least half the pieces before.

Questions from a composer

A few days ago, I had an email out of the blue from composer Christopher Moore. He had read my blog, and he told me it had helped him score better for horn players. In order to write even better for the horn, he had a series of questions he wanted to ask me.

I was vastly flattered, and am always happy to help composers write better for the horn. So I was more than ready to offer answers to as many questions as he might have. He agreed that I could publish the Q&A, so here it is in full.

01. What are your favorite horns(brands) to use? and why?
I use an Alexander Model 103 F/Bb full double. I bought it when I was 18 on the recommendation of my horn teacher Douglas Moore, who in his day was principal horn of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. At that age, I wasn't old enough or experienced enough to work out for myself what was a good horn for me, but his recommendation has worked out very well. I've been playing this particular horn now for 33 years, and I see no reason to change.

Because I've played the same horn for so long, I'm not particularly knowledgeable about the characteristics of different brands of horns. All I know is that the Alex and I suit each other very well. But it's my view that how you play the horn, both technically and musically, matters far more than the specific brand of horn you play, and that it is worth taking time to get used to a specific instrument unless it is showing obvious tuning or mechanical defects.

02. What are your favorite pieces to play solo or group?
For solo concertos, I regard the Mozart and Richard Strauss concertos as being the definitive solo pieces for the horn. The four Mozarts and Strauss 1 are all recognisably of a type. Strauss 2 is something quite different. I had to learn Strauss 2 at music college, but I didn't actually like it at the time, particularly the first movement that seemed to meander around without actually going anywhere.

But a few years ago, I got the opportunity to play Richard Strauss's two late Sonatinas for wind, "From an Invalid's Workshop", and "The Happy Workshop", written around the same time as the 2nd concerto. And through listening to and playing these, I gained insights into the structure and style of the concerto. In the meantime I had also played much Brahms, Mahler, Wagner and Shostakovich which also formed the musical landscape of Strauss's late years, and that also helped me understand the piece. Now, 30 years after I first learned Strauss 2, I think that I could finally make a convincing performance of it, in the unlikely event that the opportunity arose for me.

The other solo piece for horn I have a particular liking for is Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. Having several short movements, it shows off the different aspects of the horn to wonderful and dramatic effect. My personal copy of the horn part still has markings put in by my teacher, who as he was writing them said to me "This is how Britten told me to play it". He performed the piece more than once under Britten's baton.

In terms of chamber music involving the horn, there is much to enjoy: for instance the Beethoven Septet and Schubert Octet, the Mozart wind serenades. In a completely different vein are wind quintets by Ibert (Trois Pieces Breves) and Milhaud (La cheminée du roi René), which require a great delicacy of touch unlike almost any other horn music.

By the way, wind quintets are almost guaranteed to give horn players an inferiority complex. The horn is less agile than the woodwind instruments that make up the rest of the group, the horn's tone is distinctive and so there is nowhere to hide, cracked notes are horribly prominent, and with only five instruments in the group, there are fewer opportunities to rest, while on the other hand you have to play delicately in order not to overwhelm the other instruments in such a small group. Wind quintet playing is extremely hard work for a horn player!

As for orchestral music, there is so much to choose from, but I'll mention just a a couple of pieces that use horn ensembles to startling effect. The most famous is the Scherzo from Beethoven's Eroica symphony. But this is not as unique and original as many people might think. It has definite precursors in Haydn's Symphony No. 31 "Hornsignal" and Mozart's Divertimento in D, K131. Both are well worth a listen if you are not familiar with them. Then there is of course the Schumann Konzertstuck for 4 horns and orchestra.

I'm lucky in that I have had a professional quality of training on the horn, but I chose not to become a professional player. As a result, there is almost nothing in amateur music making that frightens me. There are just three pieces I have performed publicly that are exceptions to that: the Schumann Konzertstuck and the two Strauss wind sonatinas. They are seriously hard!


03. I usually use Wagner and Mendelssohn for auditions. Any other compositions you think will better access a players skills?
All the Mahler symphonies have extremely prominent horn parts, but the 1st horn part of the 2nd movement of the 4th symphony and the obligato horn part in the 3rd movement of the 5th symphony are particular challenges, not just technically but also musically.

The solo from the slow movement of Tchaikovsky's 5th symphony is also a major challenge. The solo is a difficult in technical and endurance terms because of its length, but more importantly it is a major musical challenge. The player has to decide how the phrases are going to be shaped, where exactly the climax of each phrase will be, and the subtle changes in speed and articulation which transform it into great music rather than a mere succession of notes. There is no single right way to play it, but it is very easy to find a wrong way!

A similar kind of musical challenge is the 1st horn solo towards the end of the 1st movement of Brahms 2nd symphony. Technically this is not so hard, but there are significant changes of mood as you progress through the solo, and so the horn player again has important musical decisions to make when deciding how to play it.

You may realise from this that I am more interested in phrasing and producing a convincing musical performance than in extremes of technical ability. Orchestras for the most part have no use for a horn player who can rattle off super-high notes but can't play Brahms 2 with a good tone and rounded phrasing.

If you want an audition passage that will test a player's upper range under pressure, then the solo from the 1st movement of Shostakovich's 5th Symphony is a good test, as is the solo in the 1st movement of Ravel's Piano Concerto in G. Anybody can blast out high notes fortissimo, but both these solos require the high register to be controlled with a beautiful tone played relatively softly. This is much harder.

04. When you play new pieces (unpublished works)--if you can't take the work home--...Does it make rehearsals difficult/time consuming?
A little, but not unduly. In Britain at least, professional musicians and the better amateurs are all pretty good sightreaders. So unless the piece is technically difficult or rhythmically complex to an unreasonable degree, then the notes can be mastered without too much trouble. Then it becomes a matter for the conductor (for orchestral pieces) or the group as a whole (for chamber works) to decide how they want to coordinate phrasing, tempo changes and other musical issues. That can't be worked out in private practice, it has to be done in rehearsal.

In Britain, there is a group called the Rehearsal Orchestra which has now been running for over 50 years. They are a training orchestra and specialise in doing music courses where the rehearsals are as close to British professional conditions as you will get without actually being in a professional orchestra. Probably something approaching half of Britain's professional musicians have played in the Rehearsal Orchestra in their younger days. Commonly, the orchestra will take a large orchestral work, rehearse it for one or two days of a weekend and then give an informal performance of it at the end of the course. They can be very ambitious in their repertoire, on one occasion I remember playing Strauss' Ein Heldenleben and Bartok's Kossuth in the same weekend. Their first weekend course in 2014 will be Strauss' Sinfonia Domestica. There's no opportunity to take parts home and practice between rehearsals, it just has to be got right immediately. So in Britain at least, there is no great issue with playing new or unfamiliar music. People just put the notes on their stands and get on with playing them.

I understand that the music education systems in some other countries put less emphasis on sightreading and efficient rehearsal technique, and so new music takes longer to assimilate, but there is nothing inevitable about this if the musicians have the right skills. I've been told that the horn players of the London Symphony Orchestra have something of a macho determination never to take parts home to practice, but instead they take pride in just being to play excellently just on the rehearsals. I don't know whether this story is literally true, but it does express the kind of pride that British musicians have in being able to achieve excellent results on minimal preparation.

Even among amateur musicians, it is not uncommon for an amateur orchestra to be strengthened by "extras" coming in for just the final rehearsal on the day of the concert to fill in any gaps among the orchestra's regular players. I have played innumerable concerts of this type. You arrive, you rehearse, you mark in the part any corners that you need to be particularly careful of, and you perform. Any tricky bit has to be taken care of with a few minutes practice during the break between the rehearsal and concert.

