Incorrect!

Friday night we went to see the Grant Park Symphony render the film score to Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. There's several different versions of what everyone thinks is the "correct" film score for this movie. However, the original score was written by Edmund Meisel and performed by a salon orchestra during the 1926 premiere in Berlin. The original score was not a collection of Shostakovich symphonic excerpts, like that which was used in this performance. I love Shostakovich's music and everything it stands for, but it just does not fit this film. Instead, it transformed the film into some strange "art film" instead of the dramatic masterpiece that film truly is (yes, I know it's truly an art film, but it's also a drama!).

My question about the choice of music is why GPSO didn't choose to perform the actual score? There's a re-orchestration by Mark-Andreas Schlingensiepen that is available; did the music director of the GPSO not have this option available? Surely someone must have told him that this would have been the best, most true presentation of the film. Or was the orchestra not capable of performing the music? I highly doubt that: GPSO isn't half-bad. The reason the "frankenstein" score was used is perplexing, at best. Nearly all the drama of the film was lessened, even the famous scene at the steps of Odessa. What a bummer.

Review of Burritt's Recital

Last night I attended Michael Burritt's recital at Northwestern University. As usual, I was floored by his performance (you'll never see him play and NOT feel modest afterwards!). The program included a selection of his own works, The Blue Flame Quintet and the Recitative from his Waking Dreams; Steven Mackey's Busted for solo percussion; Kahn Variations by Alejandro Vinao; Mirage by Yasuo Sueyoshi; and Mudra by Bob Becker. Also included was an encore choral by J.S. Bach.

I'm a big fan of the interpretation Burritt gives to Mirage. Afterwards I spoke with him and asked if he'll be recording it -- apparently it's on his list of things to record at some point. Hopefully we'll hear it soon! Also, if you ever get a chance to hear him play Mudra, you'll probably be amazed! There are few people who can play 45 minutes of extremely difficult marimba music, then turn around and play 12 minutes of extremely intense drumming. Great job Mike!

Reminder: Musser Festival

Just a reminder about the upcoming Musser festival at Northwestern University next weekend.

Clair Musser's Legendary 1933 Chicago
World's Fair Marimba Orchestra Extravaganza

"Clair Musser: A Historical Perspective," 9 a.m. Saturday, April 8, Pick-Staiger Concert Hall. Historian Dana Kimble will lecture on legendary marimba virtuoso and onetime Northwestern University music faculty member Clair Messer. Admission is free.

Percussion Master Class, 10:30 a.m. Saturday, April 8, Pick-Staiger Rehearsal Room. Marimba and percussion artists Leigh Howard Stevens, Gordon Stout, She-e Wu and Bob Becker will present a master class. Admission is free.

"Clair Musser's Legendary 1933 Chicago World's Fair Marimba Orchestra Extravaganza," 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 8, Pick-Staiger Concert Hall. In a highlight of the 1933 "Century of Progress" Chicago World's Fair, legendary marimba virtuoso and Northwestern University faculty member Clair Musser performed arrangements of classical orchestral masterpieces with his 100-member marimba orchestra. Pick-Staiger will assemble a monumental marimba orchestra to celebrate and recreate this
historic concert.

The program will feature a screening of vintage Clair Musser film footage, as well as performances of Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever," Smetana's "Dance of the Comedians," the Andante from Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5, Sibelius' "Finlandia" and music from Bizet's "Carmen." The event will be presented with the support of the instrument company Malletech. Gordon Stout and Michael Burritt will conduct. Tickets are $14 for the general public; $10 for seniors and Northwestern faculty and staff;
and $5.50 for students.

Notes on Shostakovich #5

This past weekend I played the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony with the DuPage Symphony Orchestra. This marvelous work is probably my favorite DSCH work overall, as I suspect it is for most people. There were a few performance notes that I wanted to share.

We managed to pull the piece off with 3 percussionists, plus timpanist. I used a hand-to-hand sticking (R-LR L-RL) for the tamburo militaire part in the middle of the first movement. I found this gave me a bit more weighting on each downbeat and it felt better in the hands. Interestingly enough, I played this movement in traditional grip. Why? It just felt good!

