DARIA RABOTKINA
think it would be the same kind of exposure that you might get as a young child in a community situation. I spent a lot of time in Latin America this summer and saw the El Sistema model, and a lot of our colleagues are now going into urban centers here and trying to replicate that model. So actually, the greater thing we can do is to be advocates for the importance of culture in largescale educational environments. Doug O’Connor: Maybe we shouldn’t focus on classical music per se. Because as a kid, classical means about four different composers, right? But classical music today is so varied and there’s a sense of excitement in how much variety there is. VanderMeulen: Doug, Lidia, and Jennifer, you play instruments without much orchestral solo repertoire. I’m curious whether the lack of repertoire gets frustrating, or whether you see it as an opportunity to develop something new.
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Christian Steiner
cultural events, but they had absolutely no plans for their child to be a professional. So my first experience with classical music was actually in school. If every classical musician, every day of the week, did some kind of outreach, we could make a dent, but I don’t
Stumm: This is one of the greatest misconceptions—at least with my instrument—that there’s this great lack of repertoire. There are so many amazing viola concerti that I would die to play, but they won’t get programmed because they’re written after a certain date or certain time. So I have to get out there and kind of kick in doors and say, “There are these great pieces of music written for my instrument that you haven’t heard yet.” Lidia Kaminska: I play two instruments: accordion, and now bandoneón for about three years. And I have to say throughout playing accordion for about 23 years, I didn’t get as many jobs as with bandoneón because the music of Astor Piazzolla is so popular now. Tomorrow I’m playing a Piazzolla concerto with the Duluth Superior Symphony and then in two weeks I’m playing Piazzolla again. But definitely I would love to introduce some accordion concertos. When I say accordion people think about folk music, but I say, “Oh my gosh, no more polkas!”—because I was trained classically. O’Connor: One of the challenges that Lidia is referring to I really identify with, and that’s getting your instrument type-cast. Composers have a hard time letting go of the saxophone as a jazz instrument, which can be very frustrating. Basically I started playing the instrument because I loved it. And when you’re young, you assume it’s kind of on a level playing field for all instruments. But the repertoire for violin and piano is just amazing! It’s such a pain, a heartache, that I can’t play these pieces without facing the sort of philosophical and identity issues of doing transcriptions. The prevailing mentality in the saxophone world is that learning transcriptions at home is cool, and performing them is not. Hristova: Well, if you feel strongly enough about it, maybe you could be the first to make them think it’s okay to perform these pieces. O’Connor: You bring up an interesting point. I talk about this often with my girlfriend, who’s a cellist from Cleveland. She says, “Remember, if you played the cello or the violin, you would have very little chance of setting a new mark in your instrument, while the saxophone is so young.” We don’t have anyone like Heifetz that we can only dream of playing that well. Stumm: There may be a connection between the question about younger audiences
and the future of what we’re doing, and the question of variety in instruments and the challenges we face. Variety is so normal for younger people—they’re on the internet and their attention span is what, five seconds a page? The amount of variety in almost everything that a young person has is just astounding. And sometimes I feel like the amount of variety in what we do is pretty unastounding. VanderMeulen: What do you all think of socalled alternative venues like Le Poisson Rouge, where there is a lot of variety in the programming? Stumm: I’m in Berlin right now and one of the earliest things was called Yellow Lounge, funded by Deutsche Grammophon. At first we thought it was this mysterious phenomenon, but there would be like fifty young people somewhere in East Berlin waiting to get into an abandoned factory. If you see that many people who maybe wouldn’t go to a normal concert waiting in line and interested in hearing classical music or basically anything—I’m 100 percent for it. Rabotkina: As long as there is respect for what people are listening to, that’s fine with me. If they’re coming to look at the circus, I have a problem with that. Hakhnazaryan: Maybe this is a little oldfashioned, but each style of music must stay in its style. Because now so many performers are just mixing styles—they’re playing some classical pieces like jazz. Mixing in the program is great to show variety, but we need to stay in the styles of those pieces we’re playing. Hristova: Like not add a hip-hop track to Bach. O’Connor: I went to a couple of lectures recently. One guy was saying that the problem is that the rest of the entertainment industry is delivering this synaesthetic experience—it’s not just sound, it’s sight, it’s lots of different things—and that the concert tradition, the classical tradition, hasn’t really kept pace with that. We’ve got to find a way that feels artistically sound to us that makes it a more full-blown experience. Rabotkina: It might work for some styles. I’m not sure if you’re playing Beethoven that it would work as well. It would be a distraction for me as a listener. One of the most fulfilling experiences, in my opinion, is to close your eyes and listen. symphony
WINTER 2011