WMV Music Web Log

I am really really pleased with Grace Jean's review of our Ratner Museum concert in the Washington Post (October 7, 2004). She allowed herself to be moved by the music, and reported what that was like in vivid and imaginative language. This kind of arts criticism affords new insights about the music to others, including me. I loved her description of the first movement of the Faure: "Their first movement flowed with such freedom that one couldn't help but imagine standing on a boat's bow, arms outstretched." Yes! I will always see this image when I open the Faure from now on. And her description of Copland's Piano Quartet as snow-covered fields, and children playing in rain - that was a particularly new and wonderful way to experience a work which is often regarded (wrongly) as a forbiddingly stiff exercise in serialism. And she said some very nice things about Gary Poster, who deserves every word of praise.

Altogether I feel good about this concert. It was an ambitious program, so much so that I feared that the strings would mutiny. Yes, it was everything that I wanted to play, and probably one piece too many. But what could I leave out? I didn't want to part with any of them. I wish sometimes that I played more often than once a month, so that I could program more repertoire, or that we performed a given program more than once. But we will work towards these goals.

May I blog about money for a moment? Most audience members have no idea that for us to produce a single ambitious concert like the October 5 program creates a deficit of more than $1000, even with a decent audience. And that does not include any fees for me, as performer, contractor, director, publicist, or gopher. A calculation of the actual cost of producing a typical concert gives a figure of just over $5000. We are thinking about this in preparation for our upcoming fundraising campaign, and amid dreams of my devoting full-time energies to WMV. Realistically, we need to grow the organization considerably just to continue at the present level.