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Evans Mirageas and Opera · Evans Mirageas and the Symphony Orchestra
Evans Mirageas and the Symphony Orchestra: Part 2
Orchestral music was my first love in classical music and it started with the Boston Pops. My father, growing up in Boston in the 1930s, attended the free Boston Pops concerts on the Esplanade. The memory of those evenings on the banks of the Charles River stayed with him all his life. When the first stereo phonographs became available in the late 1950s, our living room in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was soon graced with a Motorola console and a handful of early stereo LPs including Hi-Fi Fiedler and Marches in Hi-Fi, both classic Fiedler/Pops recordings. Listening to them today in superb CD transfers, these pioneering stereo recordings reveal a conductor of refined culture and an orchestra at the top of its form.
Growing up in a college town in the 1960s, particularly one with the tradition of an international concert series and two superb auditoriums, meant that I had access to a range of concert-going opportunities otherwise available only in the top three or four international music capitals. Since 1879 Ann Arbor has been blessed with the University Musical Society, a presenting organization founded within the structure of the University of Michigan.
Evans and Gairt Mauerhoff, Aspen 2004 At thirteen, soon after I was hired to work at the now-legendary Liberty Music Shop, proprietor Gairt Mauerhoff insisted that I expand my musical horizons beyond recordings and join him and his wife at the Musical Society concerts they attended regularly. I look back at the faded and tattered programs of thirty-five years ago and, besides the countless chamber music concerts and recitals, I can still recall my fervent reactions to Josef Krips and the Vienna Symphony, the young Yuri Temirkanov and the Leningrad Philharmonic performing the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony, and the superb Jean Martinon with the French National Radio Orchestra. Most of all, however, I remember the yearly May Festival, an intoxicating week of concerts each spring with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra.
How to describe the emotional impact on me of those Ormandy seasons? Here were the Fabulous Philadelphians in perhaps their greatest decade since the height of the Stokowski era, let loose in Ann Arbor's Hill Auditorium, a marvel of pre-acoustician engineering built before World War I.
Hill Auditorium, Ann ArborReleased from the dry acoustic of their beautiful Academy of Music in Philadelphia, these virtuosos and their longtime maestro served up core symphonic repertoire every spring to over 4,000 listeners nightly for a week. Ormandy gave me my first live Brahms, Beethoven, Richard Strauss, Dvořák, Mahler, and Stravinsky. Pianist Rudolf Serkin, violinist Isaac Stern, and baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (in a Kindertotenlieder I can still recall with tears in my heart) gave me my first exposure to live classical music a short bicycle ride from home. It was a truly magical adolescent awakening. With the Liberty Music record store, the winter season concerts, and the May Festival I literally gobbled up music with a voracious teenage appetite.
The fledgling radio announcer circa 1977When as an undergraduate I began working for the University of Michigan's public radio station WUOM, the next phase of my love affair with the symphony orchestra unfolded. In the mid-1970s the newly formed Corporation for Public Broadcasting was handing out grants to public radio stations to help them upgrade their technical facilities. Neil Bedford, the enterprising station manager, and my equally prescient boss, music director Stephen Skelley, saw the opportunity to revive a WUOM tradition of live and taped concert broadcasts with the latest in stereo technology.
Unfortunately, there were no similar grants for employees to make these broadcasts happen. We all had to pitch in and when my colleague Hal Prentice got too busy to be the regular recording engineer, I eagerly volunteered to try my hand (and ear).
WUOM Producing days 1981 (early in the cigar period)Looking back, what innocent and flexible times these were! Through the largesse of the Musical Society's then-director Gail Rector, I was given entrée to record orchestra after orchestra for local broadcast. It was a happy accident of timing. The Eastern European orchestras that toured regularly in those days were nonchalant about radio broadcasting. With a little arm-twisting, even the powerhouse Los Angeles Philharmonic and its matinee-idol maestro Zubin Mehta were persuaded to let us record, in exchange for giving them the tape to broadcast on their own series. I remember the morning after that concert as if it were yesterday. Mehta and his formidable manager Ernest Fleishmann (now a cherished friend and mentor) came to the WUOM studio to approve a playback. They grudgingly admitted that this kid (I was probably twenty at the time) did a not-so- bad job and they'd have to play the tape for Decca Records. Twenty years later when I joined the Decca Record Company as senior vice president for Artists and Repertoire, I delighted in telling this story to my predecessor Ray Minshull, who supervised those early LA Philharmonic recordings.
