G.P.

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Monday 1 February 2010

How to find me on the Internet

If you want to stay on top what I am currently doing, there are couple of other things besides this blog that you can follow.

My personal website at www.sashamakila.com is where you will find the most current information of my coming concerts. If you want to book me for a concert better check the calendar page first!

You can now become my fan on Facebook! Fans get updates of my coming concerts and I try to post some video clips of my work there as well.

Follow me on Twitter to get real-time tweets from me. I cannot tweet while I'm conducting though!

I have a YouTube account as well. I think I should change the name though...

You can also find me on MySpace, LinkedIn, Xing, Hi5 and about every other social networking website, although I warn you that I check those pages maybe once a month, maximum. The four websites I listed first are my main information outlets besides this blog.

See you out there, somewhere!

Friday 1 January 2010

New Year, New Challenges

First I would like to wish Happy New Year 2010 to all my readers! Some of you have sent me email which is very nice - I will always try to find time to answer them. I would also like to see more comments on my blog postings, so I will make it my personal challenge this year to try to write in a way which would encourage more interaction between me and you!

My year 2009 was in many fronts more rewarding than I could have imagined. Here I will just list some of the musical highlights of the year: assisting Kurt Masur in both great Mendelssohn oratorios in Paris, premiering a new modern opera in Finland, making my debuts in UK and South Africa and taking part in the Aspen Music Festival in the US. That's a plenty!

Next spring I will make my debuts with the MIAGI youth orchestra and the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra in South Africa, and orchestras of Joensuu and Turku in Finland, as well as continue my cooperation with some old friends. Looking at the repertoire list for those concerts already sends shivers down my spine - Eroica, Pastoral Symphony, Firebird, Fountains of Rome... Great stuff, absolutely! During our conducting studies we all the time study those great pieces, but it might take a while for a young conductor to actually get to perform them with a professional group!

Next Sunday I will make a small concert with a non-professional string ensemble in my birth town Kerava in Finland - yet another kind of debut for me this year. If you are passing by drop in to listen - entry is free!

Saturday 21 November 2009

Furtwängler, Karajan and the Modern Conducting Technique


Boskovsky talks about great maestros

At 0:40 in the above clip Willi Boskovsky, the long-time concertmaster of Wiener Philharmoniker, speaks about working with the legendary Wilhelm Furtwängler and how difficult it was to start a piece with him. Furtwängler was renowned for his unconventional (at that time) style of conducting, which in fact was the result of a long and consciouss process. Furtwängler writes:

"Many spectators, accustomed to the usual technique taught at conservatories, do not understand my gestures. They call them uclear, and go so far as to assert, that I engage in 'camouflage'. Recently a critic wrote about a concert of mine with the Vienna Philharmonic: 'With the unclear gestures of the conductor, it is impossible to understand how the orchestra could achieve such flawless ensemble playing. There is only one solution to the puzzle: endless rehearsals.' No, that is precisely not the solution. My rehearsals do not exceed the customary number and hardly touch on questions of technique, that is, of precision. This very precision is much more the natural consequence of my 'unclear' conducting. That this unclear conducting is not unclear after all, is shown by the fact that the instrument functions with flawless precision. It is, so to speak, the acid test."


Furtwängler rehearses Schubert's "Unfinished" symphony

As Boskovski notes, Furtwängler "never beat time clearly". But in the above clip we see that his gesture is pretty obvious! Not "beating time" as such, but "taking the sound" from the orchestra. Also, see how he sacrifices the 3-pattern for the constant flow of the quarter-notes. Later Herbert von Karajan often made the same decision - to forget the awkward beat pattern which sometimes gets on the way of the music.


Furtwängler rehearses Brahms symphony No. 4

Also, see in the ending of Brahms' finale, the exciting wiggle of Furtwängler's baton - which goes against all the rules learned in the conducting class. "It does not help" is the usual critizism. But it depends on what you want to help, really. It sure might make a difference!


Karajan rehearses "Ein Heldenleben"

Here is one of the most perfect examples of a good, varied and virtuosic conducting technique. I have posted this clip before, but just watch how almost every gesture of Herbert von Karajan is corresponding with the sounding result! When Karajan was making his mark as a touring maestro, one music critic wrote that he represents a "modern" way of conducting - not beating down, but encouraging the orchestra with movements that resemble hushing away a flock of geese!


