Cleveland Classical

eighth blackbird at Severance Hall: a conversation with flutist Tim Munro

by Mike Telin

On Friday, May 27 at 7:00 pm, Franz Welser-Möst will lead The Cleveland Orchestra in
its final Fridays@7 performance of the season. The concert includes John Adams’ Doctor
Atomic Symphony, Jörg Widmann’s Flûte en suite (world premiere, Cleveland Orchestra
commission) with the orchestra’s principal flutist, Joshua Smith, as soloist, and Jennifer
Higdon’s On a Wire — Concerto for eighth blackbird.

Then on Sunday, May 29 at 7:00 pm in Reinberger Chamber Music Hall at Severance
Hall, eighth blackbird will present a concert titled “Still Life”.

These Cleveland performances have special meaning for all of the members of eighth
blackbird, but especially to flutist Tim Munro, who recalls being a student at Oberlin, and
ushering for a concert at Reinberger Chamber Music Hall, given by Pierre-Laurent
Aimard. Aimard’s program included Pierre Boulez’s Third Piano Sonata, and the
composer was in the audience. “I remember this lovely moment [after the concert] when
a very elderly lady, who was the last person to leave, looked up at me and smiled as she
passed and said, ‘wasn’t that wonderful to have the composer here? It’s just like having
Beethoven in the audience.’ I have always remembered that because it was such a lovely
thing to say. So often we think that people will always have an adverse reaction to
modern music, but if it is presented in the right way, and if it is performed with
commitment, like Aimard can do, you can make converts”.

Higdon’s On a Wire was commissioned by a consortium including the Atlanta
Symphony, the Akron Symphony, the Cabrillo Festival, the Cincinnati Symphony, The
Cleveland Orchestra, the West Michigan Symphony and the Vermont Symphony. The
work was first performed by Robert Spano, eighth blackbird, and the Atlanta Symphony
in June of last year during the League of American Orchestras Conference. CC.com
spoke to Mr. Munro prior to their performance with the Akron Symphony (read the
interview here.) We recently spoke again, and talked about subsequent performances of
On A Wire, and the repertory for Still Life.

Mike Telin: Have there been any performances of On A Wire since you performed it in
Akron?

Tim Munro: Yes, since then we have done in with the Toronto Symphony as part of their
new music festival, and that was really a wonderful experience. It’s such a fine orchestra
and their conductor, Peter Ondjian, is someone the group vaguely knew from Cincinnati,
because he was the first violinist of the Tokyo String Quartet when they were in
residence there. He is such a wonderfully flexible, intelligent and quick musician that it
was a real pleasure to work with him.

We also performed it with the West Michigan Symphony, in the town of Muskegon,
which is a beautiful little hamlet, but what surprised me was that we had these huge
audiences both nights. This was only the second time we have done multiple
performances of the piece, but both nights the audience seemed to really enjoy it. It was a
real pleasure for us.

MT: I asked you this question back in January, but now after two more performances are
you still finding new things in the piece, and perhaps having new ideas about it?

TM: Absolutely, I think I said this back in January, but it is still true: each orchestra, each
acoustic and each audience brings out different things in a lot of ways. But now we do
know the piece so well that we usually spend about one or two rehearsals bringing it
back, whereas the second of third time we needed to bring it back we would need three
days to rehearse it. Now it does feel like part of our bones, like coming back to a
beautiful old friend. But doing it in different halls! The West Michigan Symphony Hall
was big and cavernous, so we felt like we did need to bring bigger gestures to everything,
more primary colors let’s say. And Severance Hall is a large hall but I remember that it
feels very intimate. In a hall like that, where you can hear a pin drop, we will have to
challenge ourselves to play very softly and to bring out interesting colors. It’s going to be
a lot of fun.

MT: Yes it will, and you will have fun with the Severance Hall acoustics.

TM: For me, having spent three years going to Cleveland Orchestra concerts, and being
such a huge fan when I was a student at Oberlin, it is a wonderful thing to be able to
come back and get to be on intimate terms with the hall.

MT: In addition to the performance of On A Wire with the orchestra on Friday, the group
will also be performing a recital on Sunday the 29th in Reinberger Chamber Music Hall.

TM: This is a program we are really proud of, and we have been touring it around the
country this season. We did it at Carnegie Hall, and the Library of Congress, and next
weekend will take to the Barbican in London, so to be able to bring it to Cleveland is a
real pleasure.

MT: It is a great program.

TM: The title is Still Life, which of course refers to the title of the first piece by Missy
Mazzoly, Still Life with Avalanche. For her, the piece was full of mixed emotions: the
exuberance she was feeling while writing it for us, but she also received some bad family
news at the same time, so these emotional poles really pulled her in two different ways;
so there is a dark undercurrent that is punctuated by exuberance. I feel like the
rollercoaster of emotions in this piece is also the journey we take people on in this
program.

From Missy’s piece we go into the world of Pierre Boulez with Derive. It’s about four
minutes of some of the most concentrated, beautiful and intricate music that conjures this
buzzy, hazy world. Then we go to a piece by another Frenchman, Philippe Hurel, that is
like a runaway freight train. This piece, … a mesure, is almost the hardest piece we have
ever done. It has never been performed by any other group without a conductor, so it has
been a real challenge for us to put it together. We definitely have a sense of danger when
we perform it, but there is an energy that the ensemble gets from playing it, which is
quite exciting.

What we like to do in our programming is to celebrate the diversity of contemporary
classical music, because there are so many styles out there. Missy Mazzoly comes from
far more of an indy-rock background, whereas Boulez is steeped in the modernist
tradition. We end the program with a piece by Stephen Hartke, who has written us a total
masterpiece. Meanwhile: Incidental music to imaginary puppet plays, evokes the world
of Asian puppet theatre. We’ve played it forty or fifty times, and we love it so much we
have memorized it, so it really is in our blood. We’ve also developed some choreography
for it that does nothing other than bring out the musical relationships that are in the piece.
We have recorded all of the pieces on this program, but they will not be released until
next year.

MT: So you have been back in the recording studio?

TM: We have been doing a lot of recording. We had almost a four-year hiatus, but we’ve
recorded something like four albums in the past year and a half. We are trying to space
out the releases, because — let’s face it — do people really need this much eighth
blackbird in their lives?

MT: This is true, but if you keep us waiting then we’ll want them all the more.
Visit eighth blackbird’s Web site here.

Published on clevelandclassical.com May 19, 2011