Coordinated Breathing

Mahler's 4th symphony was in the programme for a concert I did during the summer. At the end of the first half of one of the evening rehearsals, as we were stopping for a coffee break, I asked the second horn to stay back for a moment before we got our coffee so we could work out some coordinating breathing points for a horn 1 & 2 duet passage in the 3rd movement (14 bars after 11 if you want to look it up).

The conductor happened to walk past as we were marking up the parts. I think he was rather surprised that we would co-ordinate breathing in this way. He's a string player, he's entirely used to the idea of co-ordinating bowing in string sections. But I don't think it had ever properly occurred to him that the wind would at times need to co-ordinate breathing.

Much the same principles apply of course. It is just that the breathing isn't so visible as bows moving up and down in unison.

This autumn, the same orchestra is playing Dvorak's New World Symphony. We'll may also need to co-ordinate the breathing at the opening of the slow movement, not just between the horns, but with the heavy brass as well.

Sexual abuse in music schools

Child sex abuse is more normally the topic of my other blog, where I have been working to address the child sex abuse scandal at Ealing Abbey and St Benedict's School.

But this unpleasant topic has now spilled over into the world of music and music teaching, with the conviction of Michael Brewer a former teacher at the prestigious Chetham's School of Music in Manchester, of a series of sexual assaults against a former pupil Frances Andrade. Tragically Frances Andrade committed suicide after giving evidence at the trial, something kept from the jury until after they had given their verdict.

In developments which are depressingly familiar to me as they mirror so many other cases I know of, in the publicity following the trial it has emerged that there are several other teachers or former teachers at Chetham's and at the Royal Northern College of Music who are under investigation. (Chetham's takes children up to the age of 18, RNCM teaches college-age students. As both are in Manchester, many teachers teach at both institutions.)

And worse still, it has emerged that Michael Brewer resigned from Chetham's after the then headmaster, Peter Hullah, disturbed Brewer and a pupil in Brewer’s office ‘when the choirmaster had the girl’s top off’. That resignation, supposedly on health grounds, allowed Brewer to leave without there being any investigation, and so allowed Brewer to continue to work with children, particularly as director of the National Youth Choirs. In fact, Brewer continued to work with NYC even after he had been arrested for the indecent assault on Frances Andrade, though the NYC did at least ensure that Brewer was not permitted to be alone with any student under the age of 16.

One of Britain's leading composers Michael Berkeley has this week said in the Guardian that he understood the conditions under which abuse could flourish at a music school.

"What is important to understand is the extreme vulnerability of a pupils … for whom the teacher may be some sort of guru … There is a huge responsibility attached to that."
The same was true for young dancers, "who have to delve deeply into their psychosexual makeup" and may transfer emotions on to their teachers.

Berkeley has has suggested that it should be an "absolute rule" that teachers should not have sex with their students – even if the student is over 18. He went on to suggest that if educational institutions, from colleges to universities, could not enforce such a rule, then one has to start thinking about legislation.

It seems to me that music schools and music colleges are particularly vulnerable to this issue, partly given the emotional aspect of making music, the hothouse atmosphere of intensively training children from a very young age, the almost universal practice (in Britain at least) of instrumental teaching in one-on-one lessons with a single pupil at a time, and the fact that teaching instrumental music at times inevitable involves the teacher touching the pupil in order to obtain correct hand and body positions for playing the instrument.

In fact, the new Principal of the RNCM Linda Merrick has suggested in the Guardian that one-on-one music tuition may need to be abolished.

Because of the high emotions involved in music making, it has to be recognised that the pupils themselves may form strong crushes on their teachers, and that there is scope for trouble even if they are not reciprocated.

Clearly, the first priority has to be to ensure that children are protected. Child sex abuse is a loathsome crime and all practicable measures to deter and prevent is must obviously be made. But we must also recognise that many good honest teachers who have dedicated their lives to music are now also feeling intensely vulnerable lest an unfounded allegation be made against them.

Chetham's is where there is a current scandal. But I doubt very much that it is unique, even among music schools. It is very likely that similar stories will eventually emerge from other music schools, in Britain or elsewhere.

And that means that the entire worldwide tradition of how we teach music may come into question. What changes do we need to make in specialist music education such that the welfare of the students is assured while maintaining the standard of the teaching provided?

Some parts of the answer are obvious. For instance, it is clear that all allegations of sexual abuse have to be passed immediately to the authorities, whether or not a teacher voluntarily resigns. If this has to be made mandatory because schools too often don't report voluntarily, then so be it. There also has to be greater awareness of the issue both among staff and students, and perhaps training for music teachers in music schools on how to conduct themselves in a way that reduces the risk of inappropriate behaviour or even of mistaken perceptions of inappropriate behaviour.

But it may be the more is also needed, and Linda Merrick's questioning of the future of one-on-one tuition needs to be part of this debate.

This is an unpleasant and uncomfortable topic. But it is going to have to be faced by everybody who cares about music and music education.

Playing a concert on one rehearsal

Last month, I was asked to play a concert with the North Downs Sinfonia. They don't happen to have any regular horns at the moment, and so they had to bring in extras from outside. I was asked to play 1st horn for the concert. The programme was very nice: Weber's Overture Euryanthe, Grieg's Piano Concerto, and Beethoven's 2nd Symphony.

But I and the other horns couldn't get to any of the rehearsals before the day of the concert, so we had just the one rehearsal on the day the concert itself. Amongst freelance pros and also among the better amateurs who deputise in each others' orchestras, this is a fairly common occurrence. The only unusual aspect of this concert is that it isn't all that common for a deputy to be called in to play 1st.

If you are going to do a concert on such little rehearsal, then you owe it to the rest of the orchestra to be as well prepared as possible. Ideally, you should already know the pieces and so not need much rehearsal anyway. In this case, this was true for me for two out of the three pieces, I've played both the Beethoven and the Grieg before.

But whether or not you've played the pieces before, you still need to prepare. If at all possible, get hold of the parts ahead of time. You can get the orchestra to post them to you, or if the pieces are out of copyright, you can go to the IMSLP website and download the part if it is available. You then have a listen to a recording of the piece while looking at your part, so you can identify any tricky &/or exposed bits. Mark these as you listen. They are then your priorities for practice prior to the concert.

Just as important, listening through the piece while looking at your part will get you used to hearing it and knowing where you come in. For instance, if you have a long rest during which 2 or 3 rehearsal letters go past, you should see if you can note a change in orchestration. Maybe the flutes have a solo entry at letter "B", the trombones at letter "C". Note that down in the part, it means that you will be able to reset your counting in case you have miscounted during a long rest. This is always possible with a piece you're less familiar with.But more generally, if you know how the music sounds you can be much more confident of your entries.

The third vitally important point is that pieces have "corners", places where there is a pause, a break, or a change of tempo. Many such corners have been established by tradition and aren't written into parts, and so you need to be able to anticipate what the conductor will do. You can't guarantee that the conductor will follow tradition in exactly the same way as happens in the recording, but at least you will be able to work out a number of places where you need to watch carefully to see what the conductor is doing, and so avoid wasting rehearsal time by being the one person who carries on when the rest of the orchestra has stopped!

If you're playing 1st, or if you're playing another part with any exposed solos, you need not only to ensure that you have the relevant notes well-practiced, but you also have to form a view ahead of time on what expression you're going to put in: what articulation, dynamics and rubato. This may of course need to be adapted on the day, depending for instance on whether the conductor is going at the speed you expected. But if you do something that is fairly appropriate and convincing on the first run through, the conductor is likely to be so grateful that he will leave it as it is rather than attempt to get you to change it, and will instead go on to rehearse something else that needs more work.

If the parts aren't all that difficult then preparing by listening to recordings is generally more useful than preparing by practicing. If basically you know how to play the notes then the most important issue is making sure you know when your entries are. That's done by listening.

These days, with electronic copies of much of the orchestral repertoire so easily available, there is usually no excuse for turning up and sightreading your way through the one rehearsal before a concert. You're greatly appreciated if you come prepared.

