Two interesting situations are developing that on the surface may not seem connected but are actually deeply related.  For better or for worse.

Detroit.  Charleston.  One’s a biggie.  The other’s a ……… not so biggie ……… though I’m sure that the musicians in Charleston who rely on those jobs to make a living would argue otherwise, and I can’t really blame them.  What they have in common is that for years no one has taken adequate responsibility for the long term health of these organizations.  Now they’re paying for it.

Charleston is in the worse situation.  The orchestra actually closed down in March and is currently exploring ways in which it can be reconstituted.  With the debacle in Honolulu fresh in everyone’s memory this cannot be an easy time for the Charlotte Symphony musicians.  The announcement of this new Chamber Symphony/Ensemble venture is not going to make anyone sleep any better.  No matter how this is spun the truth is that if it goes ahead it will divert precious resources away from the CSO at this most crucial time in the organization’s history.

Of course, there is a long and distinguished history in Classical Music of organizations moving in when they detect a wounded comrade.  Just look at the situation in Florida – there used to be several orchestras up and down the East Coast.  Now there are residencies by (insert name of Über-orchestra here).  Hardly ethical in my book, but that’s the way things go.

Detroit is also at a crucial phase, and once again the usual arguments are being trotted out on both sides of the dispute.  There is one argument, however, which I feel has become less and less powerful as the years go by – the “if we aren’t paid as much as everyone else the quality of the orchestra is going to nose-dive and we’ll turn into a intermediate stop for musicians aiming for the big gig.”   This is the position posited by the musicians’ negotiating committee, as well as industry guru Drew McManus.

Politely, I disagree, for a couple of reasons.  First, it ain’t so easy getting a decent paying gig in this business.  For every person who gets that job there are now hundreds of people auditioning.  It’s essentially a crap shoot most of the time, but the general quality and number of people who could do these gigs is so high now that the competition is ridiculous.  Those people who are so outstanding that they could win any gig they want are few and very far between.  It’s also not like there is a 40% turnover in personnel every year.  Even if the DSO took a massive pay cut this year I hardly expect that the industry mag would suddenly become replete with page after page of audition notices for the band.

There’s another argument, however – 10 years (or farther) from now the gap between the Haves (Chicago? Boston? etc.) and the Have Nots (everyone else) is going to be much wider than it already is.  There are going to be a very, very, very few orchestras who can survive with $40 Million+ budgets, paying their musicians six figures plus benefits, with tours, recordings, etc.  For the rest of us that is simply not sustainable.  That’s not defeatist – that’s realistic.  While the big boys were jacking up their salaries over the past 40 years, and everyone else was trying to Keep Up With The Joneses, some serious systemic imbalances got contracted into the picture.  No one seemed to mind deficit after deficit after deficit.  But, unfortunately for us, only the Government has license to print money.  The general economy is retrenching and the orchestra business isn’t going to be far behind.

The admittedly excellent orchestras like Detroit are now in the position where decades of deficit spending and endowment raiding are going to come home to roost.  Whether we like to admit it or not, we musicians have been complicit in this debacle.  At some point the long-term health of an organization must be more important than how much the salary will increase during the next year of the contract.

I don’t think Detroit need worry about artistic quality being impacted by what the salary is.  Much more dangerous to the artistic quality is a $6.5 million dollar operating deficit.  A couple more of those and they’ll never have to worry about the artistic quality again, and I don’t mean that in a good way.

The Red Hour has struck, and the 2010 Edinburgh International Arts Festival is open!!! Time to lick my wounds.

It has happened.  Porgy has taken over Edinburgh.  Not without a fight, though.

Friday was an interesting day.  I had lunch with Serge Dorny, the head of Opera Lyon.  Serge is a mover/shaker/candlestick maker who has had his fingers in the music business for years.  He started off turning around the LPO in the ’90s, a job of near biblical proportions.  None-the-less, he was successful, and then he moved on to Lyon.  I’d tell you about all the secrets we discussed but then I’d have to kill you.

The General Dress Rehearsal was Friday night.  There’s an old adage which says a bad dress rehearsal leads to a good concert.  For some reason we thought we’d put it to the test.  The rehearsal was frustrating to me in the extreme.  I don’t know whether it was the different acoustic, or the “familiarity breeds contempt” thing, or whether Venus was suddenly in the 4th house, but it went from bad to “fer Godsakes what are we doing?”  The problem was people weren’t paying attention to me.  Or, to be honest, the problem was people weren’t paying attention to the conductor!  So I had a fit.  It wasn’t quite a full-on conniption fit, but it was a fit.

