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Emil de Cou is the Associate Conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra
The traveling portion of the West Virginia Residency has come to a close and it’s back to business as usual for NSO musicians and staff. Before the trip becomes all but a distant memory, please enjoy this collection of photographs by the NSO's Associate Conductor, Emil de Cou.
Here we are right before getting on the bus – Aaron Goldman (Assistant Principal Flute), Leif Bjaland, and me - but if you look carefully there is Jauvon Gilliam (our newest member of the NSO family) dashing behind. He added so much to the tour, musically of course, but also with his wonderful warm and fun spirit (as you can see - well, almost) - and it's only his first month!
Here I am with the members of the University of West Virginia String Quartet and their teacher (middle) who serenaded us with the Tchaikovsky String Quartet No. 1 during our welcome buffet. Very talented and nice guys who I enjoyed talking with during the reception (two of them are from the DC area).
Here are Barry Hearn (Acting Principal Trombone) and Kathryn Meany Wilson (English horn) on the oldest suspension bridge in the US - dating before the Civil War that was right next to the concert hall in Wheeling (it looks sort of like a mini Brooklyn Bridge). An amazing sunset right before the concert started.
I was driving the van to Glenville for a preconcert talk but had to stop and take a picture with this sign - the only city welcome that I have seen that had a violin (fiddle) and a banjo. They have a bluegrass festival once a year.
I like to call this picture "The West Virginians" with Ken Harbison (Assistant Principal Percussion) and Tony Ames (Principal Percussion), both native sons and State Senator Facemyer who conducted the Stars and Stripes march as an encore in Glenville. I gave her a short conducting lesson beforehand which was not totally necessary since she has a natural way with a downbeat.
Here I am in our final city with the percussion section of the youth orchestra I worked with (Charleston). It was in their beautiful new concert hall - the young musicians were all so happy to be able to play together - some of them drive for hours for the rehearsals.
Here I am during my first ever "Vocal Master Class" in Morgantown, VW. This talented young lady, who sang an aria from Barber's Vanessa, of the many talented future performers we come across on our residencies. I mostly listened - happily.
One of the very best side benefits of the American Residency program is that it gives NSO spouses and children the chance to tour with us as well. Here I am after our Young Person's Concert in Charleston with Ruth Schaaf's (husband Paul also joined) and Pavel Perkarsky's (wife Stella was also on tour) adorable children. They came to the YPC as well and had a great time (with a little nap for the youngest during a quiet moment).
While Maestro Fischer enjoyed several afternoon bridge games with NSO members here we have a serious (!) game of cards during a long bus ride (no money changed hands however leaving me "shocked shocked").
As a tour veteran you learn how to thrown an impromptu after concert party with friends. Here we have Marissa Regni (Principal Second Violin), Leif, Nick Stovall (Principal Oboe), me and Aaron Goldman (Assistant Principal Flute) outside on a beautiful spring night in Morgantown with our table cloth (hotel towel), stemware (plastic cups courtesy the hotel restaurant), chips and nuts (the local CVS). Sitting along the Monongahela River that night was one of the nicest of the tour.
Not only on the podium but on my music stand, Pavel's little angel beams following our YPC in Charleston, WV. She looks not only happy but strangely at home there with her "I'm an NSO Fan" sign.
With some of the people who helped make the tour happen and helped make it so much fun for musicians, staff, and our audience members: Randall Ried-Smith (Commissioner), Lou Karas (NSO Statewide Coordinator) and state senator Susan Facemyer. I don't think anyone of us will forget Randall serenading the orchestra at the reception with about 10 songs all about West Virginia. It was as generous as it was genuine, expressing his love for his beautiful home state and his appreciation of us coming to help support the arts.
In addition to Emil's wonderful photos of the West Virginia Residency, please check out a partial list of press coverage from the tour:
Wheeling Intelligencer/News-Register: Wheeling City Council changes meeting time to see orchestra – April 3, 2010
Classically Speaking (blog): Here comes the NSO! – April 5, 2010
Charleston Gazette: Music in the Hills – April 7, 2010
Polyphonic.org: Orchestra Spotlight – National Symphony in West Virginia – April 8, 2010
State Journal: National Symphony to perform in Wheeling Tuesday – April 5, 2010
National Symphony Orchestra Continues W.Va. Residency Tour – April 8, 2010
Bluefield Daily Telegraph: National Symphony Orchestra moves with music – April 12, 2010
Jeffrey Weisner is a bassist in the National Symphony Orchestra.
