The Mess

Our third concert with the Sarajevo Philharmonic this season was a part of this theatre festival called the MESS. And what a mess it was. First of all, on the day of the first rehearsal, public transportation workers decided to go on strike, so buses and trams weren't running into the city. We live on the outskirts of Sarajevo, so it takes a 20 minute walk to the tram and then a 30 minute tram ride from there to get to work. Luckily for us, Admir helped us get a cab to rehearsal. Traffic was pretty bad, and we kept on seeing people sitting around at the bus stops trying to hail a cab. Other people we saw just gave up and walked wherever they were going. It wasn't a bad day to be walking, since it was sunny and in the 70s.

The SPO's contribution to the MESS was a piece called Sconcerto by Battistelli, an Italian composer. Honestly, it took me all week to figure out what the piece was about because of reasons I'll explain shortly, but I think it was a cool idea. The piece is staged so that there is the orchestra, a real conductor, an actor conductor, and an actor English horn player. The real conductor was sitting on a short stool in front of a black backdrop while the actor stood behind the backdrop and did his thing. This involved pretending to conduct us and giving a scripted Italian monologue throughout the piece. Apparently, his commentary was mainly about how the state of the world has effected classical music. The premise of his speech is that the reason modern music sounds dissonant and unpleasant is that the world is in a bad state. The piece quotes Brahms Symphony No. 3 in small snippets, and during those points, he wonders why music doesn't sound like that anymore. The actor who is planted in the orchestra seemed to be mainly keeping the faux conductor on track during the piece, but there is a point where he sings along with the orchestra. I wish I knew what was really going on there.

Rehearsals for the MESS were extremely exhausting mentally. See, we thought that rehearsals would be run in English because the conductor speaks Italian and English, but the faux conductor was there with a translator. Therefore, rehearsals were run in three languages: Italian, Bosnian, and English. It surprised me how little the conductor wanted to talk though. The actor was in charge most of the time, giving long speeches in Italian which were then translated into Bosnian. I think he was explaining the point of the piece and how we were supposed to act. I talked to Ivana, the principal cellist, during one of the breaks, and she said that we were supposed to just look confused. Apparently, she saw the look on Matt and my face and decided not to mess with it. We definitely looked confused. Rehearsals for this piece felt really long for all of us. Between not understanding what was going on and getting through the piece very slowly because of extra breaks, extra talking, and a little bit of chaos, my brain was shot. The day we had a double service (two 3-hour rehearsals in a day), I stared blankly at my music and tried to tune everything out until I heard the conductor say where we were starting in English.

The good news is that even though I'm not really sure what was going on during the piece, it was received rather well in Sarajevo. We got a standing ovation. They showed Bosnian supertitles during our performance, so the public had no problems understanding the faux conductor's speech. We will take the piece to Italy next week, where we will perform it twice in two nights. The performances are in a town about an hour away from Venice. That'll be fun.