Don's Weekly Listen: Svendsen's Octet

Happy Friday!

This week’s Weekly Listen email is free of my usual bloviations, because I’m busy preparing another series of longer-form articles for release in the next two or three weeks.

Those articles will deal with the state of the conducting profession today. One will focus on conducting’s rising cult of niceness (in the sense of bland agreeableness, not kindness), and the other on the profession’s increasingly destructive gender dynamics.

In preparation for this conducting profession series, I would like to bring to your attention an excellent article on the subject published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette this week. Based on interviews with several of the Pittsburgh Symphony’s current and former assistant conductors, the article demonstrates just how precarious the young American conductor’s career is. It shows that for many young aspiring conductors, the faster they paddle, the further the little green light recedes on the horizon.

In the coming weeks, I will tell you some of the things that the Post-Gazette’s interviewees could not have said, or at least not if they wanted to keep their jobs. In particular, I aim to answer, with a whole-of-industry view, the following question: If conducting is such an insanely competitive profession (and it is), why do there seem to be so few inspiring, or even interesting, young American conductors?

And on that note, our listening material:

This week, I send you one of the most underrated octets in the repertoire, the string octet of the Norwegian composer Johan Svendsen. A contemporary of Grieg, Svendsen was a master of string sound, and expertly combines confident swagger, whimsy, and tenderness in this luminous octet. Enjoy!

DB