Most important of all, I was learning how an orchestra works sonically. In making a live recording you can either sit back and try and get a decent overall sound, or be a bit more ambitious and see if you can improve on Mother Nature. My feeling was that radio and recordings are media unto themselves, devoid of the visual cues you get in a live concert. To me, it was permissible to see if one could sensitively enhance the balance by careful microphone placement just enough to create a sonic picture for the listener rich in detail and overall impact. I was aided in my experiments by a WUOM engineer named Jim Paffenbarger who tirelessly explained the finer points of electronics so I wouldn't go off completely half-cocked in my search for perfect recorded sound. In those happy days of my twenties I learned my trade on the job with some of the finest orchestras in the world as my guinea pigs. This led to my first studio recording -- a Beethoven Triple Concerto which combined the University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra with faculty member soloists (Angel Reyes, violin, Samuel Mayes, cellist, and Theodore Letvin, piano) conducted by Gustav Meier. Enterprising university school of music professor Abe Torchinsky (former tuba of the Philadelphia Orchestra) had formed a record company within the school of music and entrusted me with their most ambitious recording to date. No one taught me how to combine the skills of producer and engineer. I simply read whatever I could get my hands on, studied the score like mad, and tried to cajole the best performance I could out of the assembled forces.
With Stephen Skelley, 2005My favorite memory of those days was the chance to record Eugene Ormandy conducting a benefit concert with the university orchestra. The morning after the concert was the usual playback for approval. I had taken particular care in placing microphones since Ormandy was notoriously fussy with the sound of his beloved violin sections. By then I had met his favorite Columbia Records producer Thomas Frost, who advised me to make certain I had a highlight microphone conspicuously placed over the first violins. Ormandy and his wife Gretel came into an improvised studio in the Hill Auditorium conductor's dressing room. They were both looking rather stern. Just as I was about to press Play the maestro exclaimed, "More first violin!" He saw the confused and terrified look in my eyes and immediately dissolved into laughter saying that he and Tom Frost had cooked up the joke. All went well thereafter. Ormandy loved the sound and I treasure that recording.
A Cleveland Orchestra broadcast recording made in Hill Auditorium opened the next door in my love affair with the orchestra. In 1979 WUOM hosted a national conference of radio broadcasters and Norman Pellegrini, program director of the commercial classical radio station WFMT in Chicago, heard my Cleveland concert recording at a demonstration session. About a year later WFMT was looking for a combination producer/engineer/interviewer for a new national radio series they were developing. Norman told my future boss Jim Unrath about me and shortly thereafter I was living in Chicago and producing Lincoln's Music In America. If you love classical music and have unlimited time and money, where would you go every week for the most interesting event in classical music? That dream premise became the basis for a program that ran for seven years. I traveled the world creating documentary programs on upcoming concerts that often featured the orchestras of Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, St. Louis, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, Detroit, Minnesota, and numerous others.
On assignment in Italy, summer 1984 for Music in America
with Jim Unrath, tenor Giuseppe di Stefano and friend
(the cigar period ended shortly thereafter...)
WFMT syndicated the Philadelphia Orchestra broadcasts in 1987. We hired a full-time engineer in Philadelphia to record the concerts and I eventually succeeded my colleague Jim Unrath as producer. I visited Philadelphia regularly throughout the season, collecting interviews and attending concerts. It was another full circle, producing the concerts of the orchestra that had given me my first exposure to live music, and I was thrilled. Sadly, Eugene Ormandy had retired and died before I took on the job, but working with his handpicked successor, the fiery Riccardo Muti, made up for it. These were again glory days for Philadelphia with a formidable young maestro, recordings for EMI, world tours, and a national radio series. It was a chance to watch an orchestra on a nearly daily basis; learn the mechanics of how concerts are programmed, produced, and performed; watch the dynamic between conductor and players; and see how the administrative machinery made it all happen.
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