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A symphony in three movements

One musical program, three nights, three cities. On its most challenging weekends, the Florida Orchestra is a study in the evolution of making music.

By JOHN FLEMING
Published February 26, 2006

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. As you see, we've entered the 21st century,'' Stefan Sanderling said, gesturing to the wall behind him where a slide of information on Mark-Anthony Turnage was projected.

Sanderling, music director of the Florida Orchestra, was starting his preconcert talk in typically breezy fashion. He had enlisted visual aids to make his case for Turnage, anticipating that the British composer's angular, angry music would be a tough sell to the audience.

About 100 people turned out for the talk, sitting on folding chairs in a hall adjacent to the sanctuary of Pasadena Community Church in St. Petersburg. The orchestra is playing there while its usual venue in the city, Mahaffey Theater, undergoes renovation.

Normally, I don't go to Sanderling's talks when I review concerts, preferring to do a little reading and listening to brush up on the program. Last weekend was different. Instead of writing a review that night as I usually do, I was going to wait until I had heard all three performances around the Tampa Bay area. After Saturday's concert at the church, the orchestra would play Sunday night at Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater and Monday night at Morsani Hall of the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center in Tampa.

The program was appealing: Turnage's Three Screaming Popes, a jazzy walk on the wild side for an orchestra that doesn't get to play much contemporary music; William Schuman's tuneful slice of Americana, New England Triptych; and one of the greatest symphonies ever written, Beethoven's mighty opus to a hero, Symphony No. 3, the Eroica.

I was interested in hearing how the performance varied from night to night. In 15 years reviewing music, I have rarely had a chance to hear subsequent performances, and I was curious whether the level of artistry improved or got stale with repetition. I wondered what orchestra members thought.

Conventional wisdom has it that the opening performance would be exciting but a bit loose, since it was the first time through the program in front of an audience; the second would be good; and the third would be somewhat flat, because by then the musicians would have become bored.

"But it doesn't work out that way,'' cellist Sasha von Dassow told me. "You just never know. It's unpredictable.''

* * *

The orchestra's work is complicated by its peripatetic schedule. Most American symphony orchestras of any stature have their own home hall, where they rehearse and give their concerts. The Florida Orchestra is essentially homeless, going from hall to hall, frequently bumped out because the halls have their own shows to book and bottom lines to meet. It is like Wagner's Flying Dutchman, the ship forever doomed to sail the seas, never finding a port to call home.

Rehearsal space, too, is hard to come by. For the program I was following, the orchestra rehearsed at Ruth Eckerd Hall and Pasadena. This was frustrating for Sanderling.

"You build an orchestra in rehearsal,'' he said. "That's when the work of a conductor is done. In concert, I'm just there to remind everyone what we did in rehearsal. But it's hard to be consistent when we're in a different space every day.''

All this meant that my listening experiment was grittier than the more aesthetic experience it might be in Boston or Los Angeles or most every other city where the local orchestra's sound is inextricably tied to its hall. In the Tampa Bay area, the orchestra must make adjustments for each hall it plays in.

A half-hour before Saturday's concert, I watched the orchestra players unpack their instruments and check their music folders. With its enormous glass-walled sanctuary and swooping, modernistic lines, Pasadena was probably once a state-of-the-art megachurch, but it's looking a bit shopworn these days. For concerts, the audience sits in the pews, Bibles and Methodist hymnals in the racks, and can see only the musicians in the outside chairs because the stage is elevated. The acoustics are dismal.

"In Pasadena, we really fight the space,'' said Erika Shrauger, assistant principal clarinet. She uses a different reed for each venue the orchestra plays in, trying to match the reed with the acoustics. "I'll use a reed that has a little more guts in a larger space.''

Ideally, the air in a hall will seem to carry the orchestral sound effortlessly. Connoisseurs talk about how sound "blooms'' in a resonant acoustic. (Talking about sound and acoustics is not unlike talking about wine.) You can seriously debate the relative merits of going to concerts at Ruth Eckerd Hall and TBPAC's Morsani, both with decent acoustics, but at Pasadena, Shrauger said, "the sound just plummets.''

The audience has noticed. At performance time Saturday, the church was half-empty. The attendance of about 800 was the lowest this season for a masterworks program. At Mahaffey on a Saturday night this time of year, a crowd twice that size would not be uncommon.

Orchestra members take pains to say they don't blame the church for this woeful state of affairs. Pasadena "is what it is,'' I heard numerous times, and the musicians are grateful to have any place to play. And compared with the orchestra's other venues, there is some quirky charm to the church, which has volunteers directing concertgoers where to park their cars on the lawn. TBPAC, with its vast backstage area and loading dock, is like a factory. Ruth Eckerd Hall has a bland, suburban country club feel.

Because there is no real backstage at the church, except for choir rooms, musicians tend to mingle with the crowd. On Saturday, Sanderling bided his time at the side of the stage while it was being set up. The 6-year-old daughter of an orchestra staff member, wearing an "I love snowboarding'' T-shirt, took a nap in a front row seat.