This kind of concert is great experience if you're a student aspiring to be a pro. You should take every possible chance of getting standard repertoire under your belt. But remember, if you're hoping to become a pro, then coming prepared isn't merely appreciated, it's an absolute necessity. Even with the most obscure amateur performance, you never know who may be in the audience or in the orchestra. For instance, it's not uncommon for the admin staff of the professional orchestras to be amateur players. You absolutely don't want to mess up a concert where one of the violins happens to be in charge of the extras list for a professional orchestra! Treat every concert as if it is an audition for a bigger gig.

Beecham on rehearsing

I've just come across this quote from Sir Thomas Beecham on rehearsing. If only more conductors could rehearse his way!

There's only one way to rehearse an orchestral piece, which is what I do. I take either a Mozart symphony or a Strauss tone poem. I play the whole thing through beginning to end without a stop. The whole blessed thing. The orchestra makes a few mistakes, naturally. I play through a second time. The orchestra makes no mistakes. I then just take a few little difficult parts. I pinpoint them, I emphasize them, I repeat those three or four times - I'm ready for performance.

What does the young conductor do, who will never profit by anybody else's experience, thanks to his unconquerable egotism and innate stupidity? He will take a first class orchestra, and after playing twenty bars he will stop, and he begins educating them - fancy educating a body of people like the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra! They already know the damn piece ten times better than he does. He gives us one more twenty bars, stops, starts educating, teaching them. That's why he wants six rehearsals, and that's why I can do with two!

The point of course is that we mainly get better in rehearsals by playing the piece, not by listening while we are told how we should have played the piece. It works at the amateur level as well, though there may be more in the way of errors that need to be cleaned up after the play-through. But even at an amateur level, people learn faster through actually being able to play the piece!

Choosing concert programmes

Choosing a programme for an amateur orchestral concert is a considerable art. There are quite a few things that need to be considered.

First you need to think of the numbers and quality of the players you have. Are they capable of playing a specific piece? If they aren't, there's no point in programming it. You can stretch the players, but you mustn't break them.

Then there's the question of cost. Is the music expensive to hire? Does the piece require additional players of obscure instruments who will need to be brought in (and probably paid)? That a piece is expensive to put on isn't necessarily a bar, but there is a limit to how many expensive concerts an amateur orchestra can afford.

Then there's the question of whether the programme is likely to attract an audience. Each individual orchestra will have its own audience and you should be looking to know their tastes, and to some degree cater for them. There is a fine balance between giving them what they know and like, and introducing them to something they don't know but might like.

And then there is the question of whether the orchestra will enjoy rehearsing the piece. This is not a trivial consideration. For an amateur orchestra, a significant number of people in the audience will be friends and relatives of the players coming along to support them. The players are the orchestra's sales force. If the players don't have confidence in the programme, they aren't going to work hard to get their friends to come along to the concert.

When I'm involved in helping to choose a programme for an orchestral concert, I work on the principle that for most amateur orchestral concerts, every programme should contain at least one disgustingly popular work. In Britain, that generally means a piece in the Classic FM Hall of Fame Top 300, or a piece that could easily be mistaken for something on the list (for instance one of Tchaikovksy's first three symphonies instead of one of his last three). This piece is what will actually get people into the hall. Then you have a bit more freedom with the rest of the programme. You can pick some works that are a bit less familiar. You can pick a concerto, you can pick something modern (perhaps even commissioned by the orchestra). There is plenty of room for creativity provided you remember that people have to persuaded to come, and you want them to enjoy it enough that they will want to come back next time.

My thoughts along these lines have been triggered by disagreements I've had with the conductor of one of the orchestras I'm a member of.

Our spring concert consisted of the following:

Schumann: Overture Hermann and Dorothea
John Woolrich: The Theatre Represents a Garden - Night
Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 (Eroica)

The Eroica is fine. It's an undeniably great work, it is popular, it is playable, albeit challenging in places. The problem was with the other two pieces.

The Schumann overture is not well known, and having played it, I can see why. It's what I would call one of his "justly neglected" works. It's worth a very occasional airing, but it's not good enough ever to become particularly popular and isn't all that enjoyable to rehearse - the same gloomy tune repeated over and again with bits of La Marseillaise interspersed occasionally. I've never played it before and I have no great desire ever to play it again.

John Woolrich is a favourite of our conductor. He's a living British composer. I had never heard of him before, and specifically never heard of this piece. It is passages of Mozart (mainly taken from uncompleted fragments of works) tacked together with odd time signatures and somewhat abrupt transitions between subjects. My feeling was that if we wanted to play something that sounded like Mozart, we could actually have played some Mozart. The frequent changes of speed and of time signature made the piece difficult to rehearse. The effect achieved wasn't really worth the effort involved.

I don't mind musical experiments. I like them. I accept that not all experiments will work, and if you try an experiment that doesn't work, you learn from it and move on. But two obscure or experimental pieces in the same programme in my view was one too many. I certainly didn't feel that I wanted to bring all my friends to the concert, and I suspect that others in the orchestra felt the same. The audience was down by almost half on our usual numbers.

The programme for the orchestra's summer concert will be as follows

Rossini: Overture Il Turco in Italia
Schoenberg: Chamber Symphony No. 2
Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto

In my view, this programme breaks the rule of making sure that most of what you put on will be enjoyable to rehearse. The Tchaikovsky is undeniably a great work. But it is a concerto, so the soloist has most of the good tunes, and much of what the orchestra plays is relatively uninteresting accompaniment. For a professional orchestra, this doesn't matter so much - they are paid to turn up and play whatever is put in front of them. But for an amateur orchestra, the players won't turn up if they don't enjoy rehearsals.

The Rossini is fine, it's not one of his best-known overtures, but it is tuneful and pleasant enough. But it only 9 or 10 minutes long, it isn't going to occupy much time in rehearsal.

The Schoenberg is another problem. The composer's name frightens audiences, he is synonymous with difficult tuneless atonal music. He invented serialism, a musical system based on the ultimate democratic principle that every semitone in a chromatic scale is as important as every other semitone, and should be heard as often in a piece. The problem with this idea is that our ears aren't democratic, and like consonant harmonies better than overly frequent dissonances. As it happens, the Chamber Symphony No. 2 isn't one of his atonal pieces, but it isn't the most tuneful thing in the world. Moreover it does have some odd harmonies and some difficult transitions of speed. It is going to be a problem to rehearse.

I think that this programme again is going to have trouble attracting an audience and gaining the confidence of the players. The conductor told me that he felt that the Schoenberg was an excellent training piece for the orchestra, and that they would improve musically as a group by playing it. My view is that the orchestra exists to play music to audiences, and there's not much much point in playing to an empty hall even if what we play turns out to be a musical triumph.

And it is so unnecessary. The orchestra had a unique opportunity to play the Tchaikovsky with a bright young soloist who is taking up a post in Germany in the autumn. That's fine, the programme could have been built round that. The Rossini was fine with it. But having all but 10 minutes of the programme containing pieces that don't have much in the way of orchestral tunes is in my view the wrong way to programme an amateur concert. So, you don't have a long concerto and a long experimental or obscurely difficult piece in the same concert, it's a step too far. The situation could have been resolved really easily by programming the Schoenberg some other time, and putting a Mozart or Haydn symphony in, or if you wanted to be a bit more modern and ambitious, perhaps Prokofiev's Symphony No. 1 "Classical", which is very lively, contains some very enjoyable tunes and is scored for much the same group of instruments. I could without much effort think of 15 or 20 other pieces that could have filled that gap quite satisfactorily.

But with the Schoenberg I foresee another poor audience. I've also decided I don't want to spend a second consecutive unenjoyable term rehearsing a programme I don't have confidence in. I play music to enjoy it. I've discussed the issue with the conductor, he's not budging. I don't think it is fair on the orchestra for me to pick and choose which programmes I'll play, so I've decided to leave.

