Bruckner Blog

Last Saturday Katie and I got to take a trip out of New York by virtue of my association with the Mannes Orchestra. You see, I am playing as a "ringer," someone brought in from the outside, for this concert--Mannes has 6 horn students this semester, but the Bruckner symphony they are playing requires 8. The concert is this Thursday at Carnegie Hall, but for a quasi-dress rehearsal, they performed Saturday up at Bard College, a rural campus about 2.5 hours north of New York City.

I was asked to drive the equipment van since I am not a student and therefore not subject to the same sorts of legal liabilities. I said I would if I could bring a navigator, and that's how Katie got involved. She was also deputized to take pictures for the school and given the school's digital camera. The "van" ended up being a 25-foot-long truck (shown above)! Navigating the narrow lanes on the NYC streets was quite an adventure. But after getting out of the city into the less trafficked regions of the Hudson Valley, we were able to enjoy the autumnal beauty of the multi-hued fall foliage. Bard has a beautiful campus, and a brand new concert hall designed by Frank Gehry, all glass and polished steel curvilinear surfaces.

We had a two-hour dress rehearsal and then were given a complimentary dinner at the Bard cafeteria, which had remarkably good food! The concert went well, although it seemed that there were few Bard students in the crowd, so maybe they could have done a better job advertising. The piece was Bruckner's unfinished Ninth Symphony (he died while composing the last movement), a massive, slowly-unfolding late-Romantic work (1896) whose 3 completed movements still clock in at about 60 minutes. It has great brass parts and is a lot of fun to play.

Next post will probably be Thanksgiving when my parents come to visit! We posted some more pictures of the Bard trip on our flickr account (click the "pictures" link at the right or click here).