Classical music diary: UW alumnus conductor-cellist Kenneth Woods on the road and in rehearsal — Part 3 of 3

By Jacob Stockinger

What is it like to be a busy professional musician who is in demand and has a lot of far-flung duties to perform and obligations to meet? It is a question that has always intrigued me – especially because I am an amateur pianist who once aspired to a professional performing career but just didn’t have the talent or nervous system.

Anyway, I got a good taste of what my life could have been like from a friend I have made through this blog and the University of Wisconsin School of Music: Conductor and cellist Kenneth Woods, who is based in Cardiff, Wales. and has his own great blog (“A View From the Podium”).

He offered me this profile of several weeks of his life last spring and summer. And it’s not all glamour and fun.

I should have posted it sooner. But things happened – or didn’t. Anyway, it seems like particularly good reading right now as I lie here tending to a killer cold or flu and look at the minus 10 winter weather outside.

I hope you agree and enjoy the three-part series. Then maybe you will let me know it you would like to read more first-person accounts from the eye of the classical music storm.

Take it away with the third and final installment, Maestro Ken!

By Kenneth Woods

June 21 – Hereford Symphony Orchestra (below). HSO rehearse on Monday’s and I had to dep out rehearsals on the 31^st and 14^th for Orchestra of the Swan and Cambridge. This is our last working rehearsal before our final concert together on Saturday.

Lovely French program – Berlioz Corsaire Overture (keeps everyone’s fingers moving!), Saint-Saens 3^rd Violin Concerto and the Franck D minor Symphony. Saint-Saens was no Mahler or Debussy, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do his music. There are some really nice colleagues in the orchestra — I’ll miss them, but I’m no longer able to do concerts with these long weekly rehearsal runs.

June 22 – First of two more trips up to Stratford. Festivals to plan, a contract to negotiate.

June 23 – A busy day at home. We’ve got to organize the family, who are coming with me to America for a month on Sunday. Also, my conducting workshop in Portland is coming up soon. We’ve got to make final housing arrangements for the students, make sure the orchestra and music are ready to go and that all the faculty have their travel and accommodation sorted.  Rose City International Conductor’s Workshop (http://www.rosecityworkshop.org), which I’ve directed since 2005, is the only project I do where I take on administrative responsibilities beyond what a conductor normally does, but its’ always worth it.

June 26 – HSO. My final concert with them. We’re playing in Leominster Priory, a stunning and vast building of cathedral proportions in a beautiful corner of Herefordshire. Lighting during the day is a problem- sunlight streams in through the front window and tends to blind the players.

There is one unfortunate moment when one player in the wind-brass neighborhood who had brought rehearsal to a standstill on Monday has still not learned two mildly tricky bars in the finale. I stop to work on it and she flatly refuses to play. Not what I wanted on my last day here! I’ve never actually had this happen to me and am left kind of speechless, but I’m  probably clearly unhappy. I don’t want her ruining the day for the people sat around her, so I have friendly word to clear up the “miscommunication” and improve the atmosphere at the break and she’s as friendly and reasonable as she was rude and crazy in the rehearsal. Another of life’s mysteries.

Concert comes and goes (I LOVE the Franck) and I say many goodbyes. Then it’s back to Cardiff with a lovely bottle of Scotch from the orchestra.

June 27 – TRAVEL. I got back from HSO just before midnight. At 3 a.m. we have to leave for Heathrow  and fly to America for a month. I’m not packed! Also, Suzanne came down with a violent stomach bug Friday night, so she’s not packed either, which means the kids aren’t packed. So, 12-1 is packing time, 1-2:15 sleeping, then pile the kids in the car. About 30 minutes from home we realize we’ve forgotten our son’s most precious comfort toy. If we go back, we’ll miss the flight, but will he cope for a month without it? Will he cope for an hour? Bad news at Heathrow- they’ve changed visa procedures for Sue and the kids. I have to get on the laptop and apply online. Minutes tick away as I contemplate missing the flight and the first day of UW Music Clinic in Madison, Wisconsin.

Finally, we’ve got the codes and we’re off! Kids good as gold on the flight. Change in Detroit starts well — quickly through customs and all is on time. Just a short hop to Madison. We nip in to a Mexican joint for some lunch, but then it rains for 10 whole minutes.

By the time we’ve got our chips, our flight and all flights for the next two hours are cancelled and there are lines of hundreds of people around the block at every ironically named “help desk.”

After some pointed discussions with Delta staff about locking babies in airports overnight, they get us off to Green Bay on the last flight, where my parents come to meet us. Of course, we have no luggage, and are completely out of baby supplies. Not the most fun end to a transcontinental journey, but the kids have been heroic.

June 28 – UW Madison Summer Music Clinic. (See Mills Hall below.) I’ve washed out the shirt I flew in and am ready to go. Teaching cello class, orchestra, string master class and a listening class. Cello class is an interesting mix of those who want to learn and those that don’t.

So much of one’s teaching energies these days are spent getting a student ready to learn rather than teaching them. Teaching in groups makes the dynamic infinitely more complex. Orchestra is HUGE, and so young. Quite a change from Hereford – their longtime concertmaster once called the HSO the Hereford Geriatric Orchestra.

I decide to start with the grand and majestic Prelude to Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger.” We tune and I give a big upbeat and nothing really happens — they’ve got the music to the Prelude to Act III, which starts with very soft cellos, instead of the Prelude to the whole opera, which starts with the whole band playing nearly full out. Yikes!

So — we dispatch the library team to find the right Wagner and read our excerpts from Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet.” It’s a great, great string section this year — lots of very gifted and passionate players. “Montagues and Capulets” already sounds very good.

Performance Critique (the string masterclass) gets off to a good start, and after my listening class, I have time to buy some underwear, baby food and a toothbrush on my way home.

After rehearsal, it occurs to me, that at this point, in the last four weeks since May 31^st, I’ve conducted 7 different orchestras in 7 cities on two continents in 7 completely different programs, done a challenging world premiere, played a concerto, conducted one of the most high-pressure gigs of my own life and managed to transport two very little children to America.

Of the 7 orchestras, two (the Clinic orchestra and the Cambridge band) had never played together before. In spite of the vast differences in experience and skill, there were some definite similarities.

There were new beginnings for me — my first concert as a member of the team at Orchestra of the Swan (below) — and endings, as I said goodbye to Hereford. Likewise, I finally got to conduct in Oxford for the first time 6 years after I met them, just days before I completed my Schumann cycle with the SMP, an orchestra with nearly identical demographics to the Ox Sinf. Earliest work performed was Telemann, the latest Joanna Lee’s premiere (which was Classical Music Mag’s Premiere of the Month!).

A good month’s work, to be sure. Of course, as I said, I can’t really afford to think in months. The story must continue: Sue, the kids and I are still without luggage. There’s a concert to prepare with the Clinic Orchestra and a whole lot of teaching work to be done, and then there’s my conducting workshop next week (always the busiest week of the year for me) to get through before vacation.

So, the run continues, but perhaps this blog post ends! For the rest …  it’s

To be continued …

And here is Woods conducting the UW Symphony Orchestra (NOT the summer clinic group) in Elgar’s Symphony No. 1 in the UW-Madison’s Mills Hall.

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Posted in Classical music