Any horns in Hillingdon?

If you're a horn player, you live in Hillingdon or anywhere in west London or thereabouts, and want to join an orchestra, please let me know by emailing me at jonathanwest22@googlemail.com. The Hillingdon Philharmonic Orchestra needs you!

Mendelssohn Nocturne

On November 12th, Hillingdon Philharmonic played a concert - 3 movements from Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream (the Overture, Scherzo and Nocturne), Bruch's 1st Violin Concerto and Beethoven's 4th Symphony.

Bob Paxman, former owner of Paxman Musical Instruments, Britain's leading manufacturer and seller of French horns, died during the summer after a short illness. Paxmans have put up a tribute to him on their website. Bob was a regular member of our audience at Hillingdon, and would always come round and say "hello" and "well done" to the horns after the concert. This was our first concert after his death, and Stuart, our other regular horn, suggested it would be good to dedicate the Nocturne to Bob, since it is mostly a horn solo. I thought that was a wonderful idea, and so Stuart arranged with the conductor and the chairman that there would be a short announcement at the start of the concert about Bob Paxman and his connection with the orchestra, and how the Nocturne was being dedicated to his memory.

So, I played the solo and made it sound as beautiful as I knew how, to show the audience what a wonderful instrument the horn is and how much horn players need good instrument makers in order to produce those beautiful sounds. At the end, Stuart put his hand on my shoulder and quietly said "Bob would have enjoyed that."

Strauss at Brent

I've been horrifically busy since the last week of October, with work, a huge eruption of publicity on the child protection issues I've been dealing with over on my other blog, and with three concerts that I took part in in November. So this blog has been rather neglected, as far as writing about music is concerned I've had to restrict myself to making an occasional comment over on Lyle Sanford's Music Therapy blog.

But I have been meaning to write for some time about the concert on 9th November at St John's Wood Church, which the Brent Symphony orchestra incredibly kindly dedicated to the memory of my parents. I played the solo horn part in Strauss 1, and my sister Joanna played solo violin in Tchaikovsky's Sérénade Mélancolique.

With everything that had been else that had been going on in my life, my practice schedule was shot to hell. I had been intended to play the Strauss from memory, but in the end regretfully decided that I shouldn't take the risk. Playing the music from memory looks very impressive, but I take the view that the sound and expression of the performance is the most important thing, and that I was more interested in making it a good musical experience for the audience than showing off my memory skills. So to allow me to avoid stressing about the notes and give the most possible brainpower to the music, I decided to have the music available, on a stand in front of me but fairly low down, where I could refer to it if I needed to but where it wouldn't get in the way of the audience seeing me. It was a compromise that worked. As an orchestral musician by long experience, I have a prejudice towards thinking that memorisation of pieces is a greatly overrated skill!

At the first rehearsal with the orchestra, a couple of weeks before the concert, we discovered that the tempo was dragging. It was only after the rehearsal that I twigged what was going on. I was being an orchestral musician, and I was following the conductor's beat. But he was being a good conductor and listening out for what the soloist was doing. And so we were both following each other and getting progressively slower and slower!

This was a problem easily solved. At the other rehearsal, on the day of the concert, I deliberately turned more away from the conductor and towards the audience, and decided just to set the speed for myself and leave it to the conductor to catch me. By turning away, the conductor's beat was no longer in my eye, only just visible in the extreme corner of my vision, and so the temptation to revert to orchestral beat-following technique was minimised. Also, in the time between the two rehearsals I had put together a few thought on how I intended taking the piece, and emailed them off to the conductor Lev Parikian. These are the points I wrote

1st movement, maybe just a tiny bit faster than we took on Wednesday. I think that was mainly my fault - a lifetime's habits as an orchestral player means that I stick to the conductor's beat. I'll try and lead a bit more.

Opening cadenza: while I will pull the tempo about, the last 2 minims will be in strict tempo, so you can beat those and I'll match you.

After that, the first movement is pretty much in strict tempo. I'll be doing expression by means of articulation and dynamics.

2nd movement, again maybe a tad faster. If I feel it's a bit slow to start, I'll push it on a bit at my second entry, 6 bars before un poco accelerando.

The countermelodies in the clarinet and bassoon can come out as much as you wish - they are 20 feet further from the audience, and it's an additional item of interest in what would otherwise be a straightforward and slightly boring repetition of the tune.

Initial tempo for the last movement was fine.

At the 4/4 section where the cadenza comes back, I will pull back quite a bit at the un poco calando.

Lots of rubato at Mit freiem Vortrag. I'd like to start the rit a bar earlier than written and pull back the tempo a lot by the time we get to the Lento.

The poco piu mosso will be a little bit faster than the rest of the movement, but not very much. I think it is more important that the notes can be heard than that the audience are terribly impressed with it appearing to be taken at meltdown speed. Very little if any rall at the end, only the minimum necessary for me to accent the last 4 notes.

Lev briefly wrote back saying that was really useful. And by and large that is how we took it in rehearsal. I was really fantastically pleased with how the rehearsal went. Everything seemed to gel. A horn in my hand, a fine orchestra behind me, a nice resonant church acoustic, and Richard Strauss. Heaven!

It was such heaven that I probably pushed it a bit harder than was entirely wise in the rehearsal, and so my lip was a bit tired towards the end of the performance. Not enough that any of the audience would have noticed, but just enough to feel a bit uncomfortable. As an amateur musician I get so few chances to play a solo with orchestra. Lesson learned, I'll know better next time, if and when next time arrives.

I think there were sixteen members of the family in the audience. As far as I can remember, it was the largest assembly of family members for any event other then weddings and funerals since my grandparents had a party for their golden wedding anniversary over 30 years ago. They came from as far afield as Glasgow and Southampton. For the first time in years (apart from weddings & funerals), all six of the grandchilden of my Grandma and Grandad West were present. It was a tremendous support having them there.

And the concert went magnificently well. The orchestra started with Schubert's Rosamunde Overture. Then Joanna went on and played the Tchaikovsky absolutely beautifully. She's recently got hold of a magnificent old violin, and in her hands the warmth of its tone completely filled the church.

Then I had to go on. It had been agreed beforehand that I would say a few words about the two charities the concert was in aid of, the Thyroid Eye Disease Charitable Trust and the Alzheimer's Society, and their connection with my parents. And then we had an A to tune to and we were off into the concerto.


And I was really pleased with how it went. If I want to be hypercritical, yes, one or two notes were cracked. But none of the top Bbs, they came out clear as a bell, and I felt that they weren't sounding strained in any way, the acoustic of the hall was supporting me well. And I I got fairly well into a "flow" state where I felt able to become the music, without having to worry much about the notes. Although the music was on the stand in front of me, I barely looked at it. In the first movement the tone was singing out over the orchestra, I was getting the dynamic range I wanted, the slurs were coming smoothly.


I've always found the first part of the slow movement more difficult than the notes would suggest. In performance, the movements follow on after each other without a break, so there isn't all that much time to catch you breath and rest your lip during the orchestral interlude at the end of the first movement before you're off again. The first part of the slow movement is a bit of a test of endurance and smoothness - you want it all to remain fairly quiet because of the need for the contrast with the second theme, but you daren't risk any of the notes not actually sounding, and it still all needs to sound over the admittedly very quiet accompaniment an also of course appear to be effortless. Audiences have no idea how much work goes into making music sound effortless! But I had to increase the effort and concerntation to make sure it all went well.


And then there is the second theme. With a crescendo from the orchestra, you burst out into major key and a truly heroic mode. I took it almost loudest I could make it without the tone turning brassy. I kept a bit in reserve so I could I add just a bit of brassy edge along with additional volume for the G natural at the climax. And then it all winds down quite quickly to a recapitulation of the first theme.