Touring is a very weird mode of existence for an orchestra musician. Separated from your ordinary routine and support network, one finds oneself suddenly having to recalibrate some very basic life routines. Fortunately, with a little experience one can learn the ropes, and after awhile the touring lifestyle can even start to feel strangely normal. This is my fourteenth NSO American Residency and roughly my 25th NSO tour of some kind, so I think I finally feel qualified to give folks a brief glimpse into a few of the day-to-day survival aspects of the tour experience.
THE BOOK:
Shortly before we leave for any tour, we receive The Book. This little pamphlet, carefully prepared by the NSO staff, contains pretty much everything we NSO musicians need to know to have a good tour. Most critically, it indicates when we need to show up for everything - busses, trains, planes, concerts, rehearsals, hotel check-ins, vans leaving for education concerts, swanky receptions after orchestra concerts, everything! Since each day of tour can contain many of the aforementioned events, it is critical that you check The Book often. NSO musicians can be seen squinting at The Book's mysterious contents on a frequent basis, trying to calculate how long they have before they need to board another mode of transportation. We also use a wide variety of methods to stay on the right page of The Book - some rip out the page for each day after it ends, others have a complex hi-lighter marker system, some just riffle through and hope for the best.
FOLLOW THE SIGNS:
While reading The Book will tell you where each concert hall on tour is located and how you will most likely be getting there, it does not answer the crucial question of where to go once you have arrived. This is the task of the hardworking NSO signage team. From the moment you enter each evening's venue, a huge array of handwritten signs embossed with lots of tiny arrows direct you to all the various places in the hall that you need to know about. These include: where our concert clothes are located (they travel in special wardrobe trunks), where there might be somewhere to get a cup of pre-concert coffee, and most importantly, how to get to the stage itself! Without these signs, there would definitely be 100 very lost and bewildered musicians wandering the bowels of the building looking for the stage, the instruments, or the ladies room.
QUEST FOR FOOD: NSO bassist Paul DeNola has completed the Quest.
A basic truth of professional music life is that you have to travel and work at odd times. This is even more true on tour, when we often have to travel at all sorts of times to make it to concerts and hotels. As a result, a great deal of our fretting about The Book's contents centers around the crucial question of whether we can find somewhere to get something to eat. Musicians are obsessed with this topic and we tend to have all sorts of irrational worries that we will get to our concert and suddenly die of starvation. Thus, the Quest for Food occupies a bizarrely large portion of our time on tour. Even when The Book assures us that food is available in a particular place, we worry - What sort of food? Will I like it? How long will it take to get it? What if there's some sort of oversight and they run out of pasta in Charleston?
I hope you found these glimpses of the non-musical part of our trip to West Virginia interesting. I'd love to write more but I need to go find a sandwich that I can take on the next bus....
Courtney Kelly is Assistant Production Manager of the National Symphony Orchestra.
For most of the NSO it's that time of year again for the American Residency, but for myself and a number of musicians new to the orchestra West Virginia is our first tour. Unlike most tours, this one is TRULY on the road - West Virginia is close enough to Washington DC that we're able to avoid planes entirely. While I'm sure nobody is really looking forward to a 6 hour bus ride home from Charleston next Tuesday (charge your Ipod!!), I can't be the only person happy to avoid airport security, the potential for lost luggage, and flight delays. As a bonus, West Virginia offers some really beautiful scenery.
On Monday night most of us arrived in Morgantown, home of West Virginia University. The WV Division of Culture and History Commissioner, Randall Reid-Smith, along with faculty and staff from WVU's College of Arts held a great welcome reception for the orchestra, completely with WV flying cookies and as promised, a mashatini bar!! (initial reaction, "If it's gin, potatoes and gravy, count me out") As it turns out, a mashatini bar involves three types of mashed potatoes and every topping you could imagine, all served in a mini martini glass - I didn't take a picture, so you'll have to use your imagination. We were also treated to a great string quartet performance from high school students that studied with WVU teachers - chances are we'll see them all again at NSO masterclasses throughout the week!
