Editor’s Note: This is the second in a multi-part series honoring Seattle Symphony Music Director Gerard Schwarz’s final season.
Seattle Symphony has already released its schedule of concerts for next season, starting in September of 2011, when its new music director, Ludovic Morlot, takes over. But right now, at the midway point in this season celebrating Schwarz’s 26-year legacy as music director, the soon-to-be Conductor Laureate is excited about “one of the most important things, if not the most important thing I’ve ever done”: an educational TV project, to be aired on PBS.
The series is being called “All-Star Orchestra.” Schwarz is music director and conductor of an inaugural season of eight one-hour-long shows designed “to talk about and then perform the greatest music.
“There has been an enormous outpouring of excitement” about the project, Schwarz says, “and there are still loose ends” at this midwinter point. “If all fundraising is complete, the first year will be recorded at the end of August 2011.”
Is Gerard Schwarz doing a Leonard Bernstein? Not quite, insists the conductor who once played principal trumpet in Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic.
“What Leonard Bernstein did — fabulously, with his Young People’s Concerts — was, pick a subject. I’ll do that. Talk about it. I’ll do that, but more! And it’s not just me. It’ll be historians, could be another performer, could be a musicologist, a biographer of a composer, whoever has something to offer. And then we’re going to play the piece. Complete.”
The “All-Star Orchestra” will be made up of musicians from all over the country.
“The greatest of the great will come together for a week in New York, and record these eight shows — television shows, not concerts,” Schwarz says.
There will be no studio audience; the audience addressed is the one watching the screen.
Who’s this “greatest of the great”? Is their concertmaster Yitzchak Perlman?
“No,” smiles Schwarz, emphasizing that this is not a group of famous soloists. “They’re orchestral musicians. So in the first violin section there’ll probably be 12 or 14 concertmasters. And they’ll rotate,” meaning the solo honors will be shared.
“The same with all the sections,” he adds. “In the winds, we pick individuals who will create their favorite section. It’ll be people from here, Seattle, obviously, as well as from the New York Philharmonic and the [Metropolitan Opera Orchestra], and Cleveland and Chicago and Boston, and so forth.”
All the players are to come from American orchestras. The project, Schwarz says, is “to create a musical library,” producing as many eight-show seasons as possible over an undetermined number of years. That library will consist not only of the one-hour shows, Schwarz adds, but “the intention is to have a DVD for each show plus an extended educational component to be released in conjunction with the airing of each show.”
Of course, an interactive Web site is part of the plan.
Schwarz and his team are particularly excited about the bonus material they plan to release after each show airs:
“So we do the Beethoven 5th, let’s say, and you can click on Beethoven’s life, you can click on what was life like in Vienna in the early 19th century; click on interviews with the players; you can click on rehearsal shots,” he says.
And then there’s to be the thrill of moving in close to the music-making itself: “You can be your own cameraman or woman: you can pick the cameras you want to look at, so if you’re an oboe player and you want to look at the oboe player, you punch the oboe camera, and we have nine cameras that you can actually choose.”
One of the tracks will be Schwarz himself, voicing his thoughts while he’s conducting. “Can you imagine what that’s going to be like?” Schwarz laughs.
Ultimately, it’s the current state of school music education, or lack thereof, that inspires this project.
“We’re going to have a teacher’s guide—it’s not so much for school systems that have big music programs—there aren’t many left of those,” he laments.
Rather, he points out, “There are so many communities that don’t even have symphony orchestras. So a teacher of mathematics who’s interested could, with the teacher’s guide and the material, learn enough to teach the kids. The teacher’s guides will be specific, so if it’s primary school, this one, secondary school, that one.”
Recording will take place probably in the Juilliard complex at Lincoln Center.
A series sounds like it could be expensive, but according to Schwarz, it’s “not as expensive as you might think. A budget of maybe $2.5 million for eight one-hour TV shows. Usually you spend that much on eight commercials of 30 seconds each!”
There’s quite a team involved in this project, some in New York and some in Seattle. Schwarz, as music director, works with “a whole group that weigh in on the programming, and two personnel managers in New York to line up the musicians,” he says. “It’s just huge.”
So, no resting on laurels for the future Conductor Laureate of Seattle Symphony. While he’s enjoying the celebrations of his long service here, he’s already busy securing a future, not just for his own musical life, but for the life of the very music itself.