There's one great advantage to Strauss 1 which Lev mentioned at the end of the performance. It doesn't outstay its welcome. Some violin concertos have a slow movement that is as long as the whole of Strauss 1. They wallow. The music is undoubtedly wonderful, but sometimes you wish there could be a little less of it. Not so with the slow movement here. First theme, repetition with countermelodies, second theme, recapitulation, and you're done. Just as well, because then there is the third movement...


The third movement is a wonderful romp. Although it has heroic moments in it, for the most part the words to describe the mood are playful and relaxed. There's lots of expression you can put into the dynamic markings, lots of play into the quavers and smooth relaxation into the slower tunes. You let the flutes through in their little countermelody.. And the tension gradually rises until you break out into the final cadenza "Mit freiem Vortrag", at which point you are in full heroic mode again.


Then the danger is that you run away with yourself in the final passage. It goes faster than the rest of the moment, but it is all too easy to let it run away from you. So even while I was enjoying the cadenza to the max, a voice was whispering in the back o my head "not too fast in the next bit, don't let it get away from you!".


The whole of the last section is essentially one long crescendo.No dynamic mark is given at the start, and even though it is marked con bravura, it needs to start no louder than a solid soloistic mp. Then you can start each phrase progressively one notch louder until you get to a climax with the top Bb. Then you drop down to p again, and then do a much faster crescendo all over again to the end.


And it all went to plan. I didn't overspeed in the last passage. and I got to the end with a great flourish!


I probably lost a pound or so in the course of the performance, just from sweat and nerves. Playing a solo concerto in front of the orchestra is decidedly a different proposition from playing a solo passage from within the orchestra. You are far more exposed, far more on show. You're also standing which is somewhat unfamiliar (though less so for me because I always stand when I practice at home).


But I'm very pleased with how it went. I think that I did justice to the music, and the audience seemed to enjoy it. It was a wonderful way to honour and remember my parents. I think they would have approved.


My playing for the evening was over, but the orchestra's wasn't even half done. They had Bruckner 4 to play after the break. and they did exceedingly well. Although the piece has only 4 horn parts, they used six horns, bumpers on the 1st and 3rd parts, and they made a glorious sound all together with the heavy brass.. At the end I went up to them and shook all their hands and congratulated them. Bruckner is very hard work for the horns.


Lessons to learn. No matter how well a performance goes, there's always something you can take from it with the aim of making it even better next time. Next time I would want a less disrupted practice schedule prior to doing a concerto, and I would go a bit easier in the final rehearsal to conserve my strength for the concert. As a soloist I need to lead rather then follow the conductor, and to remember to do that from the very start of the first rehearsal. There's always something you can hope to do better next time.

Musical decisions

Lyle Sanford has recently written the following on his Music Therapy blog  

Having spent my early years on keyboard, there's the tendency to think of a series of notes as mere switches to be flipped in sequence, but on the horn, more than any other instrument I've ever played, every phrase is more sculptural as it moves from one note to the next, with every note's tone and intensity affecting the next and so on down the line.

This is a very useful realisation. This "sculpting" of notes is not merely something which happens from one note to the next, but you can also change the character of a note during an individual note of any significant length.

You can think of the tempo (including rubatos), tone, volume, pitch and attack as five entirely independent variables which you can can adjust in order to get the musical effect you want.

The number of possible permutations you can choose from is huge. Music notation only gives you the merest clue as to the appropriate combination in any particular circumstance. The rest you have to work out for yourself.

So how do you decide what is the right thing to do?

The first thing is to realise that you actually have a choice. The second is to acquire sufficient technical control over the different aspects of playing that you can vary all these things independently at need. I've described before how to control tone and volume independently of each other, which are probably the hardest two items to separate.

Once you have the technical control, you then need to understand how to use it musically. It's quite hard to describe in words how to do this.

The dots on the page give you the pitch and a general idea about tempo, volume and attack. There may be indications that rubato is appropriate. Notes may have slurs, tenuto marks, accents, staccato dots etc. Very occasionally you'll get some kind of instruction about tone, e.g. dolce or cantabile. But with staccato for instance, you have a considerable choice as to how short you make the staccato and how much of an attack you put into it. With crescendos and diminuendos, you can decide how far you will change the volume, and you can also vary the rate of change of volume during a crescendo. On a long crescendo, I'll quite often save up most of the change of volume for the last bar or two. The notes are just a general description, it is your job to turn them into music.

There is a lot of tradition involved in this. When you are a student, this is one of the concepts your teacher should be introducing, whether or not you realise it at the time. In your early years playing, you sit next to people who have been doing it for longer, you absorb how they do it and you mimic them, consciously or otherwise. Gradually you learn enough to be able to make your own decisions about this, so you aren't merely copying what you have been taught or shown. As a result, traditions change over time, as each new generation of players finds its own approach.

And you also have realise that if you are playing in a group, the sound you produce is part of a composite tone in combination with the other players. For instance the horn can used to warm up a cello tone such as in the opening of Dvorak's 8th Symphony. And there is an amazing moment in Mahler 9, where horns 1 & 2 play a note fortissomo diminuendo, and horns 3 & 4 play the same note piano crescendo, but handstopped. So the overall effect is of a more or less constant volume, but a gradual change in tone colour as the handstopped note takes over from the open. (It's four bars before figure 13 in the first movement, if you want to look it up.) So your choices about how to play any passage also have to be made in the context of what is going on around you.

But ultimately you are there with the mouthpiece to your lips and an audience in front of you, and only you who can decide how you will play the next phrase. Realise that you have a decision, and do your very best to make it sound musical.

Brent Symphony Orchestra memorial concert

My parents, Roger and Janet West, were members of the Brent Symphony Orchestra for many years when they lived in London, until the family moved to Norfolk in 1975. Dad was first clarinet and Mum led the violas, and she would play piano or celeste whenever one was needed for a piece.

In a way, I owe my existence to that orchestra, since my parents met there. They had both attended the inaugural Edinburgh course of the Rehearsal Orchestra in 1957 without meeting, and when my mother came down to London to study at the RCM, Harry Legge, who founded the Rehearsal Orchestra, asked if she would like to come and play in his London orchestra, the Harlesdon Symphony Orchestra as it was called in those days. (The orchestra has been renamed a couple of times in subsequent years as borough boundaries and names have changed, but is now settled on the name Brent Symphony Orchestra.)

She was very willing to join, provided somebody could give her a lift to rehearsals from her digs in Putney. That was arranged, and Dad, who lived that way, was asked to provide the lift! They married about three years later.

I remember one time when they came back home from a rehearsal in fits of giggles. Harry had said something unprecedented for a conductor.

"Violas, you're too loud. You're drowning the trombones!"

When I came back down to London in 1980 to study at university, it was natural to go along to Brent and renew the family acquaintance with the orchestra, which was still being conducted after all those years by Harry Legge.

It so happened that the first rehearsal I went to, neither of the regular horns was there, so there was just me and another new player at her first rehearsal. So we sat ourselves down on 1st and 2nd horn and got on with playing. In the course of the rehearsal, Harry muttered to nobody in particular "Horns turn up - all sounds fine. Horns disappear - still sounds fine!" I was a regular for a while when I was a student, and have occasionally depped for them in the years since.

My mum died in 2003. When my dad died last Christmas, I of course told the people running both orchestras - Rehearsal Orchestra and Brent. Mum and Dad had a great many dear friends in both orchestras, and although few if any of them are still regular players, some of them still keep in touch and come to the concerts.

So I was very touched when Heather Raybould, orchestral manager at Brent, contacted me earlier this year to ask if they could dedicate their November charity concert to my parents' memory, with the proceeds going to a charity associated with them. And she also asked if I would like to play a solo with the orchestra.