For the second movement, I performed all the ruff's hand-to-hand using matched grip. The rolls in the second movement are best overly exaggerated; however, do not accent the end of the rolls too much! Make it fit, musically. The rest of the work was cakewalk as I switched over to bass drum for the final 3 bars of the piece. It's so fun to play this part (bass drum) in particular, and timpanist Andrew Simco and I managed to get the ending together very well.

My New Publicity Photos

Here's my new publicity photos. I'm having a hard time finding auditions, mostly because I'm awake at night and have a night job that requires me to visit people at night and give them a bit of a scare. However, it's just a job, and I'm just doing it to make ends meet until I can get more auditions. My musical interests are the Top 40 hits of 1253CE (it's tough to find them in print these days).

A Study in Differences of Opinion

I'm listening to two recordings of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Mostly, I'm interested in the second movement right now, Giuoco delle coppie: Allegretto scherzando for the eight bar excerpt at the beginning. I have the RCA Victor recording with Fritz Reiner from 1955, and the Deutsche Grammaphone recording with Pierre Boulez from 1994.

The Boulez recording uses a drum that is slightly lower in pitch and more muffled. The excerpt is played at approximately 84-86 b.p.m., and is a bit less strict to what is on the page. Whoever played the excerpt on this recording probably played more towards the center of the drum (thus, less ringing of the drum) and the player moves their stick towards the edge of the drum during the last 2 bars of the passage. This gives a substantial color change to the drum that is very noticeable when listening with headphones. I'm not certain it is what the composer intended.

The Reiner recording uses a higher tuned drum (probably a M2 to m3 higher than the Boulez recording) and is nearly perfect to the metromone at a more lively 92-93 b.p.m. (after all, Reiner was a stickler on tempo and rhythm). The decrescendo is performed without a noticeable move to the edge of the drum. However, there's quite a bit of ring, so I assume the percussionsist who executed it on this recording (Harry Brabec?) probably played halfway between the center and edge of the drum. Both players play the except with two sticks (one for the accented notes, and another for the unaccented notes).

I applaud both performances as they are both precise and well planned. My goal here was to show that there can be two different opinions on how to execute a passage. Take a listen sometime and see what you hear.

Ned Rorem's Eleven Studies

Last Sunday we concluded our season at the University of Chicago New Music Ensemble on a major chord! In just a small handful of rehearsals we put together Ned Rorem's Eleven Studies for Eleven Players. The highlight of this, as a percussionist, is the sixth movement, Invention for Battery. Although the percussion notation is a wee bit difficult to get used to, the movement moves along experimenting several new percussion idioms. I found the most interesting thing of this movement to be the rhythmic games that Rorem plays between the two players and now intricate the composite rhythms are.

Elmhurst Symphony Performs Mahler's Second Symphony

I performed Gustav Mahler's Resurrection Symphony last saturday with the Elmhurst Symphony Orchestra. This is the second year in a row I've done the same piece of music, and the second time I've played the second timpani part.

The performance was fairly interesting and director Stephen Alltop kept the compact chorus and orchestra balanced well at the end. Some highlights of this performance for me were getting all the tuning changes right in the third movement (last time I think I missed the first high F), watching the coordination of the off-stage trumpet, horn and percussion parts (it's always interesting to see how this goes in performance!), and finally being able to use a Fred Hinger-like forearm roll in the last 17 or so measures.

Battleship Potemkin

Last weekend the University of Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Barbara Schubert, performed Battleship Potemkin in real-time accompanying the film. Battleship Potemkin is a film created by Sergei Eisenstein in 1926 to commemorate the 1905 Battleship Potemkin uprising. In our performance, we gave the U.S. premiere of the film with the original score by Edmund Meisel -- apparently most of the scoring in the DVD formats is music added by various entities to "sound Russian," but isn't the original music.

The music is very progressive and several sections consist of repetetive (almost minimalistic in some way) passages that build in accordance with the film. The end sequence is nothing short of grueling for the timpanist as three one-bar phrases are repeated over the course of some 10 minutes gradually making a crescendo. To some extent this wouldn't be so bad, but the volume of rolls and playing throughout the first 63 minutes of the work is very tiring itself!

