Message from Alfred Savia, Music
Director
This is always an exciting time of the year gearing up for a
new season – yes, exciting and at the same time a little nervous, yet certainly
full of energy and adrenaline as final preparations are coming into place for
Opening Night Classics and Gala. For me,
there are the part editings, score study, and personnel decisions. It is the latter that has especially driven
me and much of our staff into high gear this year.
We anticipated, and conducted quite successfully, our customary
late August/early September Local and Bloomington auditions for various
openings in our string sections, as well as a handful of non-string positions –
Principal Harp, 2nd Clarinet, 3rd Flute/Piccolo (1 year
appointment). We even filled a Principal
Percussion Philharmonic/UE Consortium position vacated by Monte Hatch when he
won a position with the NYC Opera Orchestra last spring – Bill Shaltis handily
won that job earlier this summer in a national search/audition. What we hadn’t anticipated was the change of
personnel in the Eykamp String Quartet, which represents the core leadership of
the Philharmonic string section!
Dawn
Posey Ginter had let us know that she would be leaving her position last spring
to move to Pittsburgh
with her husband, EPO percussionist Jason Ginter. We had already advertised nationally for that
vacancy – Associate Concertmaster/2nd Violin with ESQ – and had that
audition scheduled for August 23. Then,
around the first of August, Christopher McKay informed me that he had just won
a one year position as Violist with the Louisville Orchestra. This was great news for Chris, but as he
requested a one year sabbatical from the Evansville Philharmonic Orchestra, we
realized we were going to have to scramble to replace him in short order. Only a week and a half later, David Beem
called me, bursting at the seams with the news that he had just won the job as
Cellist with the Euclid String Quartet, a full-time Quartet that tours
extensively and has plans to record the complete Bartok Quartets in the
upcoming season. Again, a really great
opportunity for David, but another challenge for us as the start of the season
was looming!
I consulted John
Macfarlane, our Concertmaster and sole “surviving” member of the ESQ, as well
as members of the Philharmonic Players Committee regarding how we should go
about filling, quite quickly, the one year Principal Viola and Cello and
concurrent Quartet positions. We already
had some interest from within our Viola and Cello sections. We decided to invite any members of those
sections to come to the August 23 Associate Concertmaster auditions and play in
the finals round.
On August 23, we heard
four truly outstanding violinists from behind a screen in the Victory
Theatre. John and I decided to advance
all four to the semi-finals, and then after hearing them – and seeing them and
their resumes in the semis – we advanced all four again to the finals of
playing Ravel and Mozart String Quartets.
That afternoon we had every conceivable permutation of Quartet play, with
John being the only constant. After
hearing our four national violin finalists and two violists and two cellists
from our own ranks, and after a lot of deliberating – because the level of
quartet playing was indeed quite high with ALL of these musicians – we decided
to hire Gared Crawford as our new Associate Concertmaster and 2nd
Violinist for the Eykamp Quartet, and to offer Craig Bate and Kevin Bate (yes,
they are brothers!) the positions of Acting Principal Viola and Acting
Principal Cello and the respective Quartet spots. This meant all of them would need to be in Evansville nearly
immediately after the auditions so that they could participate (now as
adjudicators) in the upcoming section auditions. We also named Mae Lin, who played a superb
Violin audition, as runner up in case Gared did not accept the position. All three players did accept the new
positions, Gared scrambled to find a place in Evansville
and move his stuff from Chicago, as did Craig
and Kevin from Bloomington. The day after the auditions, that Friday, all
was settling in – or so it seemed!
Monday evening my phone rang and it was an excited John Macfarlane, who
called to tell me that he had just been offered a one year contract with the
Saint Louis Symphony. Yet again, a great
opportunity for him, and again, what do we do next to replace John? Remembering that we had officially named Mae
Lin runner up, I phoned Mae Lin at 10:30 PM to offer her the Associate
Concertmaster position (assuming that Gared would accept an unexpected
promotion to Concertmaster), knowing that I needed to act quickly. She was still in Evansville, but had just
shipped several packages of her things to Miami, where she was to play this
season with the New World Symphony (the nationally renowned pre-professional
orchestra that has bridged the gap between conservatory and professional
orchestra) – and she was to fly to New York the following morning. She asked for 24 hours to ponder this new
policy – she spoke with Kimberly, Glenn and me the next day from New York, and by late
Tuesday night, she agreed to take the newly offered position – and Gared had
agreed to “bump up” to Concertmaster for this season.
On the surface, one might wonder why we suddenly and
unexpectedly “lost” our Quartet members and most of our string principals. In every case, they were leaving for their
next career move after having spent five years (except Dawn, who was here three
years) in these positions. In terms of
young musicians starting out their careers this is actually a very long
residency, which was a real plus for the Evansville Philharmonic. However, as long as there is a New York
Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, St. Louis Symphony in the world, we will and
we SHOULD lose our musicians to their ranks.
It is a testament to the quality of this Orchestra that people like Bill
Preucil, now concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra, played in the Evansville
Philharmonic Orchestra while he was at IU, that John Tafoya, Timpanist when I
came to the Evansville Philharmonic, went on to the National Symphony (and now
on the faculty at IU) – even Edgar Meyer, the internationally renowned Bass
virtuoso who opens our season as soloist, was briefly in the Bass section of
the Evansville Philharmonic. I developed
an uncommonly close relationship with these Quartet members over the past five
years, and have taken great pride in seeing them grow as musicians and individuals. And now, I share in their excitement as they
move onto their newfound success – they have grown to the point that they are
easily ready to excel in these new positions and will bloom there as they have
here. And it is equally exciting to have
this next “generation” of vibrant young musicians eager to prove themselves as
our newly appointed leaders of our string section. It is this lifecycle of positive change that
keeps the Evansville Philharmonic energetic and alive!
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