For all the griping about Pasadena, it is possible to listen there and get something out of it. At times on Saturday, without the focus required when I have to do a review right afterward, my mind wandered more than usual - and that might have been a good thing, a more natural, relaxed response.

In Three Screaming Popes, Turnage's 1989 homage to Francis Bacon's lurid, angst-ridden paintings based on Velasquez's portraits of Pope Innocent X, the instrumental forces were as big as a Mahler symphony, with extra brass and winds, saxophones, electric keyboard and much percussion, even a police whistle. With strains of Gershwin and Copland running through the mix, the orchestra sounded like some kind of crazed dance band. A series of bloodcurdling "screams'' came at the end.

The crowd barely stirred after this cacophony. At each performance of the Turnage, the response was tepid, and in some cases, downright hostile. A man gave von Dassow a thumbs-down signal at Pasadena. A couple in front of me at Morsani walked out.

New music had gotten another indifferent - at best - reception, one of those perennial episodes in the life of an orchestra, many of whose younger musicians are closer in sensibility to the rowdy riffs of Turnage than the country dance rhythms of Beethoven.

The Schuman went over much better - after all, each of its three movements was based on a hymn, principal librarian Ella Fredrickson quipped, and the concert was in church. The middle movement, When Jesus Wept, contains a gorgeously blended wind duet, but with the horrendous sight lines at Pasadena, it was impossible to see who was playing. (It was principal bassoon Mark Sforzini and principal oboe Martin Hebert, in a performance that stood out as exceptional in each venue all weekend.)

As artful as the Turnage and the Schuman were, the Beethoven Eroica clearly counted most for Sanderling and the orchestra. They had spent a whole day of rehearsal on it, even though they played it a year ago. The orchestra has been playing all nine Beethoven symphonies this season.

"You can see Stefan's interpretation of Beethoven taking hold,'' Sforzini said as he prepared to go onstage to tune up before the concert. "He's sculpting the orchestra. It's very different than Jahja (Ling, the former music director), a much heavier approach.''

After every concert, one of the first things Sanderling asked for was the timing of the Eroica, kept by Fredrickson or stage manager Art Molinaro. Each performance was from 54 to 55 minutes, which is quite slow, even with some long pauses between movements for coughing in the audience to quiet down.

When I visited the music director in his ad-hoc dressing room after the concert, he had changed from formal wear into loose-fitting black shirt and pants. His shaggy hair was slick with perspiration, like someone who had just played a couple of sets of tennis.

Usually good-natured and funny, Sanderling was subdued, in an almost existential frame of mind. He was depressed by the small crowd and feeling doubts about his performance of the Beethoven. "We were not together on the repeat of the exposition,'' he said. "Those little things drive me bananas.''

I had not heard the flub in the violins he was referring to, and told him the hero's funeral march had been mesmerizing. The strings can be difficult to hear at Pasadena, but they had sounded good to me. Jeff Multer, who had been acting concertmaster and was recently appointed to the position permanently, was beginning to make his presence felt, I said.

Still, Sanderling remained self-critical. He said this was the 27th time he had conducted the Eroica.

"It was so much easier the first time,'' he said. "Beethoven doesn't get any easier, it gets harder. What kills you in a symphony by Beethoven or Haydn or Mozart or Schubert are the doubts. Is it a long note or a short note? It gets worse every year.''

* * *

The next night, at Ruth Eckerd Hall, Sanderling was in brighter spirits. His wife, Isabelle, was with him in the dressing room. From time to time, management staffers and board members, musicians and friends stopped by. The collective mood of the orchestra seemed buoyed to be in a proper hall. Attendance was better, too, about 1,300.

"This season, it has been a relief to get to Ruth Eckerd Hall,'' Sforzini said.

Even so, Ruth Eckerd Hall is not without critics among the players. With the stage somewhat set back from the seating, "it's almost as if we're in another room, as if we're removed from the audience,'' Shrauger said, putting her finger on what has always bothered me about the hall.

For some reason, the acoustics in Ruth Eckerd seem to magnify certain annoying sounds. When someone coughs or crinkles a candy wrapper, as audience members are wont to do there, it can be heard loud and clear onstage. "It's very difficult not to be distracted,'' Shrauger said.

But for me, it was a pleasure to hear the music in Ruth Eckerd Hall after the deadness of the church. The hall's warm, soft-edged sound was particularly conducive for New England Triptych. The piece starts out with a soft timpani melody, which made more of an impression than the night before, thanks to the superior acoustics.

At intermission I talked with timpanist John Bannon about the halls. He has been in the orchestra 18 years, going back to the last time it had to play at Pasadena, when Mahaffey was receiving its initial facelift.

"In this orchestra, I have always said that it takes someone new in a principal position an entire year to learn how to play in each hall,'' said Bannon. "It's a matter of balance, of note tapers, of attacks.''

