Today I took a rehearsal of the 1812 Overture for the first time in my life. (Thank god I found a score of the non-Soviet edition just in time.)
Amazing that it would take so long for me to address one of the top ten most popular works in the universe, but my opinion of the piece has in the past been pretty much the same as Tchaikovsky's own: "all fireworks and no heart." However, I decided I'd take this piece seriously as though I'd never seen it before, and not treat it like the soundtrack to "The Bad News Bears." So actually look at it rather than conduct on autopilot.
This afternoon, I started by marking the opening hymn played by solo strings as to where people should break up phrases ... and immediately, in bar 3, I saw something curious. I'm always hearing orchestras play this as dada-/dah-dah // dada/dada dada Dah/ ... and then I heard a Russian orchestra on youtube NOT taking that little caesura. I realized it must have something to do with the words of the hymn - which aren't being sung of course as they are cellos and violas. Sure enough I found the problem ... the words are "spasi gospodi lyudi tvoya" ... putting a break there cuts the word "god" in half. People who don't know the Russian hymn might easily put a break there. It shows you how language affects music even without any actual word setting. Sure enough when the kids started playing it, they put that caesura in ... they'd heard some famous orchestra play it that way. So I explained that they're breaking the word "gospodi" in half if they do that. "But it's not being sung in Russian." ... "Wanna bet? the cellos ARE singing in Russian, that is exactly what we are trying to make it sound like."
After that, in my easily distacted professorial way, I started discussing the Battle of Borodino (none of them knew the piece was about that. I said, take a famous Russian composer and add "o". They said Stravinskyo, Mussorgskyo, Rimsky-Korsakovo ... someone cheated and looked it up on Wikipedia.) I think that if you play this overture EXACTLY like the way that battle played out, with the French winning what they thought was a glorious victory only to learn that the Russian retreat was a cunning plan to get them trapped in a savage winter … then you actually can get more than a movie soundtrack out of it … you can actually extract irony and ambiguity out of it. So after this mini-history lesson, they then sight-read the rest of the overture - pretty well, considering they hadn't looked at it - probably assuming (as I almost did) "I've heard this, I can fake it."
By the time we get to the concert, it will probably be great. Not too bad considering that was this the very first rehearsal of the new season and many kids joined us for the first time.