In opera, with everything that’s going on, you just have to pay attention to that central figure.  For better or worse, the conductor is the final arbiter of all things.  If the conductor doesn’t know what he’s doing it essentially doesn’t matter what the quality of the rest of the cast is.  It’s not going to be a good performance.  If the conductor is good and the cast doesn’t pay attention, same result.  If the conductor is good and the cast pays attention then you have a chance of pulling something off.  Friday’s rehearsal left me wondering if we were going to fall flat on our faces at the most important summer arts festival in the world.

Some little bird had told me days ago that on Saturday I would need to do something else, something non-Porgy related.  I booked a ticket for a performance by the Gentlemen of Leisure for that afternoon.  Their show – An Hour of Too Much Culture – was quite entertaining, and managed to incorporate references to Peter Gabriel, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and a rap version of A Tale of Two Cities.  Perfect way to take the mind off of opera.

Saturday night, and I show up at the Festival Theatre with my iPod cranking Parliament Funkadelic – Like in Oakland, 1975.  This was important.  I needed some inspiration, and hearing that grand collection of lunatics put everything on the one! was just the thing to get me in the mood. (If you ain’t gonna get it on, then take your dead ass home!!! huh!!!!!!!)

Once we got started I could feel the difference immediately.  The cast was locked onto me, and because of that we put in one of our best performances of Porgy over the last 2 years.  Very satisfying, and one the audience seemed to enjoy very much.  Our next two performances are Monday and Tuesday, and our competition are a bunch of mucks from Cleveland (that last sentence written by a Buffalo boy, mind you).  Don’t know if they’re sold out, but we are.

My best news is that my family lands in Edinburgh in a couple short hours.  After the festival we’re going to spend three days at Loch Ness.  We’re going to kick our boys outside and tell them not to come back until they’ve caught The Monster!  Here we come, Nessie!

Funny how life sometimes imitates Star Trek.

There’s a classic 1st season original Star Trek episode – The Return of the Archons.  Long story short – a planet locked in war turns their fate over to the philosopher Landru.  He builds a machine to manage the planet which rules for 6,000 years.  The inhabitants are kept in a quasi-zombie state, and they stalk around asking “are you of the Body?  Are you one with Landru?” At least they do until the Red Hour, when  at the striking of a gong someone screams “FESTIVAL!!!”  and the whole planet dissolves into an orgy of physical and sexual aggression, only to revert to their near zombie status an hour later.   The Enterprise crew promptly ignores the Prime Directive and liberates the planet.  The Red Hour would be Edinburgh in August.  The population of this city triples during the time of the two major festivals here, and let me tell you traffic is a real &*@#%.

But only here could you have a day like I had Thursday.  First thing I went over to the Festival Theatre to check out our temporary digs.  From the outside it’s a modern hall.  From the stage it’s a classic early 20th Century theatre.  This makes me nervous because what usually happens in this situation is that there’s an older run down hall that gets a major revamping.  Some ridiculously expensive plan is drawn up to completely renovate the place.  The only problem is that it costs way too much money, so they start paring things down.  Can’t disappoint the patrons, so the foyer gets a complete make-over.  Can’t have it looking bad inside, so the hall gets completely renovated.  Money starts running out.  We’ll do a few things to make the stage OK, but forget about modern set moving machinery.  The dressing rooms?  Who cares?

Sure enough the foyer is magnificent, the hall is beautiful, the stage is closer to rudimentary, and the “Conductor’s Suite” looks like it was designed in the early Alcatraz style, complete with concrete block walls, prison bed and a bathroom/shower that immediately makes one nervous about dropping the soap.  Won’t be spending a lot of time there.  Since the first rehearsal of the day is in the mid-afternoon I make a break for it and hit the bus.

1 Hour later I found myself in the little town of Rosslin where the famous Rosslyn Chapel resides.  If you are a fan of history, architecture, and/or the Knights Templar, to go to Edinburgh and not see Rosslyn Chapel would be a travesty of near biblical proportions.  This astounding building was built in the mid-15th Century by Sir William St. Clair and he went all out with it.  The carvings at Rosslyn are amongst the most amazing stone work found in the world, replete with angels, devils, dragons, musical instruments, and the famous Green Man.  It has recently seen a surge in interest due to the fact that it was used in that ridiculous dreck known as “The da Vinci Code.”

