Opening Night!

Today we start rehearsals for the piece by Jennifer Higdon, "Concerto 4-3." I'm looking forward to seeing what it is like. I almost always enjoy learning and performing contemporary music, and Marin does a nice job of finding interesting, accessible music of today. It is a different experience to learn and perform a new piece.

When we play something familiar, there are certain expectations that most of us have when we go into the first rehearsal: the tempos should be so and so, we will slow down in this spot, etc. etc. When we attack an entirely new piece there are fewer expectations. This can free us to make music in a different way. In one sense there is more risk to us as performers. We don't know how well we will perform the piece, or even which sections might prove to be most difficult. We don't know whether or not the audience will enjoy the piece.

On the other hand there is less risk. Since there aren't 15 recordings by famous conductors and orchestras that we and the audience may know of the piece, it is "ours" to make what we will of it, both from the performers' and from the audience vantage points. And if we miss a few notes here or there, will anyone but us know?

Enjoy life's little surprises. Come hear the Higdon Concerto 4-3 this week. And by the way, we are playing great standards by Tchaikovsky and Brahms, too!

BSO 2009-2010 Season Kick-off

After several weeks break, I am looking forward to playing the violin with the BSO this weekend for the Gala concert. Lang Lang will be the pianist. He is a big audience favorite, and he hasn't been here for awhile. The Tchaikovsky Concerto should be a great piece to hear him play.

I have been practicing hard for the last many weeks, even though the orchestra hasn't performed since late July. It is essential to keep up my skills, and this quiet period for the orchestra gives me a chance both to prepare repertoire for the upcoming BSO season and also, to work on pieces that I will perform this year as a soloist and a chamber music performer.

One piece I have worked very hard on the Sibelius Concerto, my favorite romantic violin concerto. I will perform it December 11 in New Haven with my son, Stephen, conducting the Berkeley College Orchestra, a student orchestra at Yale University.

There are lots of great programs to look forward to this fall. Hope to see you all at JMSH and Strathmore!

Click here to view the season.

Live Classical Music on the Cheap?

My bank account has been hurting the last few months. That west coast vacation I went on took a tole on my "going out" funds, not to mention this "recession" phenomenon. It has sadly been too long since I was able to see some live classical music, so I went online to see if there were any events in the DC/Baltimore area coming up. As the 2009-2010 concert seasons are raring up, it is the perfect time to list some good deals. Here is what I came up with:

• Many people do not know that the Kennedy Center has a FREE concert every day on the Millienium Stage. Check out their series here. They also have deals for the 17-25 age range through the Attend Program once you set up an account.
  

• The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra has two ways to save, depending on your age range: (1 $10 Student tickets to most concerts in the 2009-2010 season (valid Student ID required), and 2) BSO Forte events (Friends Under Forty), which include parking deals, free food, and discounted concert tickets.

• Free Fall Baltimore- I just discovered these FREE open rehearsals on the BSO website this fall.

• The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland offers free Engagement Events every week during their 09-10 season, including 5:30pm weekday concerts if you want to grab a concert right after work.

• The University of Maryland School of Music has many student performances throughout the year, as does many other colleges and universities in the Baltimore/DC area. The Peabody Conservatory of Music is another local music school with exceptional student performances.
  

• Many museums in DC have FREE concerts (many with world music) several nights a week. All you have to do a reserve your free ticket or arrive early (first-come, first-serve): the Freer and Sackler Galleries series, American Art Museum Concerts (including their every-other-Sunday Steinway Series in McEvoy Auditorium), National Gallery of Art Concert Series, and many others (google Smithsonian Institution concerts).
  

• The Library of Congress has more than books, archives, and every newspaper in existence. Their FREE Concert Series is held in the Coolidge Auditorium located in the gorgeous Jefferson Building. The LoC also requires you to pick up advance tickets. Information will be up soon on their 09-10 season.
  

Do you know of any other live classical music deals in the area? Post a comment and I'll add yours to the list.

BSO Goes PSYCHO

Today we rehearsed Psycho. The music was written by a well known film score composer, Bernard Herrmann. It is very creepy music, very interesting and dissonant at times. Then there are the sections with the pretty famous slasher music. Herrmann uses motives, chords and themes repeatedly; I'm sure that must be connected with various characters and/or moods in the film.I wish that I could see the screen. On some occasions, like when we played the music for Wizard of Oz last summer, I can look up when the violins have rests in the music. But for this performance, I am in back of the screen. I guess I will have to use my imagination and listen for the screaming!

