Lake Union Civic Orchestra concert - Saturday, October 13th

It's orchestra season again, friends, and I'm excited to tell you about a concert that I'm playing in one week.

It's with my usual crew, the Lake Union Civic Orchestra. It's going to be a LUCO season full of our old favorites, because this is both the 20th and last season for our conductor, Christophe Chagnard. He feels that 20 years is simply a long enough time to spend on one project, and I can't really disagree - the old adage goes 'always leave them wanting more', and we'd love it if he stayed- but we're also excited about the road ahead.

Next Saturday's concert is as follows. Buckle in, because I have a lot of feelings about this program (or scroll all the way to the bottom for concert details):

• Wagner: Die Walküre
  • Ride of the Valkyries
  • Wotan's Farewell & Magic Fire Music - Clayton Brainerd, baritone

The first half of this concert is made up of a couple of pieces from the Wagner opera Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), which is itself part of a four-opera epic cycle that he wrote. These operas are where we get our idea of operas being like this:

They are also all four hours long. So you can come and experience just a little Wagner, without a half-day time commitment or any horned helmets, but with the amazing Clayton Brainerd. If you saw Aida at the Seattle Opera recently, you saw Clayton. We're lucky enough to have him perform with us because he is a long-time friend of Christophe's, and he wanted to open Christophe's last season with us in style - by singing Wotan's scene at the very end of the opera, where he says goodbye to his daughter Brunnhilde (that lady with the horned hat up there).

Do I need to tell you anything about Ride of the Valykyries? You can all sing it right now. Dum ba-da dum dummm, dum ba-da dum dummm, dum ba-da DAAAA daa dum ba-da DUMMM! Bonus points if you didn't immediately think of Apocalypse Now.

It'll be great for you, especially for those of you who are Wagner fans - and to you specifically, I'm afraid I have some disappointing news, which is that I hate playing Wagner. Wagner consistently wrote violin parts like he had a personal hatred for violinists. They're intricate, complicated, difficult, and the musical equivalent of wallpaper. Also, I can't get over the fact that he was the 1850s' equivalent of today's anti-Semitic, racist shitlord losers. They take up enough space in the news and therefore in my head as it is; I don't want to invite more of them in with music that I make for fun.

Wotan, in this song, is saying goodbye to his daughter because he is punishing her by putting her to sleep inside a magic ring of fire. He is doing this to her because she disobeyed his orders, orders that he didn't actually want carried out. She is a Valkyrie, a righteous warrior, but he feels he has to punish her for doing what everyone agrees was the right thing, and so he'll put her to sleep and never see her again. It's senseless and infuriating. The patriarchy hurts everyone, friends. Was that the message Wagner intended? Given his essays, I doubt it- but that's the one I'm hearing.

Ultimately, Wagner is dead and his music belongs to all of us now, the performers and the audience, and we can make of it whatever we like. The song is beautiful, and moving, and Clayton sings it beautifully, as a heartbroken god would.

• Mahler: Symphony No. 1

Wagner and Mahler are often programmed together, which is interesting to me because I find them so dissimilar. Mahler was certainly influenced by Wagner, and even became the authority on how to perform Wagner, because Mahler was much more famous as a conductor than a composer while he was alive.

I love playing Mahler, first and foremost because he wrote some of the most beautiful, tender music there is, and a lot of the time, he gave it to the violins to play, like a gift just for us. I love the fact that he was a masterful orchestrator, and he knew exactly what colors and tones he wanted, and exactly how he wanted the musicians to achieve them. There are whole sentences of instructions in our parts about tempos, rhythms, and what exactly to do. (I would love these instructions more if my German were better.) Mahler was willing to take all kinds of chances in order to get the effect he had in mind. He put players offstage, invented percussion instruments, wrote more than one symphony with a mandolin part, and frequently called for brass sections twice the size of ones that you might normally have. I admire that kind of creativity.

This concert is at the First Free Methodist Church in Queen Anne (near Fremont), at 7:30pm, on Saturday, October 13th. I recommend hanging out at Rooftop Brewing beforehand if the weather's nice.

As always, thanks for reading and listening, and I'd love to see you there- and be sure to say hi if you come! You can get tickets in advance if you like, or at the door.