Just Like Old Times

by Karl

Last Wednesday morning I went to hear a public dress rehearsal of the Prague Symphony Orchestra in Smetana Hall at the Municipal House. Walking away afterwards, I noticed a poster on a lamppost and—WHAT?! I’m not sure whether I first recognized the picture or the name, but it was indeed Ben Zander conducting the Youth Philharmonic Orchestra from New England Conservatory.

That’s my youth orchestra (1982-85). In my day its name was Youth Chamber Orchestra, but that was about the time that Zander started having the group play things like Mahler and Bartok, so calling it a chamber orchestra was getting to be ridiculous.

In 1985 we played Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. Zander wisely told us to get hold of a recording and listen to it before rehearsals started. The first time I heard it, I was crushed. It didn’t sound sweet, like the Brahms, Mendelssohn, Mahler, Beethoven and Mozart I was used to playing with the orchestra. There were so many harsh sounds and discordances, and I was not at all looking forward to spending the season working on that noise. But as I listened more, I started to hear it differently, and as we rehearsed it, it really made sense.

I had the great pleasure of being second trumpet to Rich Kelley. Many of the kids in the orchestra (like me) were from well-off suburbs of Boston, but Rich was from the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston itself, and if I remember the story right, he started taking lessons with a clarinet teacher, because that’s who was in the neighborhood. After three years, he was good enough to win the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s concerto competition for high school students. After that, the principal trumpet player of the Boston Symphony started giving him lessons for free. At first I was disappointed not to be first trumpet—it was my last year in the orchestra, and part of me felt like I had earned it—but Rich was much better than me, and anyway, doing a good job on the first-trumpet part of the Bartók was not quite within my abilities. I was comfortable playing second, and I hope I didn’t make the section sound bad for Rich.

(On my left, third trumpet was covered by Bijon Watson, who, like Rich, has gone on to do a lot more with his trumpet than I have.)

In Spring, 1984, we toured Austria and Poland. In Vienna, we played Mahler’s Fourth Symphony in the Musikvereinsaal, where Mahler himself had stood at the podium as the conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic.

I remember this view (though I found the picture here).

There’s a passage near the end of the third movement known as the Gates of Heaven. The orchestra gets quieter and quieter, until the strings and harp erupt in arpeggios, to introduce a monumental fanfare on trumpets and French horns. The clarinet parts have notes to double what the trumpets are doing, with the notation, “To be played, with bells in the air, if the trumpets are not enough.” As if!

Anyway, just before we got to that part in our rehearsal at the Musikvereinsaal, Jon Nelson, on first trumpet, leaned over and whispered, “You see that guy at the back who just walked in? That’s the first trumpet player from the opera last night. Let’s blow this thing out of the water.” John, and I, and Bill Ledbetter on third trumpet, all sat back, brought up our trumpets, took a nice big breath, and played that fanfare the best (and the loudest) we’d ever played it. Better than we would play it that night in the concert. Who could suppress a grin as we put our trumpets down after that?

In Poland we went to Krakow, Katowice, and Warsaw. I think it was in Krakow where a couple of fellows introduced themselves during intermission. They were from the local orchestra, one was a trombonist and the other played trumpet. The trombonist spoke passable English, so he translated (I didn’t start doing Slavics until college). There was some “shop talk,” and then the trombonist asked, “In America … do you know … do you know what is happening here?” This was not even three years after the military coup where General Jaruzelski had put down the nascent democracy being created by the Solidarity union movement. That arguably prevented a worse outcome of a Soviet invasion (see Prague Spring, 1968), but it was still traumatic for many Poles. I answered, “Yes, more or less … we have some idea,” and then he uncomfortably changed the topic back to musical matters.

So here was my old youth orchestra, and the very same conductor who had taught me so much about how to hear and understand music, and how to play in an orchestra. The concert was the very next day, Thursday, and it was definitely a concert to catch.

Ben was away with his class from Wednesday to Friday, so Kate and I were planning to do something special with Garrett after school on Thursday (he was sorely disappointed that his class didn’t get something as cool as a 2-night trip). We hadn’t totally settled on a plan, when the family of one of Garrett’s classmates invited us to join them at a pool we’d never been to, so we gladly accepted. I brought decent clothes to change into and left the pool in plenty of time to walk from the Strešovice neighborhood to the Rudolfinum downtown (did I mention there was a transit strike on Thursday?) As it turned out, there were some buses and trolleys running despite the strike, including the one that would have taken me from near the pool to right across the river from the Rudolfinum. But I wasn’t sure how frequently they were going and it was a beautiful evening, so I went ahead and walked.

The first half of the program was Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto, with an impressively skilled 15-year-old pianist and a good youth-orchestra performance. At the break I briefly saw Ben Zander (sadly, I didn't have the camera with me, so no picture), then chatted with my ČZU office mate and his wife, who happened to be there.

So the first half was fine, but the second half was another story. Zander came out and gave a long introduction to the piece, sort of like an extended version of the musicological notes that come in the printed program at an orchestra concert, only the printed program doesn’t sing the major themes and melodies at you. If memory serves, this manner of addressing the audience is sort of a trademark for Zander, only this version was twice as long, because everything had to be translated into Czech. And then they played Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.

Gustav Mahler. I didn't take this picture either. It's from here.

It’s 90 minutes long. The musical language is hard to get your head around, not to mention your hands. It’s one of the last artistic statements of a man full of life, a man who had lost a 4-and-a-half-year-old daughter and who knew, just shy of 50 years old, that his heart was failing him (he died at 51). It’s a wonderful beast of a piece, and these guys really pulled it off.

Though I can’t faithfully remember what we sounded like when I was in the group, I’m guessing that we weren’t as good as the kids who are in it now. A professional orchestra would have done a better job than they did with the Mahler, but not by a lot. It was technically solid and artistically inspired. It was a very good performance—not very good “for a youth orchestra,” just very good, period.

You hear about how the American Century is over, how the future belongs to China. How people in China have the hunger for success, the discipline, the willingness to work hard that Americans have lost. But then you hear this group play, and it gives you a new sense of optimism. America is a country where one city all by itself can field 100 teenagers with the energy and discipline to do a very good performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, in an art form that most people don't even care about. My standards may be idiosyncratic, but I’d say that’s a country that still has a bright future.

Now why can’t our financiers run a bank without destroying the world economy?