Karajan rehearses Schumann symphony No. 4

I recommend watching this rehearsal in its entirety to everyone even remotely interested in conducting technique. Here you can see in the very beginning, how the first preparatory beat comes in various forms and even various tempos, which sometimes do not bear any relation to the tempo of the continuation. It is not to say that the tempo of the upbeat does not matter - just here it obviously serves a different function, a function of setting the mood, preparing the sound and breathing...

To round up my introduction to this fascinating topic, I selected two clips of Don Giovanni overture, the first one conducted by Wilhem Furtwängler, the second one by Herbert von Karajan. Furtwängler's performance starts with his (in)famous delayed upbeat, which Valery Gergiev has completely adopted into his conducting style (!). Karajan shows in turn a beautiful example of moulding and shaping the music instead of beating time. No doubt he would be a subject of many a complaint if he had conducted like that a hundred years ago! To me it is fascinating how some orchestras still prefer a traffic police to an artist, but that only tells how rare good artists with polished technique still are. Many players are simply not used to see the conductor do what he is paid to do and not merely keep the orchestra together, which many times would be much easier without a conductor disturbing the flow of music.


Furtwängler conducts Don Giovanni overture

Karajan conducts Don giovanni overture

Wednesday 28 October 2009

Sometimes It's Hard To Say No!

I have just survived the busiest month+ of conducting in my life, so please forgive me again for not updating this blog! But unfortunately being a free lance conductor is like this - there might be no work for weeks and suddenly everyone wants you at the same time! And if you refuse an engagement you risk finding yourself at the bottom of the stack next time... Well here's the whole story!

After returning from Aspen I could take it easy for a couple of weeks, go to some nice concerts (Alexander Vedernikov in Turku, Leif Segerstam with Tapiola) and hear my friend Paolo Fanale sing "Cosi" at the Finnish National Opera. But then it was back to work full force.

I was assigned to assist Kurt Masur and the Orchestre National de France in Paris in a program consisting of full Egmont incidental music by Beethoven, and Brahms violin concerto with Vadim Repin. But before that I had to launch rehearsals for Paavo Heininen Quintet, Op. 7, an extremely difficult work from the crazy 60's. It had been only performed once with disastrous results, and no-one had dared to touch the work for almost fifty years! It was time for payback!

After a couple of days of rehearsing I left for Paris just on time to hear Chicago Symphony perform with Haitink. People always talk about Chicago brass players but oh my god what a tight string section! They played a fantastic Bruckner seventh.

Repin Masur

With Maestro Masur my job description seems to be getting more and more varied. This time I had to write some horn parts for the Egmont overture as well as do some other music librarian duties... We had beautiful Mélanie Diener singing the two songs and Ulrich Tukur narrating the final number of Egmont incidental music. Beautiful piece by the way! The concert at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees was sold out so I myself was not sure I could find a seat, but luckily I got help from above...

I also saw Christoph Eschenbach conduct Orchestre de Paris - the very first time I saw him live. What a power - one might be tempted to think that he has mastered the use of dark side of the Force!

When I got back to Finland the first thing was a funeral gig with the wind band I used to play in a long time ago. The tuba player of the group had passed away after a long illness. With wind bands it is a tradition that the band comes to play in the important occasions of the band members' lives, like weddings, anniversaries and, yes, funerals.

The next week was hellish - I had one concert on Thursday and another concert in different town and with different repertoire on Friday, and both had a set of four rehearsals. I was practically rehearsing from dusk till dawn every single day of the week!

First concert was a great success - the composer Paavo Heininen was present at the concert to hear how we resurrected his 50-year old piece from the dead. Afterwards he described his feelings with words "I feel like I was a political prisoner who now has been set free!" Can a musician get a more beautiful compliment, really? The attitudes towards playing modern music has really changed in recent times, so maybe only now time was right for this piece to come to existence.

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The next day's concert was no less important. It was the first performance of Kalevi Aho's new work "Historical Scenes", which was commissioned for the 200th anniversary celebrations of the Finnish Council of State. I traveled to the old Finnish capital, Turku, with 30 musicians from the Sibelius Academy, and we performed this with three presidents (!) and the whole political elite in attendance. The funny part was, that we had to play this piece in pseudo-historical costumes!!! They were extremely hot and cumbersome to wear, but we looked kind of cool in them! The work itself was tailor-made (unlike the costumes) for this occasion in the form of promenade concert, where three chamber groups perform pastiches modeled after music from different centuries of Finnish music history, and the final movement with the orchestra fast forwards the 20th century in musical quotations and some free fantasy.