As for the movie, there are several moving scenes. The most memorable, and that which has made it's way into other movies following Potemkin is the scene at the steps of Odessa which depicts the slaughter of innocent civilians by the military. I was amazed at how progressive Eisenstein was for his time. Hopefully sometime soon the original film score can be recorded for the DVD. It is much more appropriate than what exists now.

Keiko Makes It to DVD

A few days ago I received a DVD of Keiko Abe and Mark Ford performing Prism Rhapsody II with the University of North Texas Wind Symphony conducted by Eugene Corporon. This is a great performance by both Ms. Abe and Mr. Ford, and it's the first time Ms. Abe has made her way to DVD. I hope she isn't shy in the future and appears in more places as it's great to see her extraordinary playing with two, four and six mallets. If you have a chance, pick up a copy.

"1900, Backward and Forward"

The University of Chicago Symphony Orchestra, of which I am the timpanist of, just finished their winter quarter. My newest project is to start taking my minidisc's of each performance and put them online for anyone to listen to. You can listen to the latest concert entitled "1900, Backward and Forward." On this concert was...

• Rimsky-Korsakov: "Cortege" from Mlada
  
• Prokofiev: Autumnal Sketch, Op. 8
  
• Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 1 in D-Flat Major, Op. 10
  
• Dvorak: Symphony No. 7 in D Minor, Op. 70

Even if you're not a percussionist you still might notice that the last 2 minutes of the Prokofiev Piano Concerto has an amazingly cool (and difficult) glockenspiel passage which encompasses the entire range (and a bit more) of the instrument using scalar passages. Jamie Mezinah, our in-house mallet expert, did a wonderful job of covering the part excerpt.

Pelléas et Mélisande

As a favor, I agreed to do the Fauré and Sibelius Pelléas et Mélisande (opus 80 and opus 46, respectively). It's interesting to see the difference and similiarities of these works. I'm not sure having both pieces on one concert is an effective programming (just because the names are the same doesn't mean the listener will enjoy it!), but I do enjoy both pieces. The story of Pelléas et Mélisande is here.

A funny thing: I learned a while back that some of the older timpanists (Fred Hinger or Cloyd Duff, I can't remember which) would initial the back of their parts. This allowed them to see when they performed the piece in the past. I started doing this trick a while back and didn't think much of it, but when coming to the Sibelius timpani part, my initials and date were on it from 02/1998! It's been a long six years.

The Anvils of Das Rheingold

Recently I had the opportunity to play Richard Wagner'sDas Rheingold. Das Rheingoldis intended to be a prologue to Wagner's epic Der Ring des Nibelungen, also known as the the "Ring" cycle. Most listeners, and percussionists, find the Descent into Nibelheim before Scene III of this opera to be very unique in it's instrumentation. Wagner calls for a total of eighteen (yes, 18!) tuned anvils to be played simultaneously by various members of the orchestra. This is a representation of the mining of gold in Alberich's dark cavernous domain, forging the Ring. Read more about the Ring Cycle -- it's a very interesting story. Our concert arrangement reduced the number of anvils down to a mere three. To make this come across well in concert, we used four brake drums (as I managed to drop out the timpani low-F roll early and join in to add volume during the crescendo). Another local percussionist, Tina Laughlin-Keitel, brought a pair of railroad spikes to use as beaters on her brake drum. I must say that this idea is superior to plastic mallets which easily will break (yes, even Malletech mallets!). Also, the top-heavy weight of the railroad spike works well for metal-on-metal playing. I'm now looking for my own pair of railroad spikes for future use for playing loud, abrasive metalophones.

My one bit of advice to anyone playing this is to use ear plugs! You may not think the volume will sustain long enough to cause any problems, but often concert performances are much louder than rehearsals due to the excitement, and I had quite a ring in my ears for numerous days after the performance. You can hear a sample of the anvils performed by the University of Chicago Symphony Orchestra (1.2MB download).