Editor's Abstract (Click to Hide)

Q: In what way was this concert different from all the other orchestral concerts you’ve conducted?

The overarching idea behind REWIND was to create a real “event” – a continuously unfolding evening in which smaller individual pieces are subsumed into a larger whole. We took to its extreme the idea of programmatic connections between the various pieces on a concert.

We did this in four different ways.

First, the program itself was full of pieces that, as a group, have exquisite relationships to one another. REWIND had a Schnittke concerto grosso and a Corelli concerto grosso, and included an homage to Mozart by Raskatov as well as a piece by Mozart himself. Essentially, the program started with music that consciously referenced composers and idioms from the past, and it went back through time, ending up with pieces from the past by composers who – directly or indirectly – inspired the works we just heard. REWIND covered a span of over five centuries of music.

Second (and this is where REWIND really starts to differ from other concerts), there were no breaks at all from the moment you walked into the hall until the concert was over. We commissioned acoustic and electronic music by three different composers – Judd Greenstein, Joel Morales, and Joshua Penman – to be the connective glue that brought all of these pieces together. They composed pieces that commented on the piece just played, prepared the audience for the next piece, and acted as guides to the entire evening. In this way, we ended up with one colossal and effective piece, lasting about an hour and a half, comprised of eleven smaller pieces combined together into a continuous whole.

Another concept that made the evening special was the use of innovative spatial positioning techniques – where the audience and orchestra were placed in unusual places throughout the hall.

And, finally, REWIND made full use of tasteful theatrical lighting to guide the audience from one group of players to another (click here for a photo of the concert), as well as from one emotional context to another, as the evening progressed (click here for another photo).

Q: What inspired you to try this?

I’ve gone to so many concerts throughout my life, ranging from the spectacularly effective to the downright perfunctory, and let’s just say that a preponderance of them left me feeling less than optimally involved in the experience. Either they weren’t performed with passion and dedication, or else there was too much dead time – where nothing was happening, and often the players looked (sometimes with good reason!) like they wished they could be anywhere else...

I wanted to create a concert where a classical novice and a classical snob could walk into the same hall, get swept away, and leave the concert feeling energized and excited about what they had just experienced.

Don’t get me wrong, by the way – I don’t view this concert as a replacement of some kind for The Classical Concert, as we’ve come to know it. I love conducting in the “normal” context too. This is simply an alternative and, as it turns out, a wildly successful one.

Let’s start with the venue. I first discovered the Angel Orensanz Center at a friend’s wedding. Nestled in Manhattan’s lower east side, it is the perfect venue for a genre-stretching experiment like this.

The soloists and the composers were the first to sign on – and there really weren’t any difficulties. Anne Akiko Meyers and Colin Jacobsen were the violin soloists, and they jumped right on board. The composers are all real risk-takers as well as good friends of mine, and it seemed like we had critical mass almost instantly after I made the first round of phone calls. The orchestra we used – the Knights – is one that Colin and his brother Eric founded and play in regularly, so that was a no-brainer.

I’m not going to say that it was easy to raise the money to do this – in fact, I had a lot of sleepless nights over how we were ever going to keep from losing our shirts! But in the end, we had a group of over twenty sponsors who signed on and helped bring REWIND to life. Plus, we sold out the entire house, including standing room.

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