I replied immediately, saying I would have to consult with my brother and sisters, but that the answer would undoubtedly be "yes". It was eventually arranged that I would play Richard Strauss' First Horn Concerto, and my sister Joanna (a professional violinist) will play Tchaikovsky's Sérénade mélancolique. In the second half, the orchestra will play Bruckner 4. The concert will be on November 5th, at St John's Wood Church, Lord's Roundabout, NW8 7NE, 7:00 pm. Do please come if you are nearby.

I'm extremely grateful to the Brent Symphony Orchestra and their conductor Lev Parikian for coming up with the idea of remembering my parents in the way, and providing me with an opportunity to give a musical tribute to them. Quite apart from the fact that they were wonderful parents, I learned an awful lot musically from them, when I was Growing up musical. And they in turn learned a great deal of their music, especially orchestral technique, from Harry Legge and the Brent Symphony Orchestra. So it will be a tribute to the orchestra as well as to my parents.

As for the charities to benefit from the concert, I've chosen two.

The first is the Thyroid Eye Disease Charitable Trust, because my mother suffered from thyroid eye disease in her later years, which curtailed her music making because of the double-vision it caused. Her particular talent was for piano accompaniment, in particular sight-reading. And you can't sight-read with double-vision, you can't tell which line the notes are on!

The other charity is the Alzheimer's Society, which deals with all varieties of dementia. Dementia is what finally carried off my father. I hope that any money raised can contribute towards finding a cure both diseases.

Gulda Cello concerto

I had a whale of a time on the Edinburgh Fringe with St Clements Wind Ensemble. We had a fantastic programme for our two concerts in Canongate Kirk.

We started with arrangements by Michael Round for wind ensemble of three Debussy piano preludes: "General Lavine - Eccentric", "Canope" and "Les collines d'Anacapri".

Then we played the three movements with tenor solo from the Schoenberg chamber arrangement of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. "Mahler" and "chamber music" don't naturally sit in the same sentence. One associates Mahler with huge orchestral forces - his original orchestral version requires 3 flutes, 1 piccolo, 3 oboes (1 doubling cor anglais), 3 clarinets, 1 Eb clarinet, 1 bass clarinet, 3 bassoons (1 doubling contra), 4 horns, three trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, celesta, harp, mandolin, sundry percussion and strings to accompany the two solo singers. So a chamber arrangement for string quartet, double bass, wind quintet, piano, harmonium and percussion (1 player) really ought not to work at all.

And yet it does. Admittedly, in the opening to the first movement "Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde" the strings are sawing away madly and can't much be heard above the wind and percussion, but it settles down after that, and you learn something about Mahler which isn't instantly obvious from the large orchestras he asks for. For quite a lot of the time, he uses the forces available in order to construct ad hoc chamber ensembles in varying combinations. And so, Das Lied can be played with a chamber ensemble, you just have to change round the instrumentation. And that is what Schoenberg did with the first movement (the rest of the arrangement was finished off by Rainer Riehn).

Then we played an arrangement for double wind quintet I have put together of Liszt's 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody, partly because it is the bicentenary of Liszt's birth this year, and partly because I just plain like the piece, and think it is unfair that pianists have so many good tunes that other players don't get a chance to have a go at! No smaller group would really work, because there are times when the piece is all down in the bass, and I need 4 or 5 instruments capable of managing that range, and sometimes both hands are up around the top of the treble stave. Of course, I gave the opening rather portentious tune to myself to play as a horn solo, but tried to make sure just about everybody had some interesting stuff, and I was really pleased how well it all seemed to fit together.

The last piece in the programme though was the highlight as far as I was concerned, Friedrich Gulda's Concerto for Cello and Wind. On one of the cello forums a contributor has described the piece as "A pioneering work of jazz-rock-classical-marching band fusion". Although it sounds like he's taking the mickey, that is actually a very good and accurate description. It is a completely mad piece, but absolutely tremendous fun to play.


The instrumentation is eccentric. Solo cello, flute doubling piccolo, 2 oboes. 2 clarinets, bassoon, 2 trumpets, 2 horns, trombone, tuba, guitar, double bass, drumkit. The guitar and double bass have to be amplified, and so does the solo cello for the outer movements.

The first movement (Overture) opens in big-band style, with a cello riff over percussion accompaniment with an occasional interjection from the brass, and then with a trill and a cadence the mood changes completely, with a gentle tune in the woodwind, taken over by the solo cello with the first horn. Another trill and we are back to big band style.

The second movement (Idylle) starts with a slow gentle chorale for lower brass, the first horn taking the tune initially, before the cello repeats it. And then the mood abruptly changes again into an Austrian ländler, the oboes and clarinets yodelling up and down, before the cello takes over, and the chorale returns for the end.

The third movement (Cadenza) is for unaccompanied solo cello, nearly 7 minutes of it, and Gulda seems at times to take the piss out of over-long and elaborate romantic cadenzas, and also out of the kind of "squeaky gate" music that was all the avant-garde in the 60s and 70s (the piece was composed in 1980)

The Menuett has a renaissance dance feel to it, and also rather reminded me in tone and style of Rondrigo's Fantasia para un Gentilhombre.

The Finale alla Marcia is a rather mad marching band, the horns and trumpets are given full license to make the most raucous din possible "Stürze hoch" (bells up) and the cello has notes flying in all directions. There are elements of Sousa that are entirely recognisable. At one point it all quietens down into repeated chords and it sounded as if the tenor soloist from the Mahler ought at this point to come in singing the Toreador song from Carmen! There is passage designed to sound like a steam train, there are trumpets playing mariachi style. The whole thing is just gloriously crazy. You can't do this piece justice if you merely try and play it, you have to completely throw yourself into it.

We nearly weren't able to perform it at all, as our intended soloist Johannes Osterlee went down with tendonitis a week or so before the concert and couldn't play, necessitating a frantic search for a replacement. We were really lucky to get Thomas Carroll to step in at such short notice, and he played the piece with incredible verve and vigour, and he deservedly had a standing ovation from the audience for both performances.

I can't remember when I last had such a huge grin plastered across my face at the end of a concert!

Bob Paxman

I've just seen the following notice on Paxman's website.

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Bob Paxman.

Bob passed away after a short illness on the morning of Monday 25th July.

A tribute to Bob and information on a service to celebrate his life and achievements will appear here as they become available.

Our thoughts and sympathies are with his family at this time.

Bob Paxman was a director of and until 2000 the owner of Paxman Musical Instruments, the world-famous manufacturer of horns. In 1993 he was awarded the MBE for services to music and industry.

I met Bob a few times, he would come and listen to the concerts of the Hillingdon Philharmonic Orchestra. He would always come round and say "hi" and "well done" to the horns afterwards.

A thoroughly nice man, and a great loss to the world of the horn.

A student experience of Stockhausen

When I was a student at the Royal College of Music in London, one of the professors strongly held the opinion that no potential professional musician should go through college without having played some "modern" music (i.e. something atonal or similarly unpleasant-sounding). Like the music or loathe it, I think he had a good general point, in that musicians owe it to the composer to give a new piece the best possible performance, and to be appropriately trained to do so.

Anyway, one term, he managed to arrange for the college symphony orchestra to play Stockhausen's Carré. (Carré means "squared" in French.) This was a square piece, for 4 orchestras positioned in the 4 corners of the hall. The conductors stood in the corners facing inwards so they could see each other and coordinate the beat, and the orchestras faced outwards each towards their own conductor, with the audience in the middle. Each orchestra was a couple of desks of each of the strings, a varied selection of woodwind & brass, an 8-voice chamber choir, and pretty much a full symphonic percussion section. Maybe a keyboard or two thrown in for good & useless measure.

The piece hadn't been performed in London for 15 years. We soon discovered why.

