Looking For A New Classic

Last night, the NHL's Minnesota Wild opened their 2008-09 season at home against the Boston Bruins, a fact which was noted in eye-rolling fashion by our principal trombonist, Doug Wright, during the stage-setting break between the first and second works on our Saturday night program, when he walked into the musicians' lounge to find five musicians plus Osmo clustered around the TV, checking the score before we had to rush back onstage for a piano concerto. (Doug, who doesn't play the concerto, had the right to make fun of us. The hockey obsessives in this orchestra do tend to be fanatical, even by sports fan standards, and I noticed that Osmo had one of our personnel managers reporting the score of the game to him as he came offstage for intermission, as well.)

Later, at the end of intermission, principal cellist Tony Ross had to literally drag Osmo out of the lounge by one arm when the "on stage" call was heard, lest he plant himself permanently in front of the game, where the Wild had jumped out to a 4-1 lead. This, of course, is why Osmo doesn't have a TV in his private dressing room.

Meanwhile, up in Canada, a music-related hockey drama has been slowly unfolding over the past several months, ever since the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation somehow managed to lose the rights to the theme music to Hockey Night in Canada.



Let's understand the seriousness of this. Those of us who live south of the 49th parallel and have no connection to our neighbors to the north probably can't really grasp just how famous the Hockey Night theme is. The closest we can probably get is the Monday Night Football theme, but even then, I'd wager to say that a far higher percentage of Canadians can sing you the hockey theme than Americans can sing that pumped up NFL jingle. It's a major cultural touchstone for a proud hockey-loving nation, and it's now gone from the airwaves of the national broadcaster.

(That's not to say it's actually gone completely. The reason CBC lost the rights is that it was outbid for them by commercial broadcaster CTV, which owns TSN, Canada's version of ESPN. TSN broadcasts multiple hockey games to the entire country every week, and the hockey theme now prefaces each of them. But to a lot of Canadians, that's just not the same thing.)

So, CBC was in a spot. Obviously, it wasn't going to cancel Hockey Night in Canada, a Saturday tradition that still draws some of the highest ratings anywhere. So it needed a new theme, and it turned to the public to get it. Culling 15 finalists from over 15,000 entries it received from across the country, the network spent a ridiculous amount of time over the past month or so flogging its viewers to vote for a winner. Last night, they revealed the winner live just as Hockey Night in Canada went on the air...



The winning composer is Colin Oberst from the western province of Alberta (note to Bright Eyes fans - that's Colin Oberst, not Conor - no relation as far as I know,) and I have to say, while his theme isn't the classic that the original theme was, I like it a lot. It's up-tempo, innocent, and a bit old-fashioned, which is just so Canada, and the Celtic pipes that open and close the song are a distinctive nod to Atlantic Canada's roots in the British Isles. And all in all, despite the fact that many will likely never forgive the CBC for letting the original theme get away, the whole contest strikes me as a great way of involving the audience in something they care passionately about...

Overheard...

...at tonight's concert, which ends with Messiaen's L'Ascension, a rapturous 29 minutes which, while eminently accessible on some level, is not without its challenges:

(a well-dressed couple pushes up from their seats in Tier 1)

Man: "That was such...dream music, of a dream world, I really liked it."

Woman: "Well, I hated it."

The conversation continued as they exited and walked down the corridor - I tried to follow the thread until they were out of earshot (I didn't feel like stalking them down the stairs!). It struck me that this is one of the best reactions any concert could elicit. As much as I'm a big supporter of concert-as-enjoyable-entertainment, I find satisfaction in the counterbalance of concert-as-challenge. The Messiaen affected this couple enough (albeit in dialectically opposed ways) for them to continue the experience of the concert beyond the confines of the actual performance. Which, to me, is the level of both emotional and intellectual engagement we strive for when we present art.

A small victory - a little bit of light in what has been a pretty rough week!

Fix This Concert

Composer Nico Muhly has been playing a fun and snarky game with violist Nadia Sirota (an old friend of mine, for the record) over at his blog. He calls the game "Fix This Concert," and it was inspired by the New York Philharmonic's season opening program, which Muhly and others have complained was far too unimaginative and lacking any intellectually challenging music. (Orchestras are accused of having no stomach for complex music almost as often as we're accused of assaulting audiences with complex music.)

In Muhly's game, you try to improve the existing program by substituting one or two works for the ones currently on the program, but do so without completely changing the nature of the evening. In other words, despite the fact that I'm pretty sure that Tchaikovsky's overplayed, overwrought 4th symphony wouldn't be Muhly's first choice as a concert anchor, he leaves it where it is on the Phil's opening night program, because he understands the orchestra's need for a warhorse to sell tickets to those who are just looking to hear a big, bombastic piece they don't have to work to understand. But he replaces a similarly overplayed Berlioz overture with a short piece by Jacob Druckman, who is a brilliant composer not enough people know about, and then changes a somewhat treacly Ibert flute concerto to a more forward-thinking concerto by Christopher Rouse. And presto, you've got a better program, at least according to Muhly (and me,) without changing your soloist or your anchor piece.

Now, I'll be the first to defend an orchestra's right to program whatever we think will sell the most tickets (most of the time, anyway.) But I think Muhly makes an excellent point with his game: there's no reason that we can't spruce up our programming without seeming to thumb our nose at more conservative audience members. Half the reason that many in our audience think that they won't like new music is because we're relatively careless in choosing what composers we feature, and under what circumstances. Programmed smartly, a new work frequently garners the most enthusiastic reaction from our crowds, and has the added benefit of making our ticketbuyers more comfortable with the idea of mixing Beethoven with, say, Harbison.

So let's play Fix This Concert, shall we? Below, I'm listing a concert program the Minnesota Orchestra will be presenting this November. It's not a bad program by any stretch (unless you're fundamentally opposed to viola solos,) but it does seem to be a bit "safe." Can you make it better, without completely gutting it? Fire away in the comments, and I'll update this post with my own "fix" in a few days...

The Program:
MOZART Overture to Abduction from the Seraglio
BERLIOZ Harold in Italy
DELIUS "The Walk to the Paradise Garden" from A Village Romeo & Juliet
ELGAR Enigma Variations

Update, 10/11/08: Y'all can feel free to keep chiming in with your own fixes in the comments, but having had a couple of days to think about it, here's my take. Although Harold in Italy is the biggest, longest piece on the program, Enigma is pretty clearly the anchor piece, so it stays. On the viola front, I'm substituting Sofia Gubaidulina's riveting and virtuosic viola concerto for the Berlioz - although a very different kind of piece, I think it pairs well with Elgar's emotional character. The Delius I'm dropping altogether. And as much as I love the Mozart, I'm not sure it fits the character of this program all that well, so I'm substituting Vaughan Williams's underperformed Brook Green Suite, giving our concert distinctly English bookends, with a challenging but soulful interior work. I'd buy a ticket to that...