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Thursday, July 26, 2001

By Andrew Druckenbrod, Post-Gazette Classical Music Critic

The wild ride that was the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra's 2001 South American tour came to an uneventful conclusion Monday morning. Thankfully.

Typically, there's always some complaining -- legitimate or not -- about any tour in its final days. But nearly everyone had an opinion about this one, which was called "among the worst" by more than a few musicians. The biggest factor was probably the uncertainty in knowing what was to come next, with concerts and flights changed at the last minute.

"This tour was definitely different," quipped PSO keyboardist Patricia Prattis Jennings. "Considering the vicissitudes of the tour, it went well, though."

Bassoonist David Sogg, the head of the PSO's tour committee, agreed: "The musicians handled things with much better attitude than could have been expected." Credit for this also goes to the PSO managers who traveled with the musicians, doing their best to alleviate the troubles.

With only four concerts over a 10-day trip left from the original eight planned, you'd think the musicians would be happy to have a little vacation on the orchestra's time. Not at all. "The reasons we are here is not to see Sao Paulo or Buenos Aires, but to play concerts," said trumpet player Roger Sherman.

Nor did the time off help playing. "You have to practice even though you don't have a concert," said Sherman. "Part of keeping the standard is that you can't skip a day."

Music director Mariss Jansons also strove for perfection despite the circumstances. "This could happen anytime, anywhere -- you can't predict," he said. "There's no guarantee in life that everything goes smoothly -- there are rough times. It is important that we bring great music to the world."

Nearly every musician interviewed felt that Jansons made good on his word, urging the orchestra to play at a high level despite the problems.

"There wasn't a bum concert in the whole tour, as is normally the case," said horn player Zachary Smith. "The Montevideo concert [following a horrendous, 16-hour-delayed flight] had a chance of that happening -- and Jansons knew that -- but we didn't let it."

The musicians' ability to play through adversity was even more apparent at the Teatro Colon concert in Buenos Aires.

Reservations from Miami to Pittsburgh on American Trans Air had been lost, leading tour management to scramble to secure a flight on lesser-known Falcon Air Express. This required approval by the musicians in a vote that took place 90 minutes before the concert. A decision against Falcon would have meant an expensive flight that might have delayed the return home by up to 12 hours.

It's hard to downplay the magnitude of the vote. None of the veteran members could remember a similar one on other tours. The vote in favor of Falcon was close, sending a message to management that more than the bottom line has to be considered.

There was a feeling managing director Gideon Toeplitz was trying to prove the PSO could do the trip to South America when the Cleveland and Philadelphia orchestras didn't, said several musicians.

Toeplitz thinks the opposite. "I always have to keep the option that if things don't work out, then we go home," he said. "I did have some conversations with PSO board president Tom Todd about it ... [But] canceling is easy. Making it work, that's a challenge.

"If we would have known a year ago that we would go for four concerts, rather than only two weeks ago, we wouldn't have [gone]."

Though he reiterates that the tour is, "still on track economically," Toeplitz fumed about the continual lack of communication and business standards that the PSO ran into. "I was surprised to find out they postponed the concert without telling us, and they announced it publicly," he said. "It is not the change that is the big issue, it is how they go about those changes."

Wherever the blame is laid for this tour, everyone believes that management and musicians need to talk about the ramifications of the tour in the coming months to address the issues and to keep morale from slipping.

"I think that in the future, the [group] should make great pains to make sure this doesn't happen again," said Jennings. "The vote before rehearsal was not the appropriate time to voice our displeasure."

"It's usual practice to have a meeting after the tour, to talk about what went wrong, such as a bad hotel," said Sogg. "But this tour had bigger problems."

All in all, however, the players did learn more about its resiliency and impressed many concert-goers with excellent playing, something it and management can both be proud of as the tribulations of the 2001 South American tour fades away from memory.

"We will live through this," said Toeplitz.