Richard Strauss wrote a piece called METAMORPHOSEN in 1945. The instrumentation was 23 solo string players. It is quite a striking piece in many ways, based on the second movement of Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony—the Marche Funebre, it elongates and intensifies the rhythmic and melodic contours of the original. Is it a wild Germanic musical Frankenstein, made from parts of a masterpiece? Or is it a genuine metamorphosis—like a butterfly emerging from a caterpillar? I urge you to listen to the piece and draw your own conclusions.
What fascinated me about the composition was the distinction Strauss made by making it for 23 solo string players, rather than a string orchestra. In truth, when you hear the piece, the differentiation seems subtle. I doubt that anyone hearing it for the first time without knowing Strauss’s description of the ensemble, would conclude it was written for any number of solo string players. It is certainly not the first piece written with multiple string parts. The Romance from the 5th Symphony by Ralph Vaughan Williams has, with divisi, 16 different string parts.
I work with a talented student orchestra, a chamber orchestra. I spend a lot of time talking about the difference between a large orchestra, which represents the experience of most young players, and a chamber ensemble. In a large orchestra, the conductor is more of a director. Time constraints and the need to work efficiently in a modern orchestra, means there is little time for consensus building or dissenting points of view. In an ensemble of 85 people, it would be disastrous asking for other opinions among the players. A chamber ensemble is a different story. I coach a string quartet and one of my year-long goals is to encourage the exchange of ideas among the players. We work on making specific suggestions. Rather than saying the section of the piece starting near letter D is out of tune, I try to get them to be specific. “At measure 330, on the D major chord, the second violin seems sharp. While that is possible, even desirable, in a string quartet, it could mean bedlam in a large orchestra.
In a chamber orchestra, I try to make it part chamber music and part orchestra. Frequently I will pause the rehearsal and ask the players to comment. With young people, the results are mixed. Talking about music in a way that focusses on the specific is not easy. Asking students to use words that more clearly communicate the point they are trying to make is the only way they will ever build those skills and, over the course of the year, many do improve those communication skills dramatically. That focus on specifics and communication helps to build the most important ensemble skill of all—engagement. Engagement builds a feeling of responsibility. The more responsibility each player feels about the final results, the better the results will be.
In many (if not most) orchestras, stronger players tend to dominate and less strong players tend to recede. If there is a particularly difficult passage, conductors often rely on stronger players to learn the difficult passage first and then bring weaker players along. This system is really a matter of practicality in many cases, given the amount of rehearsal time there is.
Unfortunately, this may be a practical solution, but it can also lead to a part of the group not fully accepting the responsibility for the musical achievement of the ensemble. In fact I’ll go so far as to say the deeper into the ensemble that sense of responsibility goes, the stronger the performance will be. If you are a solo performer, there is no partner there to cover for you. If you haven’t prepared every detail in the piece, those details will not exist in the final performance. For a soloist, that responsibility starts at the beginning of the piece and ends with the last note. That is exactly what every orchestra needs, engaged, responsible players, performing as if the responsibility for the quality of the final performance was completely in their hands. In a real sense, it does.
