Eckart Plus

Sep 24, 2009

Author: Michael Bowen

Source: The Inlander

Outakes from our interview with Eckart Preu Michael Bowen

 

PROGRAM:

On Sept. 27-28, Eckart Preu will conduct the SSO in two performances of the following concert:

• Bolero (1928) by Maurice Ravel — (14 mins., erotic and repetitive; used in the movie 10 [from 1979] with Dudley Moore and Bo Derek).
• Piano Concerto in F (1925) by George Gershwin — (32 mins.; merges jazz and classical rhythms; soloist will be Pascal Rogé).
• Scheherazade (1888) by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov — (a 47-minute tone poem with the entire orchestra, suggesting a few tales from The 1,001 Arabian Nights, very melodic and romantic, with the bossy shah suggested by blaring trombones and one of his sexy wives, the title character, telling one story a night to distract him from his stated goal of killing one of his wives every night).

Experience:
Preu has never conducted the Gershwin before; with other orchestras, he has conducted Bolero once and Scheherazade twice.

 

Eckart Preu on playing an orchestral score at the piano:
“I love sitting at the piano. You can go back and repeat it. Here I have the basses, and at the same time, the counter-melody of the cellos. You can play it in real time, for just two seconds, and then go back.”

 

While popping Altoids into his mouth to relieve a scratchy throat, Preu examines the second movement of Scheherazade.

 

“I like to sing along with the score when I’m at the piano,” he says. “But I can only hum one voice at a time.” Gesturing toward all the staves on his conductor’s score, he notes that “I don’t have 25 voices. And I only have 10 fingers.

“So who do you conduct? The melody, and the people that are obvious…. You can only conduct one line at a time.

 

“But the musicians know: We have the power. We have the info: ‘Guys, we have the power.’”

 

“I don’t sound like a cello when I sing, but I know what they need to sound like. You want it crisp. And I know where my accents are.”

 

When he’s singing the score at the piano, he says, “I know that I have the first violins and the second violins are playing above, and so they are piano and they have mezzo forte.”

 

On predicting potential problems during rehearsals and swooping in “like a pre-emptive strike”:
“I’m getting better — also at predicting things that will not be problems.

 

“I think the more experienced you are, the better you know your orchestra, you can almost eliminate the problems before they occur.

 

“Sometimes it’s like — I don’t want to say that I’m like a nuclear bomb [laughing] — but it’s like a pre-emptive strike. You can make it for this not to happen.”

 

On how conducting must be like second nature:
“These are things that happen to me. It’s like acting — if you’re up onstage consciously ‘acting,’ then people will think, ‘What a charlatan.’ If it’s artificial, it’s never convincing.”

 

When it comes to his conducting gestures, Preu says, ‘I don’t choreograph anything. It’s like skiing down a hill or driving down a road — you just do it. You react to the terrain and to your vehicle.

 

“My conducting teacher always compared conducting to driving a car.

 

“And as a conductor,” he says, laughing, “there’s only so much you can do. If the car doesn’t want to drive.... You can push the gas too hard.”

 

On not pushing orchestras too far:
“Each orchestra has a different speed limit. Also aesthetics — there’s a line of resistance from every orchestra. You cannot get them to go past their aesthetic line. You cannot ask them to play more ugly or more brassy. This happens often with German orchestras.”

 

Are American musicians any different?
“With Americans, if you ask for a very loud, masculine sound, they’re just gonna blare the shit out of it.

“In Germany, there’s more of an ingrained aesthetic, and orchestras are very different.”

 

On being flexible when it comes to rehearsing the Gershwin concerto with a piano soloist like Pascal Rogé:
“No, pretty much everybody knows this really well. But I cannot anticipate what kind of tempi [Rogé] is gonna take.

“The tempo markings [in the score] are much faster than the way it’s usually played. But I will just follow his lead. That’s why you hire him.”

 

“It’s very much like a stage director. You can’t micro-manage. What [a musician is] offering may be different than what you heard [when Preu was anticipating rehearsal sounds], but it works, so let’s not touch it.”

 

Going into rehearsal, Preu says, “I have a very specific idea of what I want to do — but he’s playing it better, so that’s cool.”

 

On not over-directing his orchestra’s principal players:
“But to fool with soloists — it’s a very dangerous thing. They’ve thought about it.

 

“You might want to linger a little more. But they have to make it their own.

 

“Sometimes they want to be told. And I have worked with musicians — whatever you say can make no difference with them.

 

“But usually it’s better just to leave it alone.

 

“You can say, ‘Well, it’s OK, but I would have it a little sexier.’

 

“And they will look at you like, ‘What the f--- do you mean?’”

 

On playing the Gershwin Piano Concerto in a jazzy or classical style:
Catherine Shipley [music librarian and one of the second violin players] said that a basic question about the Gershwin is whether you want them to play it in a jazzy style or in a more straight-ahead classical manner.

 

Preu immediately points out a passage in the Gershwin score. “You can play 1, 2, 3 ... 1, 2, 3 ... hear it? You can play it with a little more swing versus being much more precise with the notes.

 

“There are sharp rhythms all over the place. But you want them played as they are written.

 

Will [Rogé] play it with sort of lazy rhythms? [The musicians] want to know.”

 

On Rimsky-Korsakov’s unusual change-ups in the orchestration of Scheherazade:
“Why do I like scores? Because sometimes there are things you cannot tell any other way.

 

“At the start of Scheherazade, for example, it’s all woodwinds, but then the top notes go to the second violins, then to the flute.” Preu starts to unlock the mystery of why Rimsky-Korsakov, instead of having instruments playing the same line consistently, changes his orchestration from measure to measure.

 

“Here is the first oboe’s line. Here the first clarinet is on top, sometimes it’s the second. Why?

 

“The way he orchestrates is much more complex than usual. The progression of chords is the same, but not with the same instruments. Every time the constellation is different.”

 

(For a loosely comparable shuffling of sounds, read about how Alan Gilbert, the new music director of the New York Phil, has rearranged his string section. Cellos, formerly on the audience’s right, are now on the left and mixed in among the first violins; the second violins are now on the right, surrounding the violas. The double basses have switched sides of the stage, too.)

 

On how he wants a faster transition from the third movement to the fourth than is suggested by the score of Scheherazade:
During performance, Preu only has time to flip through the score and glance at his scribbled reminders. But even some of the heavily marked conclusions don’t necessarily work well as guideposts: “When you finish the third movement of Scheherazade — I just found this out this morning, [because] I wrote it here from my last time [conducting] — at the end of the third movement, of course you could take a long pause, because that is what the score says. But this is the response of the Sultan Schahriar to what he has just heard...” and he’s off, humming the storyteller’s swirling violin theme and then demonstrating how quickly he wants the transition — just half a beat — into the final movement’s opening bang.