There have been several principle musicians of the Boston Symphony over the years for whom I hold special affection.
There's their former Concert Master, the late, great violinist and conductor Joseph Silverstein, whose performance of the Schoenberg Concerto with the BSO is one of the finest concerto performances of any style I've ever heard*.
There is the great tympanist Vic Firth whose performances, for example, in the Michael Tilson Thomas's recording of Carl Ruggles Suntreader never fails to chill me to the bone as soon as the first note of the piece sounds. The one he recorded with the Buffalo Philharmonic is pretty good too but there's something about that earlier recording and Firth's playing that is singular in my experience.
But the former principle BSO trombonist Douglas Yeo has a special place in my heart for many reasons, first his playing of his instrument. Longtime readers may know I have a thing for the trombone as an instrument. I love the deep brass and it is the most musically flexible and often best played of them. Yeo also is an adept player of the serpent and other related instruments.
Though, if I had not gone the route in music that I did, the thing I'd have wanted to be more than anything else is a choral conductor, high on the list of other alternatives would have been to play trombone. I don't know if one of the reasons for that is because my closest music friends have happened to be trombonists or that I had an intense crush on a particularly nice one who happened to also be very handsome when I was a teenager. Alas, he was straight and were were just friends. Though that would probably have been for the best. I met someone else in an area of music entirely removed from what I did and had a long, faithful relationship with him.
But that's enough of me and my senior reminiscences. This comes because I clicked on a video that came up with the unlikely title, "Why Everyone Stopped Playing Lassus Trombone."
I won't go into why I clicked on it, something to do with curiosity about what a trombone had to do with Orlando di Lasso, aka "Orlande de Lassus".
But it had nothing to do with that 16th century composer, it was the name of a band piece featuring the trombone from the early 20th century and the grotesquely racist associations given to it by the man who composed it. It's a piece I'd heard and which was familiar to me but I didn't know what it was called, who wrote it (Henry Fillmore) or those racist associations it and a host of other trombone pieces witten by Fillmore had. It's a really insightful and interesting short video that goes into a lot of background and why Douglass Yeo called for not playing those pieces, part of the central repertoire of his instrument, due to those associations. It comes about from a piece that Yeo wrote that went viral (among Trombone players, I'm guessing). I have to say it did everything to make me respect and value the musical judgement of Mr. Yeo even more than I had. I also didn't know he wrote a blog which I will be reading all of when I get the chance.
From a quick glance, his pieces going into the history of "Gospel Trombone" look fascinating, I'll be looking for recordings from some of the figures he mentions in those. Mr. Yeo is also a rather fine researcher and historian of music.
* Like the person who commented on this excerpt which he performed previous to that, I've long wished that they would issue a recording of that BSO performance.
Note: I have not really been keeping up with the current crisis that the Boston Symphony is going through, a mix of idiots on their board acting like idiots, firing the conductor without any consultation of the orchestra's musicians, the shrinking of their audience, probably due to ticket prices and bad promotion as much as the stupidification of the American culture. Just as an aside, if I could get to Boston I'd be interested in hearing them but I couldn't afford those prices.
If that kind of symphonic institution is still viable is open to question, or maybe it's just that such an institution in a city like Boston which is incredibly expensive to live in - and musicians except at the top tend to be anything but affluent - I don't know.
I'd be very sad if the Boston Symphony went under but I don't doubt that music will continue on. Though such large ensembles may not be nearly as common as they once were.
They should stop filling their board with lawyers and corporate gangsters. If they aren't supporting the orchestra, they're going to gut it. They should watch Slings and Arrows to see where that kind of thing leads an arts institution.
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