I can honestly say that this is the only piece I have ever played where for the entire duration of the music I couldn't actually tell whether I was playing the right notes or not. The singers had tuning forks more or less permanently to their ears to try and help them pitch their notes. There were really no cues you could take from the players around you.

The students rapidly took a fairly lighthearted approach to rehearsals, to the annoyance of the professors. There was a harpsichord player in the 4th orchestra, who rapidly cottoned on to the fact that nobody could hear her over the percussion, and practised Bach and Handel throughout the rehearsals.

We all assumed that nobody would want to come & hear this junk, even though RCM concerts were free for the public. When we filed into the hall for the concert, we were astonished to find the place absolutely packed with people standing in the gallery.

We later discovered that someone had publicised the concert in a modern music magazine, and because it was so long since the piece had been played in London, all the atonal music junkies had come to hear it. In London, there are just about enough Stockhausen fans to fill a medium sized concert hall if they all turn up on the same night.

Anyway, all went fine in the performance, we made a raucous din for about 30 minutes. The problem came towards the end. The conductor of the 4th orchestra got lost and out of time with the other three. As a result, in the 4th orchestra we finished about 30 seconds early.

Nobody noticed. We got a standing ovation and a rave review from the Times music critic.

Sometimes, less is more

I had a thoroughly enjoyable concert last Friday with the Hillingdon Philharmonic Orchestra. As it was the 25th anniversary of the foundation of the orchestra, the 30th anniversary of the foundation of the Hillingdon Choral Society and the conductor's 60th birthday, the choir and orchestra held a joint concert. it was a bit of a celebration all round, with the programme full of "lollipops". We had Walton's march  "Crown Imperial" and Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance March No. 4", Parry's "Blest Pair of Sirens", Vaughan Williams' "Toward the Unknown Region", and the the second half, the overture Die Fledermaus and lots of favourite bits from the operas.

But for me, the most satisfying moment musically was during the quiet second theme of Pomp & Circumstance No. 4. Elgar starts the piece in typically bright and celebratory mood, but the second theme is a slow stately dignified march.

The first violins, all 4 horns, and the first clarinet share the tune, all marked piano. Wind players in an orchestra so rarely have the tune, that when it does appear the temptation is always to play the tune as if it is a solo. But it isn't necessarily so, and this is a case where it isn't. This particular theme is owned by the first violins, the horns and clarinet are there just warm the tone a little bit and smooth it out. So the horns (all 4 of them combined) need to be quieter than the violins.

In the final rehearsal, I realised that the balance wasn't right, that one or two of the horns were playing a solo piano. I briefly explained that we needed to be quieter as it wasn't our tune, we were just supporting the violins. In the concert, they got it exactly right, with just enough sound to support the violins, and it sounded wonderful!

St Clements Wind Ensemble in Edinburgh

The programme for St. Clements Wind Ensemble in Edinburgh this August has now been worked out. And it is a very ambitious set of works!

Friedrich Gulda: Concerto for Violoncello and wind band. Soloist: Johannes Oesterlee

Mahler arr. Schoenberg/Rainer Riehn: Das Lied von der Erde (chamber version)

Liszt arr. West: Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2

I've just been having a listen to a recording of the Gulda. It is weird, but sounds great fun! Part chamber work, part jazz, part town band, part cello concerto. The instrumentation is flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, bassoon, 2 trumpets, 2 horns, trombone, tuba, guitar, double bass, percussion, solo cello.

The Mahler is more familiar. I've not played Das Lied von der Erde before, but I have played various of the symphonies and other song cycles. Schoenberg started working on a chamber arrangement of the first movement, but never competed it, and the conductor Rainer Riehn finished it and the other movements in 1980. I remember hearing it at a late night concert in the Usher Hall in the Edinburgh Festival about 10 years ago. The instrumentation is 2 violins, viola, cello, double bass, flute/piccolo, oboe/cor anglais, clarinet/Eb clarinet/bass clarinet, bassoon, horn, piano, harmonium/celesta, percussion, solo mezzo soprano & tenor.

Mahler normally goes in for pretty huge orchestras, he commonly asks for 6 or more horns in his symphonies and lots of woodwind. So one would expect a chamber version of one of his great works to lose so much that it is unrecognisable. But strangely, it does seem to make sense in this smaller arrangement. But having had a listen to a recording of it, I can tell that I will have a lot of work to do, and will need to be in tiptop condition to make it through. Mahler is hard work when you are merely one horn in 4, 6 or 8, it is going to be much harder when I'm the only horn!

The Liszt is a bit of a romp. It is my own arrangement for double wind quintet of the 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody, with the 2nd flute playing piccolo throughout. Ever since the music was used for a Stella Artois beer advert featuring ice-skating priests, I've been meaning to make a wind arrangement of the piece, and I was prompted to get on with it by Maren Heidemann (who runs SCWE), since this year is the 200th anniversery of Liszt's birth. This will be the arrangement's first performance.

The concerts will be on Monday 15th and Tuesday 16th August 2011, at 5pm
Tickets £10, (concessions.£7) at the Fringe Box Office
and on the door at Canongate Kirk, 153 Canongate, (Royal Mile) Edinburgh EH8 8BN (Venue 60)

If you are in Edinburgh for the festival, do please come and see us!

Student attitudes at the London College of Music

I've been asked to play a concert with the LCM (London College of Music) Community Sinfonia, performing Shostakovich 5th Symphony at St Barnabas Church in Ealing on May 11th.

On Saturday, there was a day of rehearsals at LCM for the concert. And I was quite frankly appalled at the attitude of many of the LCM students to the rehearsal.

About half the strings didn't turn up at all. I learned that about 8 or so students had originally said they would take part, but had simply not arrived for the rehearsal, with no reason given. The conductor had smoke coming out of his ears, he was so angry about this! And he had every right to be.

The rehearsal was supposed to start at 10am. I arrived with 10 minutes to spare, and found that there were only 3 or 4 people in the rehearsal hall. Various people rolled up over the next half an hour, and we finally got started about 10.20. More students quite casually strolled in even later, not apparently concerned about the fact that they were seriously late. One wind player didn't arrive until the afternoon rehearsal at 2pm, he apparently had had a party the previous night and had overslept. By not being there, you impede the conductor's ability to sort out balance and timing, and to ensure that instructions about beats and tempi need be given out only once. You waste other people's time by not being there when you should.

There was a lunch break from 1pm to 2pm. I was ready in my seat at 2pm, but again, many people were missing. The leader of the orchestra didn't return from lunch until 2.10, and three of the four flutes appeared at 2.15. While exceptional traffic or transport problems can make you unavoidably late for the start of a rehearsal (though you should always allow enough time for all but the most exceptional of conditions), nothing justifies you being late back after a break.

Then there was the attitude to rehearsals. It was quite clear that since the previous rehearsal 10 days before, few of the students had made any serious attempt to practice their parts. And I suspect even fewer had attempted to listen to a recording of the piece to find out how it went. This meant that they frequently got lost and couldn't find their way back again.

Shostakovich 5 is not a simple piece of music. It has complex rhythms and harmonies, and abrupt changes of speed. In the first movement, there are places where the tempo suddenly doubles or halves. Even when the conductor explained exactly how he was going to handle one of these transitions, still it almost always happened that somebody had not listened or understood, and carried on at the old speed. Also on many occasions, players just put their heads down and concentrated solely on playing the notes, giving no regard to whether they were going at the same speed as the conductor's beat. Sometimes there were three tempi going on at the same time. However many or few notes you play, you must go at the same speed as the conductor. Any note played at the wrong time is a wrong note!

