Keeping Scores

“I just like the look of scores,” Eckart Preu says. “It’s the closest you can come to the composer.”

As promised, Preu’s copy of the conductor’s score of Scheherazade has layers of scribbles from the two times that he has conducted it before: red ink, blue ink, bright orange highlights for the tempo markings and problem spots, big swooping pencil marks from last week’s review sessions.

The 47-minute reflection on The Arabian Nights by Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov is one of three works Preu will conduct this weekend with the Spokane Symphony Orchestra. With

its growly brass theme for the sultan who demands a different story every night and its violin motif for the seductive woman who tells it, Scheherazade is a complex, melodic tone poem for 70 musicians.

Preu knows where the difficult parts are. “In the storm scene near the end, before the crash, you have trumpets over on one side of the stage and the bass drum way over on the other,” he says. “And he has to count three and then come in. For that to line up, you have to practice it. Because they can’t see or hear each other.”

Asked to open the score for George Gershwin’s Jazz Age piano concerto (in which Pascal Rogé will be the soloist this weekend), Preu splays his fingers, presses both palms down and nearly caresses the broadleaf sheets — hundreds of them, each with woodwinds on top, then brass, percussion and, just for the strings, five staves along the bottom.

“You can read this and realize, of course he composed this at the piano.” Again the splayed fingers, the reverent touch.

“Dum-bee-DAH-bah-dum-doo-dah-DAH,” he hums, his hands taking flight.

“Puccini and Bernstein composed on the piano, and you can see how he composed this on the piano — he’s improvising along and he says, ‘Oh, I like this, let’s use this.’

Preu compares studying a score to inspecting a painting from up close. “It’s like with Rembrandt,” he says. “The background is mostly black in “Man with the Golden Hat,” or whatever it’s called in English, but you look at it up close, and it’s not black at all — there are reds and grays in it.”

Preu has a teacher’s knack for using analogies:

• Studying a score is also like scouting a rally car racecourse beforehand. He doesn’t self-consciously choreograph his conducting gestures: “You just react to the terrain and to your vehicle.”

• A half-hour spent planning rehearsal with a soloist like Rogé is “like the framing of a house”: “We go through the whole thing — tempos, the transitions, where the ritardandos [decelerations] are. It’s very basic — you’re just laying out the main planks. The interior design comes later.”

• As with a stage director, he can’t micro-manage his “actors”: “What [a musician] is offering may be different than what you heard, but it works, so let’s not touch it.”

• During performance, the score is just a memory aid, “like a GPS device. It’s there, and you know it’s on, but you don’t have to refer to it every second.”

Good thing that Preu has his shortcuts, because rehearsal time is limited. The Symphony will only have about 45 minutes to rehearse Bolero before their morning-of-the-first-concert dress rehearsal. (This is Maurice Ravel’s intensifying 14-minute drumbeat of sexual desire — which, everybody seems to know, was used to underscore Dudley Moore’s lust for Bo Derek in the movie 10.) Bolero is “all in the timing — how to do the crescendo, how to do this gradual growth without spending too much too early, but also without having too much left at the end,” Preu says. “There’s one harmonic shift at the end that you don’t see coming. But it’s very much in the hands of the soloists.”

In rehearsal, he says, “We’ll have a chance to play it through maybe twice. But you cannot rehearse too much, or you will get people annoyed.

“There’s a ‘road map’ musicians talk about — they want the ‘road map.’ And that’s all — you need to leave a couple of things unsaid when you go into a concert.’”

He likes the intensity of concert preparation: “A week ago” — he waves his hand dismissively — “it was so far away.” (Rehearsals would begin in five days.) “I need closer proximity for performance,” he says. “I need the time crunch. It propels you to where you usually would not go.

“It’s not anxiety. It’s the anticipation and the thrill of performance.”

During a performance, a musician in the orchestra has four focuses: her score, her section leader, the concertmaster and Eckart. He’s usually just in her peripheral vision.

But there he’ll be on the podium, waving his arms and keeping time, cueing the bass drum to synchronize with the trumpets, imploring his players to express the emotions that all the studying and rehearsals had left unsaid.

Eckart Preu conducts the Spokane Symphony Orchestra in works by Ravel, Gershwin and Rimsky-Korsakov at the Fox on Saturday, Sept. 26, at 8 pm and on Sunday, Sept. 27, at 3 pm. Tickets: $20-$42. Visit spokanesymphony.org or call 624-1200.