Monday night was also the NCAA Finals - while we felt badly for our host state that WVU didn't make the final round, at least it allowed for better attendance at some of our Monday night outreach concerts in Rowlesburg and Morgantown (and perhaps fewer burning sofas in the streets?). A few musicians joined our Butler University Alum Timpanist in the hotel lounge for moral support - others gathered in the lobby to warm up their bridge skills, or walked into downtown Morgantown to scope out our home base for the next few days.
A view from the hotel, Morgantown, WV
Yvonne Caruthers is a cellist in the National Symphony Orchestra.
Though it was a "day off" for the NSO (no full orchestra concerts scheduled), there were 13 outreach events on Thursday, ranging from my talk to music education students at Fairmont State University (20 miles away) to trombone and clarinet master classes at WVU here in Morgantown, to an artistic exchange in Mill Creek (a little over 60 miles away). A wind quintet is playing a chamber music concert in Marlinton, (nearly 100 miles away), a string quartet is playing tonight in Fairmont, and a flute-French horn-piano trio is playing in Clarksburg (approx 30 miles away). Including events I didn't list here, the total mileage driven today comes to nearly 600 miles. That's a lot of long and winding roads.
A one room schoolhouse at the entrance to Fairmont State University.
My talk at Fairmont State University was supposed to be for music education majors, but only 3-4 of the students who showed up fit that description. I demonstrated some of the ways I connect music to classroom subjects, hoping I could inspire some of them to also do that with their classes when and if they get jobs. At the end I left time for Q&A. One of the guitar students asked how he should practice, I had a few questions about what it's like to travel with the NSO, and another student wanted to know what my favorite concert hall in the world was.
For lunch I stopped at Fairmont's famous Poky Dot diner, which has 50's decor. There are two residents at the counter, Martha and Marvin.
Martha and Marvin at the counter of the Poky Dot Diner.
The diner is famous for its 8oz burgers, but since I can't eat portions that size anymore I settled for a delicious bowl of soup and a killer apple dumpling.
To read more from Yvonne Caruthers, please visit her page at polyphonic.org.
Sue Heineman is Principal Bassoon of the National Symphony Orchestra
Some hobbies transform every trip into adventure. I hate to be cooped up in a hotel and used to bring running shoes on tour, but then I realized you can cover a lot more ground on a bicycle. My bike has accompanied the NSO to Nevada, California, Kansas, South Carolina, Arkansas, and now West Virginia. This is the first time my partner Bill has come along and we've been meaning to travel in WV for years, so we're pretty excited to be here. We rented a car and came down a day early to get started.
Day One was relatively uneventful—there's a fantastic rail-trail system which is accessible directly behind our hotel, so we followed it twenty miles down the Monongahela to Fairmont. Rail trails are calm, traffic free, and flat, which is nice for a while but can get monotonous. I prefer to be on the road where I can see neighborhoods, landscapes, talk to the locals, sample the food...really get a feel for an area. But I did find this stop sign amusing (and defiantly ran it after taking the photo, but only after looking both ways).
This Church we saw at Prickett's Fort is ripe for viola jokes.
In the evening it was time for work -- master class at WVU, where I coached a girl wearing glasses just like mine.
Another day, another ride. Back in DC we'd checked out mapmyride.com, where roadies everywhere upload their favorite routes. We were ready for some hills, so the one described as "the hardest 31 miles you'll ever do" sounded about right. We watched it on "fly-by video" and it looked intense, but we had all day to complete it. What we didn't know was how much of it was unpaved, even un-rideable on road bikes. Things started out well, through gently rolling countryside. (That's Bill at the bottom of the hill.)
After missing an unmarked turn and backtracking (uphill, naturally), we found ourselves sharing the road with ATVs, and sometimes pushing our bikes uphill just because the surface was so uneven.
In conditions like these, descending can be tougher than ascending -- I'm a strong climber, but I don't have mad downhill skillz. Worried I'd get in trouble with management if I skidded off a cliff and missed the concert, I ended up walking downhill at times as well. Here we are at the bottom of a descent, miserable and loving it. The epic trips are the most memorable.
We did get the desired contact with local people -- because most of the roads were unmarked and some not even on our map, we had plentiful opportunities to ask the locals for help. Best response: "oh, I never go that way... it's too steep." This from a woman in a car. She wasn't lying; it was San Francisco steep. Bill and I have a little motivational game we play where we try to guess how many pedal strokes to the top of a hill. This time he just gave up, or perhaps he was delirious, because said, "Just five more! One.... one... one.... one... TWO!!! Two... two... one.... one...." At home we have a hilly route we take out to Potomac, MD which usually takes about two hours. This one covering the same distance took us six hours to complete.