Orchestra musicians invariably fret about not being able to hear each other onstage. Bannon said it is easiest for he and his colleagues to hear each other at Mahaffey, but the hall has a dry acoustic and tends to stuff the dynamic range of a Bruckner or Mahler symphony. Ruth Eckerd Hall has a deep stage, "so here we have a front-to-back ensemble issues,'' he said. Even though the Morsani stage is wide and hard to hear across, Bannon thinks it yields the most satisfying sound of all the halls.

I thought Sunday's Eroica was magnificent, and with the previous night's performance still fresh in my ears, I was able to pick up on details I had missed the first time around, such as the lilting cello figure early in the finale. Rob Smith and Kenneth Brown played German rotary trumpets, which had a richer color than conventional trumpets.

Musicians are glad to offer critiques of a performance, but it is hard for them to be objective, depending on how their own playing went. Fiona Lofthouse, a violinist, thought Saturday's Eroica had been better than Sunday's, but acknowledged she was also less happy about her individual performance on Sunday. "I thought we listened better last night,'' she said.

"I thought it was tighter tonight,'' said James Wilson, principal French horn and Lofthouse's husband, as they got ready to leave Ruth Eckerd Hall.

Sanderling was exultant about the second Eroica. "I think it was much better, maybe the best Beethoven we have played,'' he said. The long first movement had more of a sense of coiled energy than it had the night before.

I had been struck Sunday night by how much Sanderling reminded me of what his father must have been like on the podium. Kurt Sanderling is a Jew who escaped Nazi Germany to become a legendary conductor, first in the Soviet Union with the Leningrad Philharmonic, then with the East Berlin Symphony Orchestra.

I never saw him conduct, but I did meet him several years ago. I've seen pictures of him in action and talked to musicians who played under him. Stefan's gestures and baton technique seem similar to his father's, and the two resemble each other.

Kurt Sanderling, now 93 and living in Berlin, was steeped in the Beethoven symphonies, and his son carries that tradition with him. Musicians in the orchestra understand the connection and draw inspiration from it. You could almost literally draw a line from them playing the Eroica last weekend back to the origin of the music in early 19th century Europe.

* * *

The third concert of the weekend wasn't actually on the weekend. It was Monday night at TBPAC's Morsani Hall, the best place to hear the orchestra. People who know Morsani only from Broadway shows haven't experienced the hall in its optimum use. For an orchestra, the proscenium's wood wall comes down and the stage is extended out into the auditorium and beneath the acoustical clouds. This turns the 2,500-seat hall into a surprisingly intimate space.

Unfortunately, the best place for the orchestra is not very welcoming. TBPAC's priorities lie with its booming Broadway series and other touring acts. In a way, it's an old Florida story, selling out to out-of-state interests and neglecting local concerns.

Two seasons ago, desperate to keep playing in Morsani but increasingly unable to book the hall on its preferred Friday night, the orchestra switched masterworks concerts to Monday night. Predictably, attendance has dropped. I think it was amazing Monday that 1,100 people showed up.

The orchestra will go back to Friday night next season but will be able to play only eight masterworks concerts in Morsani. At this rate, it won't be long before the orchestra is entirely gone from the hall. The situation is a scandal and cultural black eye for Tampa.

In Morsani, I like to sit in the mezzanine, which provides a nice perch from which to peer down at the orchestra. Enjoying music is as much visual as aural, and Three Screaming Popes was a highlight, with its mad scramble in the percussion section. The nuances of Turnage's orchestration were vividly heard, and the funky rhythms benefitted from musicians having the previous performances under their belt. For some reason, though, the performance wimped out at the end, as the screams were strangely quiet. Sanderling later told me something had gone wrong, but he wouldn't tell me what it was.

Monday's Eroica was distinguished by terrific horn play in the Scherzo's trio. If I could construct the ideal Beethoven Third Symphony from the three performances, I would take the first and fourth movements from Ruth Eckerd Hall, the second movement from Pasadena and the third movement from TBPAC. How convenient it would be if we could order our artistic experiences a la carte.

Orchestra players and staff must have been exhausted. Three concerts in three days in three venues was a grind, and the last one had its share of mishaps. Principal cellist James Connors missed the performance because, in an emergency, he had to take his son to the hospital. Sanderling almost didn't make it to his preconcert talk because he got hung up in traffic on the Howard Frankland Bridge.

But there were also things to celebrate: At intermission backstage, there was cake for the birthday of veteran violinist Oleg Geyer.

After the concert, the mood in Sanderling's dressing room was ebullient, as musicians stopped by to shake hands with or hug their conductor. There would be a day or two off, then on to the next round of concerts.

I was worn out, but having heard the music evolve over repeated performances was deeply satisfying. I came away from the experience with admiration for the musicians' resilience and commitment.

Like the Beethoven symphony it played so passionately, the orchestra seemed heroic.

-- John Fleming can be reached at (727) 893-8716 or fleming@sptimes.com.

[Last modified February 26, 2006, 08:14:54]