Musikfreunde: Russian Romantics without a hint of snow

Another semester of orchestral music has drawn to a close with Saturday night's concert of the Musikfreunde Heidelberg Symphony Orchestra in the Stadthalle. The hall was packed, we played with passion and precision (though not always both at the same time), and the audience was by all accounts happy.

It was an unexpectedly relaxed end to an otherwise hectic term - for me, at least. It was presumably much less relaxing for our principal conductor, who was ill over the last few weeks leading up to the main concert and is still reuperating. He had to limit himself to the concerts (in Gernsbach and Leutershausen as well as the Stadhalle itself), so a couple of final rehearsals were cancelled. With those "pre-concerts" being two weeks before the main one, the final weeks were much less packed than usual. Given that the final result was so good,  perhaps the timing was just right to "depressurise" things, keeping us keen and fresh rather than jaded and exhausted.

The pressure built up before term had even started. We had struggled to find trombonists to fill one position, and the term had started badly with various of us not being able to attend rehearsals regularly. I, for example, had taken all the music home with me one week, but didn't attend the following week's rehearsal, when other players turned up. It was all a bit frustrating, especially when our conductor sent a few ratty emails to us, and to me in particular as de facto lead trombonist.

I had skipped last summer's concerts to move house, which turned out to be a welcome break from the hustle and bustle in the build up to the main concerts. With the rather stressful start to this term, I did wonder why I was putting myself through all this.

As term went on and the programme began taking shape, we uncovered some difficulties with integrating the new trombonist, a young student who tended to get overexcited and to pull us out of shape, both in terms of rhythm and tuning. We had to have a few chats - in one sense to remind him that it was he who needed to adapt to us rather than the other way around. I hadn't expected to have to use some middle-management techniques in an orchestral situation, and I was a little nervous prior to asking him aside for a portion of contructive criticism - but he took the event calmly and seemed to understand that he needed to develop. He still has a lot to learn in terms of breathing and body control: sitting next to a someone trying both to play and to nod to the beat was rather distracting, especially as the length of the trombone tends to amplify movement - but all of that can come with time.

The music itself was a very appealing mix of humour, drama, pathos and grandeur. As a result of some difficulties in ordering music from Russia (we had planned to play Khatchaturian's Triumphal Poem, but the publisher failed to collect a full orchestra's worth of notes, it had been so seldom played), we resorted to one piece that I had played with the Musikfreunde a few years previously, Rachmaninov's Isle of the Dead, which I have grown to love as a piece. Its depth and the sheer skill in its composition completely knocked any anti-romantic snobbery in me.

I had never come across Glasunov before, and his 2nd Symphony was an enjoyable blast. It felt almost simple at first, but that simplicity hid a playful inventiveness that made this work much more than (for me) an unknown oddity played more for its rarity than any intrinsic value - no, it paid its way musically, too!

So, this term was one to remember as a learning as well as a musical experience. The weather was rather less memorable - Russian Romantics in the rain.

The weather in Heidelberg around concert time