In the evening, the orchestra was off to Wheeling for our first concert. The building to the right (above the striped canopy) is the concert hall. Bill had agreed to babysit Fritz Heckscher Bar-Josef during the concert so the two of them enjoyed a waterfront stroll while I played Dvořák.
For our Day Three adventure we wanted to spend some time with my colleagues Sylvia Alimena (French horn) and Kathryn Meany Wilson (English horn), so we left the bikes in our very cluttered room and went hiking at Coopers Rock.
They call this place "Rock City" for some reason.
WVU has a super cool transit system called PRT (personal rapid transit) which is kind of like a monorail. It was built in the seventies, funded by the government, and was supposed to be an experiment, but for some reason remains the only one of its kind. (Despite heavy use of the system, the car traffic here is still horrendous.) Here are Bill and our friend Julie Savignon (a frequent sub violinist with the NSO) enjoying the roller coaster thrills.
Since this blog entry has mostly been about forms of transportation, I'll conclude with this photo taken from my seat on the tour bus returning from last night's concert at WVU. Looks like a bassoonist with right shoulder tension to me.
Yvonne Caruthers is a cellist in the National Symphony Orchestra.
Tuesday, April 6th, I made two trips from Morgantown to Wheeling. The first trip was so that I could join Rita Shapiro, the NSO's Executive Director, and Tony Ames, the NSO's Principal Percussionist, at a Rotary Club luncheon. We each gave short talks about the NSO's American Residency in WV, and why the arts are a vital part of public school education. In the evening, I returned to Wheeling with the full NSO for our concert. (I heard on Wednesday morning that 1000 people came to the Wheeling concert!)
All that time in vehicles gave me lots of time to learn more about the local arts scene, and more about the state in general.
A few WV facts: the Wheeling Symphony plays 45 concerts a year. They are smaller than the NSO, about 65 players, and most of them commute from Pittsburgh. Their music director is Andre Raphael Smith, one of the few African American conductors in the US. He also commutes to Wheeling—from his home base in Philadelphia. No city in WV is larger than 50,000, though the metro region of the capitol, Charleston, is about 300,000. My favorite photo from yesterday was of this plaque explaining the history of the bridge across the Ohio River at Wheeling. I particularly like the last sentence about it being the most significant pre-Civil War bridge in the US. Who knew?
Since Huntington, WV, is one of the cities where Chef Jamie Oliver is focusing his attention on America's unhealthy eating habits, I've been keeping tabs on what's served here in WV. My favorite thus far is "fried mac and cheese balls" which were served at our opening reception. There were also very healthy trays of fruit, and a mashed potato bar.
Fried mac n' cheese balls.
The chef is melting marshmallows over my glass of sweet potatoes.
Jauvon Gilliam is Principal Timpani of the National Symphony Orchestra.
I'm sitting at the back of the bus heading back to the hotel after our first concert in Wheeling, WV. My first few days on my first tour with the NSO have been a blast. I've gotten to know many of the orchestra members and have already made several friends in my first four weeks of being here.
We arrived at the hotel on Monday to a beautiful West Virginia day and I immediately went down to take a walk along the Monongahela River. After my short walk, I met with a few friends and we went to the welcome reception and then to grab a bite to eat before the NCAA National Championship game. I had a very special interest in the game, as I am a proud Butler Alum, c/o '01. We didn't win, but I'm very proud of my school!
Tuesday morning I went on a 3 mile run and then took a nice swim in the hotel pool and sat in the hot tub. After lunch and another walk, it was almost time to board the buses for our Wheeling concert.
The Capitol Theatre, our venue for the evening, is an historic building that has lots of old world charm. I'm not playing the first half of the concert, so I got a chance to sit out and enjoy the music. The audience loved it! I heard one couple comment on how they really enjoyed the cymbals. Go, Ken! [Ken Harbison, NSO percussion section]
After three curtain calls and The Stars and Stripes Forever encore, the audience left humming a very happy tune. If this is indication of how the rest of the tour is going to be, West Virginia, you're in for a royal treat!
Next stop, Morgantown!
Check back here for more blog posts from NSO musicians and staff as they tour the state of West Virginia, April 5-13 as part of the American Residencies program! |
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