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In Reply to: RE: Orchestral Players -- 2 Questions posted by goldenthal on April 19, 2015 at 17:06:31
Hi Goldenthal - the number of rehearsals in a professional orchestra will vary quite a bit, depending on what kind of program it is. For most pops shows, most big orchestras will have only one rehearsal 90% of the time. Two at most, if it is particularly difficult.
For a normal classical subscription series concert, most major orchestras will have four or perhaps five rehearsals, earlier in the same week as the performances. The soloist on such programs are usually only there for one rehearsal in addition to the dress (which is normally on the morning of the first performance), and generally those two rehearsals would be the only times the concerto would be rehearsed, unless it was a particularly difficult accompaniment. The rest of the rehearsal time would be spent on the rest of the program. Different music directors/guest conductors will apportion their rehearsal time VERY differently. Some of them are much better with time management than others....generally the average rehearsal length of one rehearsal in a major orchestra is two and a half hours, including a fifteen minute break somewhere around the middle of the time period.
For a runout concert, or free neighborhood concert, where an orchestra performs say in a local church, there would probably be only one rehearsal.
Many major orchestras have a few different children's concert programs that they rotate per season, which are each rehearsed once at the beginning of the season, maybe over two rehearsals, and then performed many times throughout the season.
Operas usually have a couple of orchestra only reading rehearsals, followed by a couple of reading rehearsals with the singers, followed by a couple of full dress rehearsals.
Ballets usually have again two orchestra only rehearsals, and then probably just one dress with the dancers.
So it depends on what type of program is being performed, and to some extent also on how difficult the program is. As someone else said, there are slight differences between not only different countries, but different orchestras within that country. No two will be exactly the same, but the above amounts would be average here in the US.
Follow Ups:
Many thanks, learsfool (though perhaps I may call you Hutt after William Hutt, the best Lear's fool I ever saw live).
The reason for my question is that I sometimes listen to streams from the Concertgebouwe, and this past week I heard several commonly played works, various conductors, with sloppy mistakes. Not just wrong notes, but also musicians out of synch. I was surprised at that even though I know that these performances are recorded (though not, from my source, broadcast) live and thus always susceptible. I have also heard soloists make mistakes, but rarely a great orchestra with works it has played many times. What I heard sounded like insufficient rehearsal.
On the other hand, I am generally aware that rehearsal time has decreased during my starting-to-be many decades. Also, though I heard all the performances during the last week or 10 days, they certainly did not all occur during that time. Still, given an orchestra of such quality, I was surprised.
Jeremy
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.
Yes, learsfool, I fully understand and agree with your paras 1, 2, and 4 (except that re para 4, I had not considered that cutting and pasting movements would be simple and thus frequently resorted to). I agree with para 3 too, except the result -- as mentioned elsewhere, perhaps a coincidence of the concert performances the Concertgebouwe selected for streaming during the past 2 weeks -- was such as to suggest sloppy conductors (there were at least 3 different conductors -- Haitink, Janssons, and Fischer) or a poorly prepared orchestra; hence my question about rehearsal time.
By the way, I did not intend my enquiry to be an attack; merely, I was surprised. Though I am used to soloists making errors, I guess I have learned to expect less of that, over the decades, from polished orchestras led by polished conductors playing well or even over-polished pieces.
Many thanks for your help.
Jeremy
I remember when I posted similar information here about five or so years ago, there was quite a bit of disbelief expressed on this board. As Jon Nakamatsu mentioned to me at about that same time though, if you can't play the piece, then no amount of editing is going to convince listeners that you can! ;-)
BTW, great post, Lf!
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