July 3 and 4 were great last week at Oregon Ridge. Absolutely perfect weather, nice big crowds, and I enjoyed our conductor, Damon Gupton, quite a bit. I think that was the first time we played the entire Tchaikovsky 1812 Overture at OR for a long time; how nice.

Distant Worlds: music from FINAL FANTASY - June 27

I'm really looking forward to this concert, and I'm glad that the Baltimore Symphony has decided to perform this music. I've been a serious gamer for years, and in my experience, a soundtrack can make the difference between a good video game and a great one.

Video game music, like everything else about video games, has evolved greatly since Tetris, Galaga, and Super Mario Bros. Crude synthesizers have given way to more advanced ones and in many cases to full orchestras.

Nobuo Uematsu, who composed the music for the Final Fantasy series through Final Fantasy X, has witnessed this evolution as well as anyone. His music has helped make this fantasy/science-fiction series one of the most popular video game series in history, and I am happy to see the Baltimore Symphony recognize his achievements.

I will also be glad to see some people my age at the symphony. The concert is this Saturday, June 27 at the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in Baltimore.


Eric Mulligan (age 23), son of Greg Mulligan

Reflection on the 2008-2009 Season

The main season is almost over. We are playing this weekend to full houses, with a concert of Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto, performed beautifully by Yefim Bronfman, and excerpts from Wagner's great Ring Cycle of operas. It will be nice to have a little break next week!

We have had a great season that included some unusual repertoire this past year. Bernstein's Mass, which we performed in Baltimore, New York, and Washington last October, was a once-a-career opportunity for us. Though we all admire Leonard Bernstein, I think that it was still a pleasant surprise to experience the eclectic chaos of the work. Marin put together a great cast, and it was truly thrilling to perform the work with children's choirs from here and from New York. Click here to watch Marin discuss the project.

Mahler's Ninth Symphony, which we performed this spring, was another highlight. This is a difficult piece, even by Mahler's standards, but we were all very pleased with the results. There were a lot of other great performances, too, but the Bernstein and the Mahler stand out to me.

So in couple of weeks we will have our first summer season concert, "Distant Worlds: The Music of Final Fantasy." To be honest, I don't know exactly what to expect from this show, but I will ask my 23 year old and 21 year old sons about Final Fantasy. I know that Eric, my older son, enjoyed "Play, a Video Game Symphony," last summer, in which we performed music from various video games while scenes from the games appeared on a screen over the orchestra. I'm sure that Distant Worlds will be a big hit with the gaming crowd, too.

Greg Mulligan's First Post

Hi, I'm Greg Mulligan. I play in the First Violin section of the BSO. I have been here in Baltimore since 1980, except between 1989-1994, when I left to become the concertmaster of the San Antonio Symphony. Now I'm glad to be living and performing in Baltimore again. Click here to read more about me.

It's funny to me that I am writing a blog for the BSO, because, while I am a good typist and I love to communicate, I am technologically challenged. Whenever something goes wrong when I am on the computer, I hope that my wife Jeanne, or one of my sons, Eric or Stephen, is around the house because there is little chance that I can find the problem! But with their help, and with the help of Jamie Jean Schneider, E-Commerce Coordinator of the BSO, I think I can do this.

Last weekend we performed a Pops show featuring music from the 1970s, "Disco Days and Boogie Nights," with our great Pops conductor, Jack Everly, and nine excellent singing and dancing solo performers. While the disco craze has the reputation of having produced some very silly music, I have to say that I really enjoyed the show. I was a teenager in the 1970s, and I remember very fondly going out with friends to dance to all that music. It all has a great beat and it inspires moving your body. And there is a lot of variety. This show wasn’t only disco; it also featured many other types of popular music from that era.

It was fun to wear 70s clothes. I used to have an old disco (loud pattern!) shirt, but I'm sure it got donated to Goodwill at some point. So I went into Hampden and found a copper-silver polyester shirt. There were some great costumes in the orchestra, including the French horn section dressed as the rock group Kiss. Join the BSO facebook fan page to view pictures of us dressed to the max for the evening.

I'm looking forward to this week. Hilary Hahn is a local girl who has amazed the classical music world with her incredible, beautiful violin playing. She is playing the Higdon Violin Concerto, which I don't know, but I am looking forward to learning it. Also, it will be nice to have Marin back again. Besides Higdon we are playing pieces by Beethoven and Dvorák, two of my favorite composers. If you want to see just how classically cool Hilary Hahn really is, visit her YouTube Channel.