Not knowing your part, when you've had ample opportunity to practice, is just not acceptable. As a new young musician starting out in the profession, you will need to be able to compete with people who have performed a piece 20 times, and play it as well as them. Shostakovich 5 is one of the standards of the orchestral repertoire, and this is an ideal opportunity to get to know it when there is no serious pressure. As a student, you should be lapping up every single opportunity to play every piece of the standard reportoire you can get your hands on, so that you don't have to sight-read it professionally. Even though I'm only an amateur, I have played Shostakovich 5 before, more than once, so I do know how it goes. But even so, I had a listen to a recording to remind me about it, since it is a few years since I last played it. It is a courtesy to the conductor and the other players to be as ready as you can be.

If you are a music student wanting to take up music as a career, your task at present is to learn how to be a professional musician. That involves doing more than practicing concertos. Many student musicians (especially violinists and pianists) imagine that they are going to become international soloists, and so will spend their whole careers playing the Tchaikovsky or Sibelius concertos. Phooey. There are about 30 international soloists on the violin in the whole world. There are more violinists than that in any major orchestra. If you are going to make it at all in professional classical music, you are almost certainly going to be in an orchestra. So you must take orchestral technique and rehearsal etiquette seriously. Otherwise, you will wreck your career before it has even begun.

Now, I'm just a former music student who chose not to go into the profession. I only play as an amateur. But even so, I have some tiny influence: for the amateur orchestras I play for, I help with fixing extras, and I keep a list of names and phone numbers for the purpose. Nothing about Saturday's rehearsal has given me any reason at all to get out my diary and take the names of any of the students. For the most part, I simply couldn't trust most of the students present both to turn up and to play, even to the standard necessary to manage an amateur concert on one rehearsal.

Now, suppose I had instead been an amateur player who, instead of leaving the music profession altogether, had gone into music administration, and was involved in fixing extras for one of the major London orchestras. It isn't uncommon after all for those in music administration to have studied music and to have kept it up in an amateur way after they gave up the idea of a professional playing career. If I were in that position, I would have quite likely taken an even dimmer view of proceedings than I actually did, and I might well have decided to made a note of names for the purpose of making sure that they didn't ever play with the orchestra I worked for. Those students' professional careers would have been seriously damaged even before they left college. Such a waste of so much time spent studying, all gone because of a failure to do something as simple as get back from lunch on time.

As a musician, whether you are professional, amateur or student, you are on show all the time you have your instrument with you. In performance and even in rehearsal, you never know who will hear you and see you. So you need to try and make a good impression at every opportunity.

There are far, far more students graduating from the music colleges than can possibly be accommodated by the music profession. Many years ago, I calculated that on the horn, there were probably 10 times more students graduating than there was space for in professional orchestras in Britain. That ratio will vary a bit from one instrument to the next, but it serves to indicate how cutthroat the competition is.

That means that orchestras and other employers need very little excuse to decide against employing somebody. Even outstanding musicians won't get employed if they can't be bothered to turn up on time and prepare their music.

Saturday's rehearsal at the London College of Music was a perfect example of how not to approach the music profession. If any students who were or should have been at Saturday's rehearsal read this, then I have to say that you need to either change your attitude or abandon any idea of playing music professionally, because you just won't make it if you carry on as you are, no matter how well you think you can play concertos. In fact, if you can't be bothered to turn up on time, you won't make it in any profession, never mind one as competitive as music.

Contradictions and meanderings

James Boldin has recently published an article on his blog, in part about playing softly. In it he quotes various authorities on what you need to do to play softly.

They are all agreed on the importance of it, and the need to practice properly, but they have remarkably different ideas about what you do to physically produce soft notes. There are flat contradictions between the different visualisations involved. Everyone has their own idea as to how it is all working, and some of these (possibly most of them) are physiologically wrong. And yet they all work for the people concerned, since they are professional players and teachers who have definitely mastered the art of soft playing.

This is a real problem with wind teaching. Almost everything about wind playing is either happening internally within the body or in minute and outwardly almost imperceptible changes in the embouchure. It sometimes makes me wonder how anybody manages to learn a wind instrument at all!

I don't know "how to play the horn". All I know is how I play the horn. I could describe how I play softly. But would it be of any use to anybody else? I've seen and heard and read so many conflicting ways you should go about playing the horn. Some I agree with, many I don't. I have a few approaches that I haven't heard mentioned by others. They seem to work for me - I claim nothing more for them.

There seems to be such disagreement as to what is going on. If we all disagree, we can't all be right and most of us are wrong. But then there is great disagreement in the best approach even for such apparently simple things as teaching children how to read. And yet most of manage to learn it somehow.

So that's why I've tended to talk here more about musical aspects of horn playing rather than the technical aspects of producing the sound. I've no reason to regard my own particular synthesis of ideas on horn technique as being superior to anybody else's. But musicality is talked about less than technique, and so I feel there is a gap to be filled there.

Brent Symphony Orchestra centenary

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of taking part in Brent Symphony Orchestra's centenary concert. I'm not a regular member of the orchestra but I have a family connection with it which goes back to before I was born!

The concert was a pleasure on a whole number of different levels. The orchestra is to some extent responsible for my existence, my parents first met as a result of both playing in the orchestra over 50 years ago. (My dad played clarinet and my mum played viola, and were both members for about 18 years, until we moved to Norfolk in 1975.) It was really nice to be able to make a contribution to their centenary.

I was also a regular member of the orchestra myself in my student days about 30 years ago. Harry Legge was the conductor both when my parents were members and when I was. He had been a member of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (also playing viola) under Sir Thomas Beecham and Rudolf Kempe, and had learned a lot from both of them as to how to run an effective rehearsal. There are still a few members of the orchestra who have been members continuously since I was there in my student days, so it was a pleasure to meet up again with some old friends. Among those present was the complete horn quartet of the orchestra from my student days.

I well remember a particular occasion from those days. I was at university at the time, and Harry Legge phoned me towards the end of the Easter term. He said "How would you like to get the horns together to do the Konzertstuck next term?"

I gulped, and said "You're joking!". He assured me that he wasn't, and told me to phone round the other horns and see if they were interested in having a go, and get back to him once I'd spoken to them all.
So I phoned each of the others, and in each case got precisely the same reaction from them: "You're joking!" Once I got past that, we decided to have a go together, just the four of us, and see if we could get anywhere near it.

The piece is of course almost impossible to play. But we decided that this was quite likely to be the only opportunity in our whole lives to have a go at it. So we decided to have a bash. I suspect our performance contained more enthusiasm than accuracy!

The centenary concert was also a pleasure in terms of the music we were playing. The mainstay of the concert was Mahler's 1st Symphony. I was playing "bumper", or assistant 1st horn. David Perchard, the first horn of the orchestra then and now, said that I shouldn't regard it as bumping, but more of a jobshare, since there is so much to play. Mahler 1 requires 7 horns, so with the bumper we were 8 in all. We were organised in two rows, and I was in the front row. Usually the horns are at the very back of the hall, over to the left as the audience sees them, and from that position almost all of the orchestra's sound is coming from one direction. But with a second row of horns behind, I really felt surrounded with sound. It's wonderful!

Lev Parikian took over the orchestra whan Harry Legge died, and remains the conductor to this day. He conducted the centenary concert and did a very fine job of it. In the rehearsals, he made a very important point about the Mahler symphony. It is scored for a huge orchestra (4 flutes, 4 oboes, 4 clarinets, 3 bassoons, 7 horns, 4 trumpets, 4 trombones, tuba, 4 percussion players across a variety of instruments, a harp, and as many strings as can be mustered. All those players can make a very big sound. But there are occasions when Mahler writes ppp dynamic markings, and he expects it all to be extremely quiet. It is the contrast beween these extremes which adds to the excitement of the piece.

It's hard work getting an amateur orchestra to play quietly. The players all want to be heard so that they can assure themselves that they are playing the right notes! But there are moments in this piece where if you can hear yourself, you are playing too loud. I don't know if Lev felt that he completely succeeded in getting us all to play as quiet as he wanted, but his exhortations in that direction certainly made a difference.

I think my parents would both have approved.