Several Chicago Symphony Orchestra musicians explain how they work together with conductors to create the energy and excellence of CSO concerts, sharing interesting behind-the-scenes stories and insight.
CSO musicians James Smelser (horn), Jennifer Gunn (flute & piccolo), Patricia Dash (percussion), Lawrence Neuman (viola), John Bruce Yeh (clarinet) and Esteban Batallán (trumpet) speak about the subject of working collaboratively with conductors, including the excellence Music Director Riccardo Muti brings to the Orchestra; memories of how former Music Director Sir Georg Solti challenged musicians to raise standards; and how CSO players work to build energy and excellence into each concert. Musical excerpts include CSO recordings of Mahler, Brahms, Mozart, R. Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Liszt, Bruckner, Ravel, Smetana and Stravinsky. For more information, visit cso.org/intermission.
Introduction (a series of short quotes from the interviewees):
—We just follow the conductor, and we can feel what they want. (Esteban Batallán)
—Other times, you really have to open your ears and not look up. (John Bruce Yeh)
—He’s jumping around, and what wonderful energy, but that doesn't help the orchestra. (Lawrence Neuman)
—He’s bringing every ounce of himself. He’s able to command the symphony to an unbelievable standard of perfection. (Patricia Dash)
—The level of refinement is like none other. (James Smelser)
John Hagstrom: Welcome to Intermission at the CSO, featuring behind-the-scenes conversations with Chicago Symphony Orchestra musicians working together to create world-class performances. The CSO has over 100 performing musicians, and in each episode, you'll hear in their words what it takes to make this one of the world's greatest orchestras.
I'm John Hagstrom. I’ve played in the trumpet section of the CSO since 1996, and the shared history I have with these players means you'll be hearing discussions that are both candid and informative, discovering unexpected details about overcoming challenges and the commitment we make to continually improve how we perform together.
So whether you're a longtime CSO fan or somebody who's never been to an orchestra concert, you'll hear about the passion that has kept the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the forefront of American music-making since 1891, which is when the orchestra started.
This orchestra belongs to all of Chicago; we are a diverse community of performers, and we create beauty by listening to each other and working tirelessly to build transformative moments with music. We want these programs to encourage you to support that mission, too, and so let's get started.
This episode is all about conductors. The CSO usually has a different conductor preparing us and performing with us each week, and as you'll hear, there's probably no other topic in an orchestra about which opinions vary so widely. Every full-time orchestra like the CSO selects one conductor to be what's called the music director, and in that role, the CSO has had some of the most famous conductors in the world. Sir Georg Solti was the CSO's music director starting in the late ’60s. Daniel Barenboim took over in the early ’90s, and now since 2010, Maestro Riccardo Muti has been our music director. Maestro Muti is without a doubt one of the greatest conductors in the world today, and if you've ever been to a CSO concert under his direction, you already know that. But now let's hear CSO musicians describe what makes him so special.
James Smelser: The past music directors that I have played for were fantastic for the orchestra. There's something very different and special about Muti. The level of refinement in the level of insistence for that refinement is like none other.
JH: That was Jim Smelser, he's been a member of the CSO's horn section since the year 2000. Jennifer Gunn joined the CSO in 2005, playing the flute and piccolo. Jennifer and I talked about the Maestro's high standards, even when he's not in front of the orchestra.
Jennifer Gunn: When he walks on the stage — well, I don't think it has to be when he walks on the stage. When he walks in the room, there’s a sense of excellence and an integrity that he brings with him, and it's palpable.
JH: It has been a wonderful kind of collaboration of how he has brought his own teaching and expertise to us. But when he started, you might remember that we had this luncheon, and I know you were there, but he gave this speech, and he started by saying, “You know, the Chicago Symphony does not need Riccardo Muti, and Riccardo Muti does not need the Chicago Symphony, so why, why should we do this? It is because of what we can do together.” And I think that was exactly what we've done. It's been a wonderful kind of collaboration of how he has brought his own teaching and expertise to us and how we have worked together to create something beautiful.
JG: I think, John, I think you’re spot on. I feel like It takes a really special kind of person to lead us, to wrangle us all together, if you will, to get us all in one combined vision.
JH: This is Patsy Dash. She’s played in the percussion section since 1986.
Patricia Dash: He’s old school, he’s tough, but he’s very fair, and he has everybody's attention. He's able to command the mighty forces of the symphony to an unbelievable standard of perfection and consistent standard of perfection.
JH: And this is Larry Neuman, a member of the CSO's viola section.