The chapel carvings are a source of great mystery.  The St. Clair’s had strong connections with the Knights Templar which is reflected throughout the stonework.  Some of the meanings of these carvings is lost to time and some present great mystery.  Clearly carved over a south window is a group of maize, while aloe vera shows up elsewhere in the chapel.  What’s the big deal, you may ask?  Well, keep in mind that maize and aloe vera are indigenous to the Western Hemisphere, but they appear in the carvings of a mid-15th Century chapel in Scotland several decades before Columbus supposedly “discovered” America.  This leads to all sorts of questions about the veracity of the stories of the Knights Templar journeying to the Americas in the 14th Century, along with various conspiracy theories about the location of The Holy Grail, The Arc of the Covenant, and the body of Jimmy Hoffa.  Whatever your proclivities there, Rosslyn Chapel should be on everyone’s no miss list.

Back to the Festival Theatre for the afternoon tech/piano rehearsal.  One of the major problems with taking an opera on tour is adapting to different stages.  Did I mention that the Festival Theatre’s stage is somewhat rudimentary?  The scrims and curtains are all manipulated by hand! Quaint, but definitely something that needs to be rehearsed.  The 3 hour rehearsal is taken up by making sure everyone knows that getting in the way of the set here could lead to a long and intimate discourse concerning the efficacy of the U.K. health system.  We all got out of there alive, and I took our pianist on a short tour of downtown Edinburgh.

Back, again, to the Festival Theatre for the evening rehearsal.  Now the orchestra is in place and we really must check acoustics and balances.  The pit here is much larger than the pit in Lyon, and the orchestra is thrust farther into the hall.  It’s a good acoustic but some changes in how we play must be made.  The new acoustic also makes certain co-ordination things quite different than in Lyon.  It’s a looooong 4 hours, and at the end we’re all exhausted.

It’s 11:30.  I need a beer.  Probably two.  Heading back to our digs on the south campus of the University I pop into a little pub I have previously found called The Reverie, just in time to catch the last set of a band in for the Fringe from Sydney called The Crooked Fiddle Band.  These kids were having WAY too much fun.  Bass, guitar, drums and violin, with a post-apocalyptic hoedown folk style with nods to jazz, King Crimson, multi-meters, and outright hilarity, I think they’re a band to watch.  I cornered the violinist, Jess Randall, and found out she studied at the music school in Sydney.  Not much of a surprise to me, because just watching here I could tell she had excellent classical training.  You don’t pick up a bow arm like that fiddling in the streets.

All in all an amazing day in Edinburgh.  Tonight, that being Friday, is our dress rehearsal.  Tomorrow, that being Saturday, we open up the Edinburgh Arts Festival 2010!  Wheeeeee!

Once in a lifetime everyone should have the opportunity to do something that very, very few other people can claim to have done.  It’s my turn.

I’m in Edinburgh, and to quote a writer friend of mine – “Scotland is not for the squeamish.”  After a long bit of travel from Minneapolis the first thing one should do when you hit the Isles is to have the local breakfast, whether that’s Irish, English, or Scottish.  For the record I’ve had Haggis before, and I actually quite like it.  Of course being a male of the species I can compartmentalize very easily, so when eating it I do not dwell on what it’s made of.

While enjoying my haggis I opened up the info pack about the Edinburgh Festival and, lo and behold!, the first thing in it is none other than our production of Porgy & Bess.  So come this Saturday I will be able to claim that I conducted the opening show of the Edinburgh Festival!!!  Not bad for a kid from Buffalo, N.Y.  On my excursion into town today I dropped by our venue, the Edinburgh Festival Hall, to check it out.  It’s a good spot larger than the opera house in Lyon and definitely from a different era.  The hall here is in the old classic style from the early part of the 20th Century, where the hall in Lyon was decorated and designed by Darth Vader in his Black period.  None-the-less I think the acoustics here will be just fine.  One thing I noticed immediately though – the stage is narrower here.  That will take a little getting used to by our cast.

But the surprise today is that somehow I had forgotten that the Edinburgh Fringe Festival is going on simultaneously to our festival.  The Fringe is tremendously cool, with well over 200 venues dotted around the city (including, to my great amusement, the local mosque up the street!).  There are tons of street performers everywhere along High Street (the main road between Edinburgh Castle and the Parliament building) and a really fun atmosphere abounds.  I shall try my best to take in a couple Fringe shows, just to say that I did.

The schedule for P&B is very compact.  We start Wednesday and we open Saturday night.  In between we have the Piano Filage, staging rehearsals, a pre-dress, and our dress rehearsal.  It’s going to be every man for himself for a couple of days but fortunately we don’t start rehearsals until the afternoon.  With mornings free there is blessed little excuse to miss some of the late night Fringe-ing.  And since I’ve mentioned it, it’s time to go get some food and get out on the Fringe!

When last we saw our intrepid Porgy folk we were sneaking up on the Gale, the general dress rehearsal.  Or, truth be told, perhaps the Gale was sneaking up on us.  This is where the old expression “canary in a coal mine” starts to seem prophetic.

