Archive for April, 2008
In Vino Veritas! A couple of years ago, I stumbled on an interesting discovery. While surfing the Internet with my friend, we did a Google search for Grillo and wine. I am a wine fan and I was going through a phase of intensely reading and studying about wine. The results of that search were astonishing. Little did I know that there was a Grillo wine. Grillo being my last name, I was startled and completely fascinated.
It was not just a bottle named Grillo, a wine making family or a vineyard. It was the actual name of a grape. The fruit of the vine itself. The Grillo grape is an indigenous grape of Sicily and it goes back thousands of years. Upon further study, I found out that Grillo is one of the essential grapes in the making of Marsala wine. Marsala is the most famous wine in Sicily and in its heyday rivaled the best Port and Sherry of Europe. It is a fortified wine with an alcohol content of 20%. Most people are familiar with this fortified wine from the classic dishes such as Chicken or Veal Marsala. Marsala consists of a combination of three basic grapes. Grillo, Catarratto and Inzolia grapes are blended to make this famous wine. In recent years, vinters are making and refining bottles of 100% Grillo grape. In conjunction with modern technology and a rising Sicilian wine industry, Grillo is starting to shine solo. Just imagine, every dish of Veal Marsala contains some Grillo grape!
Among its importance in making Marsala, the Grillo grape is also used in a wide variety of blends. Blending wines has been a tradition of the Sicilian wine industry for millennia. One of it most famous combinations is Mamertino. There are several different names that are associated with this particular wine. Location is established with the city of origin. For example, you would have Mamertino di Messina or Mamertino di Milazzo. Julius Caesar had a great affinity for the taste of Grillo wine. Julius Caesar preferred the Mamertino which contained the most Grillo. To read an interesting article that discusses Caesar’s Grillo wine preference, click here. Here is an excerpt from www.biovinivasari.it describing the history of this ancient fruit. To visit a blog about the Mamertino wine click here.
“The Grillo grape gives Mamertino white wine its distinctive taste. This is a wine which was recorded as far back as Roman times. There are copious records on Marmetino dating back to 289 BC. Mamertino was planted in the area of Milazzo and the surrounding hills in the neighbourhood of the communes of Santa Lucia del Mela and Meri’. It was described as: ”a praiseworthy grape variety for the production of a praiseworthy wine”. A warm, generous and highly drinkable wine,it was offered to the followers of Julius Ceasar at banquets including the celebrations for his third consulship, and was mentioned in ”The Gallic Wars”. The noble and historic origins of Mamertino, passed down by word of mounth on the land from which it came, indicate a wine which was showered with honors, prized and aristocratic that, furthermore, towered over its contemporaries in ancient and modern times. Strabone, the revered Roman geographer counted the Mamertino among the best wines of the time and Pliny placed it in fourth place in his classification of 195 wines, while the Frenchman Andrè Tehernia, in his book, ” The wine of Roman Italy ” described Mamertino as ” the fourth grand cru classé”.
There has been a resurgence in recent years of bringing back the ancient grape varietals of Sicily. For more information on this revival click here. To learn more about the Sicilian wine industry click here . The painting below is Caravaggio’s “Bacchus”. It dates from around 1593 and hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. For more information on this famous painting click here.
April 30th, 2008
The Princeton Symphony Orchestra is set to finish their season on Sunday April 27th at 4:00. The ensemble will be led by guest conductor Rossen Milanov. David Grielsammer will be the featured piano soloist. The program will include Prokoviev’s Puskin Waltz’s Opus 120, in celebration of the composer’s birthday. Mozart piano concerto #5 in D major is next, followed by the eternal Symphony #5 by Ludwig van Beethoven. Beethoven’s 5th symphony is the most recognized melodic theme in the entire classical music repertoire. This will surely be an exciting way to end a very interesting season.
This is the second year that I have been playing with the symphony. The Princeton Symphony is a professional orchestra, not to be confused with any of the music groups from the University. It is a very fine ensemble. The 2007-2008 season has been an important transition year for the group. The orchestra is in the midst of a conductor search. What is intriguing for the musicians is that we get a chance to play with several different guest conductors. The first concert of the year the orchestra was lead by Shi-Yeon Sung. She is the new assistant conductor for the Boston Symphony, in addition to winning the top prize at the famed Gustav Mahler conducting competition in Europe. This concert was excellent and was definitely a great way to start the season. Subsequent concerts were lead by Jens Georg Bachmann of the Metropolitan Opera and Mischa Santora. The next concert was quite a treat. Gunther Schuller was the guest conductor and lead us with his own piece Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee. We concluded this program with Paul Hindemith’s Matis der Maler Symphony. Just as we began rehearsing the symphony, Schuller pleasantly commented that he succeeded Hindemith at Yale. This concert was in conjunction with the Princeton University Art Museum. The PSO plays a lot of contemporary music and the new works are very well received.