Lawrence Neuman: This is what I've loved about him. One, he’s disciplined. Generally, he comes super-prepared to rehearsals. He knows the pieces; he knows the scores very well. From a physical standpoint in terms of how he conducts, I like, relatively speaking, he’s more on the side of simplicity — less is more. He's even said things like that on the podium. I remember him once saying in rehearsal, “The older I get, the more I realize, the less I do, the better it is.” I learned that already — I think most of us have — by observing these conductors, so many conductors, over the years. So many of them are trying so hard and doing so much physically, and it just gets in the way. What we need is focus, a focused, simple effort.
Unfortunately, I think audience members have a different reaction. So many I talk to seem to be affected, “oh, wow, he was so expressive physically, and he's jumping around, and what wonderful energy.” But that doesn't help the orchestra to play better on average on the whole.
JH: One of the other things, you'll remember, he says, and I think was one of his teachers who told him that a conductor basically says the same 29 things.
LN: I think it was von Karajan or someone who said there's only eight things that you should say, you know, only eight things that you should ever talk about: louder, softer, faster, slower, higher, lower — what’s the other two?
JH: Shorter, longer?
LN: Shorter, longer. Shorter, longer. Yes! Thank you, that's it. I like that. It should be that way.
JH: The CSO's music director conducts more of the orchestra's concerts each season than any other conductor, and in the process, he guides us to improve our standards of quality. Jim Smelser describes how this happens with Maestro Muti.
JS: The orchestra has never sounded better than it does now, and that's, that's because of him. Throughout his work with us, we've learned a different way to listen to ourselves, which is really what keeps an orchestra fresh. We’re not just repeating and polishing what we know is OK or good. We are discovering things new, but as he has said, he has an understanding and respect of the past, and as he has said, he's not here to disturb and disrupt that; he's here to add to it, and that's exactly what he's done.
JH: Every new member of the CSO needs some time to learn how to interpret the movements of the music director and all the other conductors, too. It can be confusing at first. John Yeh has played in the clarinet section of the CSO since 1977, and he remembers the first time as a student he ever saw Maestro Solti lead the CSO.
John Bruce Yeh: During my time as a student at the Juilliard School in New York, Sir Georg Solti was at Carnegie Hall. Everybody was raving about it, so I was there. I snuck my way into the dress circle [section]. I slipped the [he laughs] — this is a great story because I would be able to go to an usher and just kind of slipped him a couple of bucks, and he just kind of looked the other way, so I’d walk in. That was the way I heard the Chicago Symphony for the first time.
JH: You bribed your way in!
JBY: Yeah, I bribed my way in, and it was like, ah, this rarefied atmosphere that the entire audience was so excited, and I saw Solti up there, twitching and jerking and doing all this. And I was thinking, this is really strange. But a couple of years later, when I was in the orchestra, I totally understood at that time what he was doing, and that was what made the orchestra have such precision.
JH: Perhaps more than in any other section of the orchestra, the players in the CSO percussion section must perform precisely together with one another as they also follow the conductor. That's harder than you might think, and Patsy Dash explains why.
PD: Probably the most difficult moments for percussionists are moments that you really can’t practice at home. Like a climactic moment with a big cymbal crash where the whole orchestra has been leading to a moment, and I've been standing there with the cymbals in my hands, waiting for that moment. So you’ve got to feather in a fortissimo cymbal crash and put that down not too soon and not too late. And I have to tell you that the two conductors where you just know they just somehow have a way of showing it without disturbing the legato that everybody else is doing, and that was Sir Georg Solti and Maestro Muti. You just watch them, and somehow you just know.
JH: A great music director helps each player to be at their individual best and as a group at our collective best. And little by little, the music director raises the standards of everybody in the orchestra. John Yeh remembers Maestro Solti’s influential voice in this way.
JBY: Every time Solti would return to the Chicago Symphony after an absence of whatever, you know, several months, he would stand on the podium and give us a little pep talk, and he would tell us what he had done in the time that we hadn't seen him. [Imitates Solti’s Hungarian accent] “So my dears, I was in New York, and they are good, but we are better.” And then one year, he came back, and he said, “My dears, I was in Boston, they are good, but we are better. But my dears, I was in Berlin, and they are as good as we are. My dears, we must maintain our standard, and we must raise our standard, and this is the most difficult thing.” So he would constantly really encourage us and inspire us and challenge us to raise the standard, and it is the most difficult thing because our standard is already at the very highest level.
Each day it becomes more difficult; it doesn't become any easier because the standard is already at such a high level. And in order to raise that standard, it involves breaking new ground or really going beyond our capabilities to be able to bring something even higher, and I think in my time at the Chicago Symphony this has been done consistently. We got new people coming in, we get new musicians, new colleagues that have absolutely raised the standard.