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After this marathon week I had one day of rest before flying to Vaasa up north. There I rehearsed the Vaasa City Orchestra for two days before embarking on a two week concert tour in towns along the western coast of Finland. We performed altogether 17 concerts for both Finnish and Swedish speaking school kids. I think we reached over 6000 people, most of whom had never before heard a symphony orchestra live! This was a really pleasant duty to me, and the orchestra seemed to enjoy the tour a lot too despite repeating the same programs over and over again. For one's conducting technique it does miracles to be able to conduct the same piece so many times in concert - it is almost like working in an opera production.

Now I have just a little bit of calm before my next trip. I cannot be lazy though - I have started my DMA (in conducting) studies at the Sibelius Academy and have to write some papers for that! Luckily the program at the Sibelius Academy is kind-of tailored to suit the life of a traveling artist. The idea of artistic doctorate training in Finland is totally different from what people do in American universities, for example. But I will write about that some other time...

Sunday 6 September 2009

Summarizing My Summer

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Me and violin soloist Anna Lee at the dress rehearsal before our Shostakovich concert in Aspen (photo Laura Mirahver)

This has been one of the busiest summers in my life, and thus I have not been able to update my blog, sorry! Anyway, the concerts at the Viola Congress in Stellenbosch were awesome and we had really good time after one of the toughest weeks of my life conducting-wise.

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After our last rehearsal in Stellenbosch, with concert master Suzanne, principal flute Helen and principal cello Peter

After the festival I was right away re-invited to conduct at the 39th International Viola Congress in Dresden, Germany, as well as guest conduct the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra in South Africa, so I guess I was not the only one thinking the concerts went well! Thanks goes of course to the wonderful musicians in the congress orchestra. It was a pleasure working with you!


Me and Steve at Piccadilly Circus

I had no time for sight seeing South Africa this time since I had to fly back to Aspen immediately after our last concert to catch up what was going on at the American Academy of Conducting at Aspen. I had an 8-hour layover in London so I actually got out of the airport and had a cup of tea with my British friend Steve whom I met last year in Manchester.


Aspen as seen from the Aspen Mountain

In Aspen the program was busy as ever. I definitely got my dose of cello for a couple of years this summer! Everyone else in AACA orchestra seemed pretty exhausted as well. During the last three weeks there were three more concerts of our own, an opera masterclass with a public performance, a repertoire reading, and a composer reading. In the middle of this turmoil I tried very hard to gather an ensemble to perform Mendelssohn's "Scottish" symphony, but in the end I was happy to conduct just one reading of it (thanks guys!!!).

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The amazing AACA orchestra (photo by Laura)

I must say I was amazed until the very end how great players we had in AACA. Even when we felt there is not enough rehearsal and we felt frustrated while playing, when I listened to the concerts afterwards we sounded awesome! This orchestra really held up the standard during the whole 9 weeks of hard labour! And I must repeat that I have never enjoyed playing cello in the section as much as this summer! All the cellists were both good orchestra musicians and great guys and gals as well.


Asher Fisch teaching opera masterclass at the Wheeler Opera House

Another highly positive experience was following the Opera masterclass by Asher Fisch. He was no doubt the best teacher this summer! He was genuinely interested in helping the young musicians, and he had such a vast knowledge about how things work in opera (especially Italian opera). I was really sad that I had no chance to conduct anything for him!

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Going overtime... again?

The AACA program is undoubtedly among the best conducting summer academies in the world, but it of course could be better. A lot better in fact, with the amount of money some generous American folks have pumped into it! Just to mention one thing - I mostly hung out with the orchestra musicians during the festival, and practically all of them complained about the fact that there is no proper rehearsal going on, since the orchestra has to repeat and repeat for the sake of fixing the conductors' mistakes. And, on the other hand the orchestra had to sit idle for long periods because some of our teachers started waxing lyrical about totally insignificant matters thus wasting everyone's time! The timing of the rehearsals was an absolute disaster most of the time, and many times we ran overtime which should never happen if you respect the professionalism of the musicians. In my opinion our teachers (all of them!) should try to give us a good example of how to run an efficient orchestra rehearsal - but obviously Aspen is not the place to learn that!


The majestic Maroon Bells... A sight to remember for the rest of your life!

Aspen was really a memorable experience in both good and bad. Most I will miss all my new friends and colleagues in AACA. We will never play again together as an orchestra, and that is kind of sad! We will probably run across each other individually, since most of you guys will find your way in some good orchestra, and hopefully I will conduct some of those orchestras some day! The beautiful nature of Colorado is another thing to miss. The hikes to Aspen Mountain and Maroon Bells were among absolute highlights of the summer for me!

Thanks everyone for an unforgettable summer! Hope to see you again some day!

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