A Weekend of Music

Last Friday night we went to the PNB production of Swan Lake, which is probably the best known classical ballet aside from the Nutcracker. The music for both ballets, of course, was written by the same composer, that genius of melody and orchestration, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

Like so many ballets (and operas) the plot is an exercise in absurdity: boy meets girl, girl is under a sorcerer's spell and must become a swan during the daytime until she meets a dude who will be faithful to her forever (yeah right), at which point she can be an unfeathered mammalian lady 24/7. They fall in love (at their first meeting oddly enough), boy declares his undying love and everything is cool.  UNTIL - boy later meets another hot little number at a party and DANCES WITH HER which, in the 19th century, is apparently tantamount to coitus.  So, swan girl must remain a swan girl forever, and the dumb ass collapses in grief as she flies off into the sunset.

At this point I should mention that we don't go to the ballet for superior plot lines.

We do, however, go for the dancing and the music and I would rank the music of Swan Lake as some of the most beautiful ever written.  The orchestra played with sensitivity and projected that sense of power under exquisite control that, to me, is the essence of a great performance.  Kudos to my esteemed bass teacher, among others, who is a member of this wonderful group of musicians.

And the dancing: the ballerina swans just kept on coming.  Flocks after flock appeared on stage, their wings rippling in a way that no human arms should be able to achieve.  But it was the male dancers who appeared to take flight, leaping and hanging motionless in mid-air seemingly in defiance of the laws of physics.  For a better description, see this review.

In the final scene, when Prince Siegfried collapses as he realizes he has lost the love of his life, the staging and the music completely redeem the ridiculous plot.  You can actually feel his sadness and loss.  People, this is great art.

Part two of the musical weekend was a Philharmonia Northwest performance on Sunday featuring your blogger in the bass section.  For me, the high point of the concert was George Gershwin's Catfish Row which is a mashup (OK a symphonic suite) of music from his opera, Porgy and Bess.  Before I get to my complaints about his writing for the bass, let me say that Summertime is just possibly the most beautiful melody ever written by an American composer.  And, it was admirably performed in a solo by our concertmaster, Cecilia Archuleta during the first movement.

However, Gershwin was no bass player, as evidenced by several bars in the first movement which are close to physically impossible to play unless, perhaps, you are this guy or maybe this other guy.  

Let's do the math.  The tempo is 120 which means, for those of you keeping score, that a quarter note occurs every half second.  But the notes in this passage are sixteenth notes, meaning that they happen every eighth of a second.  So each note is played for... let's see, carry the 2, take the derivative... 125 milliseconds.  Now, as we all know, bass music is played an octave below what is written in our parts.  The pitches in the passage I have in mind are more or less centered around our first position A on the G string which is two octaves below A 440 or 110 Hz.  At that frequency scientists tell us (or in this case, I am telling you) that my bass string oscillates only about 14 times for each note.  Dear Reader, this is ridiculous.  When you add in string crossings and, at one point, a shift in the left hand, I am confident that we have achieved the sublime.

Gershwin wrote some wonderful music but let's get real.  He was clueless about how to write for the bass.  At one point during rehearsal, one of the violists leaned over and said something like "I can barely play this on my little instrument.  I don't know how you guys can play it on the bass!"  I could have said "Well, we can't" but that would have compromised the mystique of the bass section.  So I merely smiled modestly.