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Music Lane It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes. |
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Music Lane It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes. |
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In Reply to: RE: Orchestral Players -- 2 Questions posted by goldenthal on April 21, 2015 at 21:16:52:
Hi goldenthal - one very important thing to remember is that all musicians are human. No matter how good anyone is, they WILL make mistakes. There is almost never any such thing as a perfect performance. It would be extremely unusual if you heard a live stream that was "perfect." This is what recordings, especially with modern digital editing, have done - created very unrealistic expectations for live performances. The average classical recording nowadays has a minimum of 1,000 edits!
Familiarity with the works of course helps, and yes, we practice the standard repertoire at home all of the time. But this does not mean we will not make mistakes. Some people don't like such analogies, but there really are quite a lot of very valid analogies between musicians and athletes. The work schedules are very similar, for one. And no athlete, no matter how great, is ever perfect any more than a musician is. And we use much weaker muscle groups that have to last us for much longer careers. Just about all musicians at some point in their careers suffer significant over-use related injuries, some of which can be career ending, or have significant long term effects. A professional orchestral musician's schedule is very grueling physically and mentally. The human body is not really designed to do what we do for the extended periods of time that we do them. It is quite rare that any orchestral musician, or soloist, for that matter, gets through a piece with 100% accuracy, and no one does it all the time.
As to specific mistakes, another thing to keep in mind if you hear poor ensemble - this is almost certainly at least part, if not wholly, the conductor's fault. Perhaps their rehearsal time was apportioned poorly. Perhaps they do not know the score as well as they should. Perhaps they made a mistake - and they do make them frequently. They are human as well, and often their beat patterns are very unclear. Certainly just about everyone in the audience, even the professional reviewers, give the conductor's far too much credit for the great performances, and nowhere near enough for the mishaps. You would be surprised just how easily a conductor can really screw up an orchestra. That said, every orchestra, even the greatest, have their bad days, too.
When you listen to the radio/internet broadcasts, by the way, unless they are very specifically saying that it is being streamed live in real time, what you are actually listening to is almost always a compilation of the best of the three or four performances from that weekend (for instance, your favorite orchestra's regular radio broadcast). I am on the committee in my orchestra that helps decide which parts of which performances are put together for the radio broadcasts. There is no editing done to them, but the selections are chosen from all of the performances, so you might be hearing two movements of a symphony from Saturday, and two from Sunday, etc. It is still all from live performances, but the best ones from that weekend are chosen, and rarely is it all from exactly the same performance. So again, even here, you are not hearing some of the mistakes that actually did happen that weekend.
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Follow Ups
- RE: Orchestral Players -- 2 Questions - learsfool 23:27:27 04/22/15 (2)
- RE: Orchestral Players -- 2 Questions - goldenthal 12:18:39 04/23/15 (0)
- "The average classical recording nowadays has a minimum of 1,000 edits!" - Chris from Lafayette 09:26:05 04/23/15 (0)
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