Musical Radar

When we’re lucky, it just clicks. We’re so used to the idea of “no pain, no gain” that we’re amazed by those few occasions when we can achieve something wonderful with a minimum of effort—it does happen just once in a while! That’s the way it was working with our recent piano soloist, Martina Filjak, playing beautiful performances of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G. She just makes it happen, and it was so easy to perform with her.

One of the many fascinating parts of my job is getting to work with quite a few world-class soloists. Sometimes I’ve met and worked with these artists before, but just as often we’re meeting for the first time during a concert set—it’s about 50/50. In this case, I had never met Martina before last week—but it was certainly about time, we’ve been trying to book her with the Symphony for quite a while, and the schedules finally meshed.

Last Monday afternoon, Martina played through her concerto for me in Atherton Auditorium—just the two of us were in the hall. Listening to her, it was obvious right away by her sense of timing what a treasure these performances would be. We made just a couple of suggestions to each other, but she made this difficult work so easy—working in rehearsals and concerts with Martina was a breeze.

All great artists have a great feeling for rubato—when to stretch the tempo, when to push ahead, and so on. But even within that keen sense, there’s what I call musical radar. Some great artists play in such a way that when a stretch is about to happen, she/he telegraphs the ideas in advance. We’ve been so fortunate at the Stockton Symphony to be able to work with so many soloists who possess specifically that gift of creating poetry through musical time. When you’re working with a great artist like Martina, the radar is wonderful. You don’t even have to look at her, you can sense what’s coming. I sometimes think the nonverbal communication you get when collaborating with soloists and with an orchestra is the closest we can get to telepathy.