There are quite a few upsides to doing an internship with an orchestra, but what I liked best was having the opportunity to attend rehearsals. Not only are there no other audience members to bother you, but you also get a feel for how much work goes into a production. You get to see the zillions of people who are necessary to run Operation Concert. You get to see how many factors need to play together to make a concert possible and most importantly, you get to see the minor details that can make the artists’ lives hell. The culprit in the case of the Springtime in Vienna concert: the light.
The battle humans vs. light started when someone switched on the stage lights and the orchestra reacted like a group of vampires exposed to sunlight. Heads were averted, hands and arms thrust up to shield eyes, bodies contorted to get away from the light. Given the complexion of the musicians it really seems likely that they had not been exposed to light in a long time and I began to think that the lights, which were strong enough to guide a plane down on a foggy November day, might really hurt them. The more daring (or tanned) musicians in the group bravely blinked at the lights like British tourists first getting off a plane in Spain and braving the Majorcan sun. But all of them agreed. They could not see. There was no playing in these conditions. There was, however, one dissident voice. One of the percussionists felt it was too dark. He could not see. There was no playing for him either.
The conductor decided that there was not conducting in these circumstances and they were going to sit it out until someone fixed the situation. So, in came a score of people to tame the light, which according to some little guy from Austrian Television would take a couple of minutes. What followed looked like an intricate game the rules of which nobody really knew. At regular intervals, musicians would pop out from the group and, bow in hand, point at some light they found particularly disturbing and you really had to sit in this spot to see how bad it was. Thereupon, one of the group of light fixers would talk importantly into a walkie talkie, then receive a reply that the issue was solved and the musician would announce that nothing had changed. Next, the door would open and another light fixer with a walkie talkie would join the group. This went on for so long that by the end, there were no fewer than eight different people running around trying to fix the lights and I was having so much fun watching them that I briefly entertained the idea of grabbing a walkie talkie and joining them. However, after 20 minutes I became a bit restless and began to wonder if the musicians overdid it. Then, someone switched on the lights above my seat and I went blind for a second. I had to agree. There really was no playing in this situation.
Finally, little guy from Austrian television threw up his hands in despair (apparently, he had lost the game), the conductor (who had been busily pointing at lights with his baton) decided the light would have to do and the rehearsal continued. And as if the light had tired of the game as well, it all of a sudden did what it had to do. And pretty it was on top of that. Ranging from a glaring white that brought to mind Jesus’ Resurrection (quite fitting for Easter), to a cosy red that got the musicians so relaxed that I could swear some of them actually moved while playing to a very surprising blue which made the conductor exclaim, ‘Ah! Blau!’, the light really set the mood for an evening of Bernstein and Gershwin. There were only two minor hiccups after that. The first came when the light came in too early at the beginning of Bernstein’s Symphonic dances (conductor to little guy, ‘It’s four bars, not two!’) and the second when I felt that there was not nearly enough light during the Mambo. But then maybe all the light in the world would not have been enough to do justice to the Symphonic Dances. Upon second thought, a disco ball would have done the job or some pyrotechnics.
Needless to say, the concert was fabulous! I loved the fact that Berstein and Gershwin once again reminded me of the fact that there is still more to America than a certain badly kempt individual in the Oval Office. I loved the fact that Jean-Yves Thibaudet brought a tumbler on stage and took sips out of it in between movements. And I loved that fact that I was not the only one to assume the flowers on stage were fake until a took a good long look at them. Best of all, I loved the fact that I had just witnessed something that only very few privileged individuals ever get the chance to see. And I had learned something important. In the words of the conductor, I had learned ‘What a difference light can make!’
