Gene on CSO brass concert December

[bisontuba]

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/18Gi89xEpk/

[tofu]

I never miss this concert. Been going for decades. It is simply and always - superb. It has been the most attended CSO concert every year over the years. The players volunteer to do this concert. The hall is always sold out & packed to the rafters. This is clearly the performers favorite concert (and they all say it repeatedly). The hall has a lot of energy as as part of the audience are musicians attending the Midwest Band Clinic and you can tell the players really appreciate that a good part of the audience are fellow musicians who really appreciate the sheer artistry happening on stage.

The musical selections are always great and a lot of the living composers travel from all over the world to attend the concert and it’s great to see them in the audience. Often there is a premiere of a piece written with this group in mind. My favorite was after they played a piece composed by the legendary & great Arturo Sandoval - at the conclusion he was so thrilled - he bounded out of his seat in the audience and on to the stage to kiss Esteban Batallan (principal trumpet - superb player) on the top of his head.

It’s interesting that while all the players get tremendous hands the biggest hand is always for Gene. He has done a lot of the talking over the years and is both very modest and very funny. What wasn’t funny was (I think this happened last year or the year before) when they were doing a world premiere of a piece and the composer was in the audience just a few seats from us - and the tuba part was not in the folder when Gene came back on stage after the intermission. Gene never lost his cool, but it was pretty frantic. Fifteen to twenty minutes of silence - librarians and musicians going through all the stage folders - looking on stage and back stage - no music. Finally Gene found it - one of the String Bass players apparently heard them rehearsing the piece and liked the tuba part so much - he took it upon himself to borrow it “manuscript original with no copies or pdfs” and forgot to return it - apparently it was found in his orchestra folder. And it was a great featured tuba part - the piece would have been unplayable without it. Gene was pretty glib about it, but I’m pretty sure if it had been me - there would have been punches scheduled to be thrown at a later date.

If you can - this is definitely a concert worth attending.