JH: So he knew that he was asking for something difficult because he'd also been working to raise his standards. And even when he was on his deathbed, he was still looking at new scores and preparing for things coming up, regardless. That's the kind of mentality that really teaches other people that it's not just lip service, it's a way of life.
JBY: It’s a way of life, and we’ve absorbed it, and we are proud of it. We are proud of this tradition.
JH: When higher standards are part of how every musician prepares and performs with the CSO, there’s a certain kind of trust that develops between the players and the conductor. We get limited rehearsal time, so the conductor is going to have to trust that players will be prepared and will have addressed most of the difficulties the music presents ahead of time. I asked the CSO's new principal trumpeter, Esteban Batallán, to explain how this kind of trust works in the CSO.
EB: This is very simple. It’s very easy. We have our own identity, so we don’t need to specifically ask the conductor what he wants. He is going to trust that we know what we need to do. So when we are not on stage, we work for ourselves, as you know, because we do that every week to be more together to approach different objectives that we want to improve for our performance. Then we just follow the conductor, and we can feel what they want. But even most of the time we have our own identity. It's very easy to say this is the CSO brass. What you want, we can give you everything you want. [Laughs]
JH: Well, we certainly try.
JH: There are countless little details to get right before a concert, and it's up to the players to work alone or sometimes in small groups to get all that accomplished. That'll free up the conductor to focus on the big picture, and when the conductor takes the podium to guide the orchestra, it seems mysterious and sometimes magical almost. It’s a process that fascinates our violist Larry Neuman.
LN: I'm continually and forever fascinated by how we play together as musicians, how we listen, how someone like a conductor has an effect strictly visually of course because it's all about seeing the conductor, whether it’s peripheral or otherwise. But my belief is we're just listening as much as we can, hopefully not too much to ourselves too much at a time, if there's some of that, but I think the less of that the better, if you’re not one of the solo players, generally.
Then we rely on the inner sense of pulse, disregarding whatever the conductor is doing. Ideally, whatever musicians are playing together, they're in touch, they're using an inner sense of pulse that they're trained to use. It's second nature; we mostly don't think about it. We all have our flaws, and nobody has a perfect sense of pulse; we’re not metronomes, but I think that's a big part of what keeps us together. Most of the time, would you agree, John, we don't really need to have someone up there, showing us where the beats are the vast majority of the time.
JH: Well, a lot depends on the conductor, because some conductors are very precise, they demand we play with them whether we want to or not. Or we feel there's often a delay sometimes if a conductor is a little unclear, and the orchestra is kind of finding a consensus without being precisely reactive.
LN: They're setting, the conductor sets the pacing and the whole interpretation of the piece and a lot beyond that too in terms of the mood within the orchestra and how the rehearsal goes, etc. This is one of my favorite topics.
JG: I studied with a man named Robert Langevin, who's now principal flute in the New York Philharmonic. And Robert always said to me, if you get an orchestra job someday and you're lucky enough to play in an orchestra. … There’s a conductor that he mentioned to me, and he said if you ever see this name on the program, learn whatever piece it is 20 clicks faster on the metronome. Lo and behold, my first, I think it was my first season, this guy was going to be conducting us, and it was Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust, which is a notoriously difficult piccolo part. And I did practice 20 clicks faster than was printed, and he was exactly right. When we got to that spot, it was notoriously fast. So I had that imprint on my brain, and you know, know the conductor will always get more excited. And Maestro Muti is no different. You know, we play these concerts three to five times, repeating the repertoire, and each night will be a different tempo. We're all human, including the conductor, so the tempos might be slower one night or maybe he had an extra espresso and then goes faster.
JH: And I remember playing the Tchaikovsky Fourth Symphony some years ago, I think you were there, and the conductor went so fast in the last movement that the orchestra just ignored him.
JG: Yeah, I remember a very, very fast Tchaikovsky Fourth, and I'm actually drawing a blank on who that was, but what I love about the CSO is there's no, like, talking over the coffee at the break, like, hey, everybody, we're going to do this our way. The conductor probably doesn't even realize they're going that fast at this point. You know, they just hear us keeping up and then they think they can probably go faster because they get more and more excited about what's happening, and I feel like we know this is outrageous. I don't, I don't know where it comes from the front to the back or somewhere in between, but we all collectively come together and say whoa, dude, we are not going faster than this tempo right here, and we're going to do it together, and we always do.