Princeton, New Jersey is a beautiful town with many cultural offerings. This is a great advantage for the ensemble. One of my first impressions of Princeton was that is an ideal marketplace for the arts. It is a good combination of affluence and intelligentsia. The concerts here in Princeton are very well attended. Next season is also going to be a host of new guest conductors and will be announced publicly in the near future. Once the symphony finds its new leader, the sky is the limit for sure. For more information and history on the Princeton Symphony visit their website by clicking on the following link www.PrincetonSymphony.org.
The Princeton Symphony plays on the campus of Princeton University in Richardson Auditorium. Richardson Auditorium is located in Alexander Hall. The picture below is the interior of this historic building. This concert hall has some of the best acoustics I have ever experienced. It frequently hosts many guest orchestras and it is one of the busiest theaters on the east coast. For more information on this architectural gem click here.
April 22nd, 2008
This is a new series I am starting on the blog. “Orchestra Confidential” will focus on symphonic musicians and all things that permeate the backstage of the concert hall. I have always thought that the backstage lives of performing arts groups are an exciting place percolating with many different things. There are always two doors to every event. The public walks through the front doors under the marquis. The artists, musicians, stage crew, and make-up people all walk through the stage door. The public at large is relatively separated from this underworld of frenetic artistic activity. ”Orchestra Confidential” is going to highlight this behind the scenes culture and everything that pertains to the performance aspect of the business. In one my other series “The Art of the Deficit”, the focus is on orchestra managements and the difficult economic realities of running arts organizations.
Having played in over 30 professional orchestras to date, I have seen and experienced a wide range of things that I think are never really talked about to the general public. From the perspective of the audience, an orchestra looks like a relatively normal institution. A stage full of people in elegant formal tails and black dresses, playing this beautiful music and providing an enjoyable evening of entertainment. Little do they know that orchestras are a hotbed of all kinds of activity. Granted that many work environments have their share of issues, the interesting one about an orchestra is that the stage is everyones’ office. There are 80-100 people on stage with each other day after day. In the business world, most people have their own office to retreat too. The scientist has his or her laboratory, the teacher his or her classroom. This is not the case with musicians. I have heard it been said many times that an orchestra player sees his stand partner more than their spouse! There are orchestras that do rotate, which means that they get to switch it up a bit. This environment can lead to quite a soap opera to say the least. I have witnessed and been briefed on many occasions where this has lead to some outrageous activity that will certainly be discussed further in this series. What this really boils down to is that an orchestra is very similar to a dysfunctional family. Members of the ensemble may not like each other, but are forced to deal with one another on a day to day basis.
I want to focus heavily on the psychological states of musicians. Playing in an orchestra is a much more stressful job experience than most people realize. There was a famous study that came out of Northwestern University some years back relating to high stress careers. The study ranked symphonic musicians second after air traffic controllers when it came to high stress vocations. One of the big factors was the margin of error for mistakes. Even though a plane accident is much worse than a trumpet coming in the wrong spot, the mistakes are irrevocable.
To the surprise of the general public, job satisfaction in symphonies is sometimes extremely low. Negativity and resentment run high in many groups. The frustrated musician is nothing new and can almost become obsessed with never achieving the goals they had in their mind when they entered this profession. I will certainly cite the Harvard Business School’s study that stated that orchestra musicians ranked lower than federal prison guards in terms of job satisfaction. Some factors that led to this discovery are the little input musicians have in the organizations, limited job mobility and the fact that most of the orchestra gets paid the same pay scale. The new musician that joins the orchestra gets the same exact wage as the person who has been playing there for 40 years. Musicians have to learn to live with the job they have, if they were lucky enough to get a job in the first place. This will certainly lead to a discussion of the modern audition process. In classical music, someone is hired potentially for life without a face to face interview, a review of personality traits, a mental health evaluation or what the organization can gain from attaining their employment.
I want this to be a collaborative effort. I invite people to contact me and share their experiences good and bad. The new media environment, in addition to the social networking potential of all of this can have a lasting impact on the industry. Younger musicians can have a better sense of what to expect when they enter the professional arena. Orchestra committees can have a platform to present their case perhaps in the middle of a difficult collective bargaining situation. The list goes on and on. Click on the word contact at the top of this website. Fill out the appropriate fields and I will respond as soon as I can.
On the lighter side, musicians can be absolutely fascinating to work with. On the whole they tend to be extremely bright and are always interested in different things. Whether it is someone reading Charles Dickens or obsessively involved in an intriguing hobby, the aesthetic focused mind of the artist is always in motion.
Please stay tuned for further posts on this exciting topic. I look forward to corresponding with my orchestral colleagues and what surfaces from this inquest will surely be fascinating. With many newspapers limiting or even abolishing their arts writers entirely, this will also serve as an important tool for reporting what needs to be out there. Lets start from the top and not finish until we leave no stone unturned. All repeats please.
April 13th, 2008