It’s Wednesday last, and after 2 days of full rehearsals and a pre-Gale rehearsal we are ready to enter the run.  Despite it being called a “general dress rehearsal” there is very little “rehearsing” about it.  When I take a peak out from the depths of the pit there is nary an empty seat in the entire house.  Honestly, we should just go ahead and call it another performance but, this being France, I’m sure there’s some regulation that we would be in violation of.  Plus it’s Bastille Day, and you wouldn’t want to have our first performance then, would you?

We start off, and in the back of my mind I start hearing birds chirping.  Maybe I should cut back on the late night foie gras runs.  Hmmm…… a little bobble there…. no problem, I catch the eye of whomever and we promise each other to pay attention there…. slight mishap here….. same…….. orchestra not quite together….. blame myself…. look, it’s a complicated opera and there are bound to be some hitches.  But we’ve all done this before.  Let’s just find the groove and move on.

Thursday is a day off, and I take advantage of it to hop on the train and go down to Valence to see the 11th stage of the Tour de France!  I set myself up about 250 meters from the finish line and wait.  For 5 hours.  In the hot sun.  With a whole bunch of other cycling lunatics.  All for 3 seconds of “my God, those guys are moving faster in a dead sprint than I can go downhill!!!”  Cavendish wins the 11th stage, not without some head-butting help from his teammate.

Mark Cavendish making a mad sprint to the finish of the 11th stage of Le Tour

After that excitement comes opening night.  Friday is a nice relaxing day for me.  I go out for a ride in the morning – 31 miles in my brand spanking new Maillot Jaune purchased at the 11th stage of Le Tour.  Not that I’m showing off or anything.  Then pick up some rocking chocolate at Bernachon, best chocolatier in Lyon (why yes, honey, of course I’m bringing you home some chocolate!).  Then mosey on over to the opera, gussy up, walk in the pit, start of the opera, and ……….. what in the name of the four Gods is going on???  Why didn’t I notice that the canary was stone, cold dead?  Let’s start the count-off:

Missed cues?  Yep.

Missed stage entrances?  Got that.

Missed curtains?  Check.

Missed orchestra entrances?  Oh yeah.

General madness?  Here’s your 800 # for that.

Etc., etc., etc.   I make a mental note to check and see if Mercury has suddenly gone into retrograde.  The frustrating this is that there were things that went right that had never gone right before! That’s a truly annoying experience, especially since it was being recorded by Radio France and videotaped for possible [......... this section heavily redacted............].  I believe the collective response of Serge (Director of Opera Lyon), Robert (Artistic Director of Opera Lyon), and myself  could be summed up as “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot????”  I gotta tell ya, this is certainly not what I signed up to provide the good folks at Opera Lyon, and it was kinda embarrassing.  Unfortunately, the guy who’s listed under “conductor” is one William Eddins.  That would be me.  Buck stops right here.

Dammit.

Precious little sleep that night.  General moping around while trying to pack the next day.  Many frantic phone calls between The Powers That Be because we have just one more night to try and get something in the can that we all can be happy with and the only way to do this in the opera world is to PANIC!!!!!!  That’s what opera’s about, right?  And suddenly it’s 8 pm, Saturday night, and I’m walking back into the pit, and I’ve got no idea if my opera career is about to go deep, deep into the deepest freezer imaginable or……..

Then there’s that classic little ditty written by Maria Méndez Grever, with lyrics in English by Stanley Adams, popularized by Roy Harris and his orchestra, that won Dinah Washington a grammy award in 1959 – “What A Difference A Day Made.”  Please don’t ask me what happened; I’m not really sure.  What I do know is that there was a completely different atmosphere than the previous night.  Suddenly Porgy found his groove.  Radio France was happy.  Serge was happy. I, obviously, was happy.  This is how we wanted to launch our way towards Edinburgh.  And perhaps I can now get some sleep.  Next stop on the Porgy express – Haggis!!!

It’s Bastille Day.  We have our General Dress rehearsal tonight for Porgy.  Tomorrow I travel to Valence to see the 11th stage of the Tour de France.  With all that going on why, you may ask, is my mind a thousand miles away?

The internet is a wonderful thing.  You can keep abreast of all sorts of news, and that information can cause one to reflect on one’s own situation.  This happened to me last night on the way back to my flat after the Pre-Gale, the pre general dress rehearsal.  I was exhausted, desperately ready for a beer, and it popped into my mind: what the hell was the Boston Symphony Orchestra thinking when they hired James Levine?

