I've been guest conducting annually in San Jose, California for a decade now. The orchestra, Symphony Silicon Valley is terrific and we've forged quite a beautiful bond. 

The program for my concerts there last week began with Wagner's Siegfried Idyll which he wrote for his wife, Cosima Liszt in tribute to her devotion and for bearing him his son, Siegfried. The original work was written for single string players plus assorted winds performed with the instrumentalists arrayed on a staircase leading up to her bedroom with Wagner himself conducting. The term "romantic music" was not coined for nothing!

It has become customary in large concert halls to play it with full string sections. One needs to pace it a bit differently when performing with these large forces. I generally took it slower and focused on the beauty of the harmony and the spaciousness of the string sonority. It had been a while since I last performed it andI  found quite a bit of the later Mahler in it–in particular the sense of stillness and utter calm. The principal rhythmic motif of a short duration followed by a longer one reminds me of the one Mahler used at the beginning of his 9th Symphony (and for that matter, Beethoven and Brahms also to begin THEIR last symphonies!).

But this hommage to birth and creativity was followed by LIszt's Totentanz or Dance of Death, a series of variations on the Dies Irae chant for piano and orchestra played brilliantly by Adam Golka. It was quite a shock to go from the tranquility of the end of the Wagner into the brutal opening of the Liszt. But as the piece unfolded the variations afforded a variety of viewpoints on the subject of death, positive and negative, making a striking foil for the Idyll.

Then after intermission we campaigned through a major engagement with Life in Rachmaninov's Symphonic Dances, his last piece for orchestra and arguably his greatest. I told the musicians at the end of the dress rehearsal to "be bigger than the piece." The work is so intense and demanding that it is easy for the executants to feel cowed a bit by its challenges. So to combat this I encouraged everyone to get the concept of being bigger than the piece they were re-creating and it worked like a charm. At the performances everyone was extroverted and heroic. The reviewer said that we gave a "killer performance," which was also a pun since Rachmaninov also made liberal use of the "day of wrath" tune towards the end. But LIFE WAS VICTORIOUS!

It was once again a wonderful week out there.

Yours,

Paul