PD: One moment like that does come to mind, though it wasn't a wrong tempo, it was a wrong beat pattern that happened for, you know, not just a few measures, but for almost the whole last page of a piece. Not a standard repertoire piece, a piece by, maybe it might have been Elliott Carter, or something like that, I don’t remember exactly who the composer was. But near the end of the piece, it required me to use our Mahler hammer, which is huge, if it doesn't look like a hammer, it looks like a prehistoric club. And I was wielding this thing, and anticipating a moment when I was supposed to essentially hit a wooden box with it, like in Mahler but it wasn’t Mahler. But all of a sudden, we went into 3/4 instead of staying in 4/4, and so I, along with everybody else, got completely lost, and I didn't have the wherewithal to just, like, play something somewhere. I was just sort of in shock, and so I didn't play anything, and I was near the edge of the stage, and I also didn't have the good sense to, like, leave the stage immediately for the intermission. And so I was standing there, and somebody from the audience came up to the edge of the stage and said very innocently, “What were you going to do with that?”
JH: [Laughs] Knowing that it ... it never happened.
PD: My colleagues and I still laugh about that.
JH: When in doubt, leave it out.
PD: Well, yeah, but when in doubt, do a pantomime at least.
JG: One thing I’ve always personally enjoyed is following the conductor. Of course I have musical ideas of my own, but I'm always staring at the conductor, trying to interpret every little head nod and elbow move.
JBY: There’s always kind of the joke we say to ourselves, “Don’t look up!” I've tried that on a few occasions, and a couple of conductors have called me out on that, namely our music director, Maestro Muti. He says, “You gotta to look at me — you gotta look at me.”
Well, it's sort of again a balance issue. Sometimes you do have to look up, but that's only when it's appropriate. Other times, you really have to open your ears and not look up, because that is appropriate also at other times. A conductor may say, you know, “You’ve got to look at me,” and you get certain cues from the conductor; but the conductor, I think, in the best sense, is really an over-all guide, and an over-all director.
Whereas, the intricate details come from what individual members of the orchestra hear and react to — from what comes to them. It's all about balance. You know, my motto has become “balance is the key to life,” and I think balance in every situation is really the key to success. So in this particular situation, we’re talking about balancing what we see with what we hear, and sometimes those two don't jibe perfectly, and I think our experience leads us to that.
Our knowledge we've gained from our predecessors, and from our colleagues, figures into how that plays itself out. This intricate balance happens every moment we are performing on stage, but that's why we love being in this orchestra, and doing what we do.
JS: There is something very special about this orchestra. There are few orchestras that just gather the greatest respect and praise and love from the world. Every time I have a week off, I go listen to the orchestra. I want to hear, I want to support them — of course my colleagues — but I want to hear what it sounds like to somebody else. And every time I go out there, it's a better orchestra than I even hear on stage.
It’s somehow the collection of the sound; the positivity of the energy; the presence of emotion; it’s just amazing. I've heard visiting orchestras that play ensembly unbelievably well, and beautifully in tune, and just nothing wrong. In fact, very, very good, but it doesn't grab you. It’s that thing that's just extra and special. And those are not just my words — that’s just what we hear the world telling us, and we're blessed and fortunate to be part of this.
JH: Thanks for listening to Intermission at the CSO. Thanks so much to the musicians from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra you heard today: John Yeh, Jennifer Gunn, Larry Neuman, Jim Smelser, Esteban Batallán and Patsy Dash. You'll be hearing more from them and others in the future.
I hope this time together has shown that the quality of the CSO doesn't just come from our conductors or our virtuosity, but from our team effort to align our talents to create a unified impact. When you attend one of our concerts, you both hear and see the power of our unity, the power of our commitment to work together.
We place a high value on what we can achieve together, and we know that performing as well as we can also means listening to each other — as well as we can. We hope that’s a message you’ll take with you, and we are all fervently hoping that we'll see you again soon at Symphony Center, after our intermission at the CSO!
For more information about this podcast, our guests and links to the music you heard, please visit cso.org/intermission. CSO.org is where you'll also find complete and up-to-date information about our fall programming on CSOtv, and all of our plans to continue to provide musical excellence, both before and after our regular concerts resume at Symphony Center.
While you're visiting cso.org, if you've enjoyed our podcast and would like to support the mission of the CSO, please consider a donation or sponsorship. Intermission at the CSO is produced by John Hagstrom and Scott Brewer for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association. And thank you for listening!
Next time on Intermission at the CSO, we’ll be talking to just one member of the orchestra, and that's Jim Smelser. He joined the orchestra 20 years ago, but he had been a regular substitute for 13 years before that. He will be sharing lots of what he's learned over many years with us, and he’s now also the chairman of the CSO Members Committee. You won't want to miss any of what he has to say, and as always, you’ll also hear great musical moments recorded by the entire orchestra. That’s next time, on Intermission at the CSO!