Musings from "IU"...

Sorry, everyone, for my long silence here. It has been a very busy time for the last 18 months, culminating in the very major 20th anniversary celebration season of the Bellingham Festival of Music. We celebrated in grand style, indeed, with the west coast premiere of a new work for cello and orchestra, Dreamsongs, by Aaron Jay Kernis. This wonderful work, co-commissioned in honor of the Festival's 20th by Anacrusis Productions, was written for our favorite and magnificent young cellist, Joshua Roman, who gave a stunning performance with yours truly and the Bellingham Festival Orchestra, to open our season. It was wonderful working on this project with Aaron and Joshua, who, along with Dreamsongs, were warmly received by our audience and orchestra. It was a great pleasure, too, to collaborate again with some of our Festival favorite guest artists, Garrick Ohlsson, Pepe Romero, and our wonderful three sopranos in excerpts from Rosenkavalier: Frederica Von Stade, Heidi Grant Murphy and Katie Van Kooten. We also had the pleasure of introducing the young violinist, Ray Chen. With all of them, we traversed a magnificent and varied artistic landscape celebrating our wonderful virtuoso orchestra, playing repertoire from Haydn and Beethoven and Brahms, right up through Kernis. It was stunning to hear at our 20th anniversary party that in our twenty years of 5 orchestral concerts per season, we have performed in the neighborhood of 640 works. 

After a brief pause and the beginning of the new fall-winter-spring season, I now find myself in the midst of a very special and wonderful experience, returning as guest conductor to my alma mater, Indiana University, where I'm preparing the University Orchestra for it's first concert of the season. I'm not sure I can adequately describe to you the joys of, after 46 years, being back on this campus, at this great school of music and among so many valued colleagues with whom I've had the joy of working over the years, making music with these bright and shining talented young musicians, so in love with life AND SO IN LOVE WITH AND INSPIRED BY MUSIC. They are an inspiration and they are the future of our art. We needn't fear. The reason we don't know how they will make it, is that we are not them. They will make it. We are here to help, guide and to support in the formative stages. After that, in the final analysis, the credit will all be theirs. They are the new wave and I do mean wave - maybe, tidal wave!  You should hear this Brahms #1 after only three rehearsals. Actually, those of you within striking distance of Bloomington, Indiana, have the chance to experience what I'm talking about on Sunday, September 29 at 3pm, on campus at the Musical Arts Center (affectionately known as the MAC). I hope you can be there to hear Wagner's Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde and the Brahms Symphony #1 performed by these magnificent young artists.

Now, I have to confess that after a wonderful dinner with Andre Watts and his wife, Joan, night before last at a, to me, new and wonderful restaurant in Bloomington named Tallent, last night (being Friday) I absolutely had to relive old times and indulged myself, once again, in my old student life Friday night ritual at Nick's for beer and pizza. It looked just the same (!) and I could almost see my old roommate, Jerry, sitting across the booth from me. What a trip this is!  Will catch up again soon.

2013 Bellingham Festival of Music Updates

Greetings one and all.  A long overdue musing as I'm taking a brief, but much needed break from all of this glorious music making that surrounds me here in Bellingham.  We are right in the middle of our 20th Anniversary season of the Bellingham Festival of Music - "A Season of Celebrations" - and what a celebration it has been thus far!  Sold out concerts, working with long time friends and great artists - what more can I ask for!  I've been blessed to be able to spend my summers for the past 20 years, truly focusing on achieving the pinnacle of artist achievement performing all of these great classical masterworks with some of this generation's  greatest musicians.  This is truly one of the great virtuoso orchestras that I've gathered together and I can't even begin to describe the energy and camaraderie that surrounds me.

For those who are following me on Facebook or my website, I do hope you'll find a way to experience this amazing festival one day - in person or online.  We are making efforts to expand our reach and always looking to attract wider audiences - as it's been one of my passions to help preserve the essence of this great art form and to ensure that classical music remains accessible and enjoyed for many more generations!

I'll do my best to check in before this year's festival ends, but in the meantime, please follow me on Facebook for more regular updates:  https://www.facebook.com/michael.palmer.conductor

Until next time....thanks for checking in.

MP

Martini & Oyster Musings - from the "Big Apple"!

Greetings to all and welcome to my very first attempt at this new found way of communicating - "blogging"!  Well, it's new to me at least.  In fact, I must confess that, having steeped my life in an art form that communicates, lives and breaths above and beyond words ("Words, words, words") the idea to start my own blog never occurred to me (and seems even, somehow,strangely distasteful). However, here I am, resulting from a delightful evening I had over martinis and oysters last night with dear friends of my personal manager who is based in New York.  In the midst of conversations ranging from classical music to corporate America and the symbolisms of the Mahler symphonies to the social commentary aspects of the movie Babette's Feast, I was engaged in a thought provoking line of discussion - how to engage a wider audience with whom to share thoughts and musings about my experiences, realizations and perspectives formed across 43 years as a music director and conductor of professional symphony orchestras.  My hope is to share my thoughts through this blog, partly as a way to encourage the next generation of performers and audiences to maintain and, in some cases, rekindle the fires of lives lived in the presence of a glorious art - lives informed by and shaped by the art itself - in other words, "getting back to the nubbin", as they say, and making our way through all of the surrounding and, at times, diverting, persiflage and hyperbole to take charge of nurturing our own relationship with the art, itself.

So, here's a beginning. Think of your favorite restaurant - it's ambiance and your favorite offering on that restaurant's menu. How many times have you been to the restaurant and ordered that meal? Is it ever exactly the same experience in every way? Can it be captured? Perhaps taking a photo of the meal would accomplish that? Yes, maybe we could take a photo of the meal and then make copies of that photo and when we wanted to relive that experience we could just eat the photo. How about that? This way we wouldn't need to go to the trouble of leaving home after a long and tiring day at work to go to the restaurant and have our favorite meal. We could just pull out one of our photocopies of the meal and eat that. Another advantage is that this way we can make that one, wonderful dining experience we had at the restaurant immortal, instead of its reminding us, somewhere within the deep recesses of our awareness, that we just had a once in a lifetime experience - which, could, perhaps lead us to the thought that perhaps life, itself, is a once in a lifetime experience and, therefore, precious in each of its delectable and even not so delectable moments. Oh dear - not sure we want to think about that. Hmmmmmmm...........

Let's go a step further. I'm about to begin a restudy (when I finish here in a moment) of Mahler's First Symphony for the umpteenth time. Where does this work of musical art exist? Are the black dots and expression marks and various jottings left to us by Mahler and accumulating to 171 pages of full score the music? Where and (importantly) when does this work of musical art exist?

Enough for today for us both. On to Mahler, who has something pressing to communicate.