This morning at 10am I attended an open rehearsal of the Seattle Symphony. They were rehearsing the Masterworks program for tonight and Saturday, consisting of Sibelius' Tapiola, Pascal Dusapin's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (it's the U.S. Premiere), and Beethoven's 6th Symphony, the "Pastoral." I'll be talking about the works in detail when I write about the concert on Saturday, so now I'll only be writing about things relevant to the rehearsal.
They rehearsed the entire program in order. They played through Tapiola with hardly a pause, and then Morlot worked with them on a few sections before calling it a wrap and heading onto the Dusapin.
Renaud Capuçon is the soloist for the Dusapin, and he came on stage to rehearse it with the orchestra. They played through the whole concerto without any breaks at all as far as I can remember. It was quite an engaging piece of music, I'm really looking forward to Saturday's concert so I can have a second hearing of it.
After that there was an intermission of sorts, in which I headed out to the lobby to find someone I could talk to about security at the event, since my stalker had gotten in and sat right next to me. I found a very nice gentleman with a Seattle Symphony nametag on, and inquired about why they weren't verifying peoples names on the guest list as they were coming in. I then told him my story, which consisted of me posting about this rehearsal on Facebook yesterday to see if anyone was interested in going, and receiving about five different comments and private messages from this rather lonely, slightly creepy middle-aged man, who gave me his number in every single message and asked where we should meet. I was Facebook friends with him because he met me in the Canlis lounge while I was playing, and added me. I ignored all his messages and deleted my own posts about the rehearsal.
And then while I was sitting in seat P-16 on the floor, waiting for the rehearsal to begin, he shows up. That's right. Having heard nothing back from me in response to five different comments and messages, he shows up like "hey man! I tried messaging you but it didn't seem to work," and sits down right next to me. Who does that? I did my best to stonewall him, to not look at him, and to reply very curtly to his questions about my life.
So I'm telling this story to the Symphony representative (I think his name was Stephen), and he found it quite amusing and commented on the joys of social media. He said it's a great story, and it was fun chatting with him about it.
As the intermission came to an end, I found a great seat in row M or N on the right side of the auditorium, fairly far from my stalker. From there I observed the rehearsal of the Beethoven symphony.
Morlot was much more stern with the orchestra over the Beethoven, compared to the Dusapin and Sibelius. He often stopped and demanded more of them, coaching them in details about phrasing. During the second movement he forced them to listen to each other by not conducting throughout the entire thing. The audience applauded afterwards. Then they played through the rest of the piece. The storm section is my favorite of course, and I thought he took it too slowly to really have the impact it's supposed to have. It just wasn't explosive, it wasn't thunderous. It was okay, that's all. If they could sustain the intensity in the tempo that he took, perhaps it would have had a cataclysmic effect, but that would be extremely difficult to do.
Anyways, so that's it. I'll be reporting on the happenings at Saturday's concert! Hope you enjoyed the stalker story!
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