Since I’ve put that out there, let me back up for a minute.  I’m not for one milli-second suggesting they made a bad musical choice.  Levine is probably the premiere opera conductor alive today, certainly the #1 in the Western hemisphere.  He has consistently shown that he is as adept in the orchestral repertoire, and he is a good few levels above being a decent pianist.  I would consider sitting down with Levine to argue various aspects of music an afternoon very, very, very well spent.  But here comes the caveat, and I have to start it by giving an honest assessment of myself:

I’m 45 years old.  Despite spending most of my adult life figuring out different ways of extending a party atmosphere I’m still in pretty good shape.  This year I was up to playing the piano 5 hours a day on Goyescas of Enrique Granados, one of the most demanding pieces in the repertoire.  When I’m home I regularly help coach my kids baseball teams, which involves a lot of running around, throwing a baseball, and standing in the heat and humidity of a Minnesota summer.  Put me on my bicycle and I’ll knock off 35 miles in 2 hours and consider it a decent, moderate ride.  Those bike duffers of you out there, I would have to downshift rather dramatically just to not end up miles ahead of you in a very short amount of time.  In short, compared to the hopefully apocryphal typical American middle-aged man who sits around channel surfing, eats regularly at the Old Country Buffet, and spends most of their work day behind a desk, I’m in pretty good shape.  No tri-athelete, but I’m still ahead of the curve.

Yet at the end of Porgy & Bess, which clocks in at a little over 3 hours, I was knackered.  First of all, it’s three hours on my feet in one place.  I’m in the pit, literally 7 feet above the orchestra on a podium, this to ensure that the singers on stage can see me, and the podium is about the size of your average postage stamp.  No jumping around.  There is also three hours of waving my arms.  Doesn’t sound like a lot of work to you?  You try it.  There’s a reason that conductors tend to live a long time (besides that whole pact with the Devil thing) – moving your arms dramatically for hours is one hellacious cardio-vascular work out.  Then there’s the concentration level.  I’ve got close to 200 people relying on my every move and there is no chance whatsoever to take a mental break.  It all has to be automatic and it all has to be exactly the same as it was yesterday.  Except, of course, when the singers take a flier and suddenly you have to adjust the entire orchestra, all without screaming out loud “WTF ARE YOU DOING?!??!??!??!”

Which brings me back to Levine.  Opera conducting is THE hardest thing to do in this business.  To do it you put in extremely long hours rehearsing singers, choruses, orchestras, arguing with stage directors, and generally disregarding the concept of “having a life.”  It is mentally and physically exhausting, and it’s that last point that has me worried.  The condition of the Music Director of the MET is no secret.  Indeed, when the poor guy has a hangnail it’s front page news in the New York Times.  Anyone who has followed the biz knows that Levine has had some health issues over the years, and frankly I’d be more surprised if he hadn’t had any.  The hours are brutal.  I once asked an acquaintance of mine in the MET orchestra what his longest day was.  He replied “one day we had a 6 hour rehearsal of Falstaff, and that evening a performance of Götterdämmerung.  It took me 3 days to recover.”  Yikes.

But the BSO is one of the premiere orchestras in the world, with their regular season, the Boston Pops, and Tanglewood to look after, not to mention recording (if there is any), touring (if there is any), auditions (ibid), and the various administrative and PR stuff that goes on.  Being Music Director of the BSO is the very definition of a full time job.  Actually, being Music Director of the BSO is much more than a full time job.  I’m Music Director of an orchestra with about 1/10 the budget of the BSO and on a daily basis I consider putting a loaded gun to my head (and, truth be told, to the heads of other people, but that’s the joy of being in this crazy business.  It’s the behind the scenes stuff that is truly insane and it’s the same at every orchestra.  If we didn’t love making music we’d all kill each other).

Where do we stand?  The BSO has one of the great living musicians as their Music Director, but no matter how loudly anyone protests is there anyone out there who believes that the BSO is actually his primary job?  No.  He is, first and foremost, Music Director of the Metropolitan Opera House.  As great of a musician as he is I don’t see how he can do both of those jobs at the same time.  I don’t see how ANYBODY could do both at the same time.  And Levine is, as of last month, 67 years old.  If I completely recycled all the repertoire I know, and stuck with operas I’m intimately familiar with, I might, just might, be able to pull off getting through one season of that kind of schedule without having a completely mental, emotional, and physical breakdown.  And I’m 22 years younger than he is. Because of that schedule, and Levine’s health, the BSO comes off as seeming rudderless.  Levine and the BSO now have a huge dilemma on their hands and I certainly have no sage advice.  I would hate to be in their position.

I’m now going on a long, long bike ride.