My Most Challenging 3 Hours

It’s hard for me to believe, yet 20 years have elapsed since the event I’m about to relate to you.

At that time I was only just recently married to my wife, Tania, and we decided to embark on a project to ‘get the word out’ on our creative work.

Tania was then an aspiring composer, I was interested in acquiring management and having more of a presence as a solo violinist on the concert stage.

So we decided to hire an orchestra and produce a full-scale ‘demo’ recording featuring a movement of a concerto she had only just written for me, as well as 3 other movements drawn from the standard violin repertoire.

For those I chose the first movement of the Dvorak Concerto, the final movement of Mendelssohn, and the 2nd movement of Mozart’s G Major Concerto.

We rented a hall, paid for insurance, engaged a contractor, conductor and recording engineer, acquired the necessary scores and music, and hired a sixty piece orchestra – top studio players and members of the LA Philharmonic.

All the while I was practicing my you-know-what off.

Now, the conductor I chose to work with was a former teacher of mine; a wonderful musician and very, very knowledgeable about conducting.

What he was not, however, was in front of an orchestra regularly, and I came to discover, as we worked together, that he’d had almost no experience following a soloist.

So the big day arrived.

I can’t begin to tell you how much pressure I was feeling. Being up there in front of a bunch of highly trained musicians, and having put a great deal of our financial resources on the line; it was kind of a do-or-die situation.

We began with Dvorak.

Sure enough the conductor was so overwhelmed he seemed almost deaf to my presence. I began feeling that awful, scary, sinking feeling that comes when one senses that things are close to unraveling in a big way.

Yet I wasn’t about to go there without a good fight. After all, I had a group of the most responsive musicians in the world sitting there. My wife, with a great set of ears, was next to the recording engineer, scores in hand.

And I hadn’t spent all those hours in my studio twiddling my thumbs.

So collectively we just played over the top of our conductor, so to speak. We did what we all knew we needed to do. And though there were some tense moments, particularly in Tania’s piece – which none of the musicians had seen or heard previously – the final, edited product was really quite extra-ordinary.

I still keep one of those ‘demo’ cassettes on my desk as a reminder of that day; of how far preparation, keeping one’s head, and the help of others can take us.

All the best, Clayton Haslop