Rehearsals – davidbruceblog #2

Sir Thomas Beecham once undertook an Australian tour during which he had the opportunity to rehearse a number of times the Australian orchestra he would conduct. He went through the program once, then excused the musicians. He did the same thing the next day and the following day—at which time he announced that there would be no further rehearsals. Because extra rehearsals had already been paid for—six in all—the orchestra manager asked why Sir Thomas would not use them. Sir Thomas replied, “My dear fellow, this orchestra was lousy at the first rehearsal, lousier at the second, and incredibly lousy the third. I can’t let this go on; think what it would be like at the performance!”

Choreographer George Balanchine valued imperfect excitement over correct boredom. In a rehearsal, he criticized a dancer, saying, “No! Not big enough, does not travel enough, feet come together too slowly in assemblé. Do again.” The dancer tried again, with more energy, and Mr. Balanchine told her, “Better, but not good enough.” Again, the dancer tried, this time putting into the steps all the energy she had. She jumped into the air with her feet together in assemblé—and she landed on her rear end in front of Mr. Balanchine, who appreciated her energy and smiled and told her, “That’s right. Now I see something.”

Cellist Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich challenged himself and works hard at his art. Within a few weeks in London, he played 35 cello concertos, most of which he knew but a few of which were unfamiliar to him, One night, he discussed with conductor Gennadi Rozhdestvensky a concerto that they were to rehearse the following morning. After asking for information about tempi, he confessed that he did not know the concerto. As you would expect, Mr. Rozhdestvensky was concerned about the next morning’s rehearsal, but Mr. Rostropovich played the concertro perfectly—to learn it, he had stayed up all night.

Pierina Legnani was the creator of the role of the Swan Queen in Swan Lake. Before dancing the role, she had astonished Russian balletomanes by performing 32 consecutive fouettés—32 consecutive spins on pointe. She attempted to keep how to perform such a feat secret, but Russian ballerina Mathilde Kchessinska secretly spied on one of her rehearsals and discovered that Ms. Legnani was spotting—looking at a fixed point as long as possible during a spin, then whipping her head around to look at the spot again for as long as possible. Spotting helped her keep her balance and not grow dizzy.

Sergei Rachmaninoff—a very punctual man—was supposed to rehearse with Leopold Stokowski, but the conductor was busy rehearsing a Tchaikovsky symphony. Mr. Rachmaninoff waited a few minutes, then strode to the piano and hit a loud chord. Of course, everything got very quiet very quickly. Mr. Rachmaninoff said, “The piano is here; I am here; it is 11 o’clock. Let us rehearse.” Mr. Stokowski then began to rehearse Mr. Rachmaninoff and let the Tchaikovsky symphony wait.

Early in his career, comedian Don Rickles guest-starred on The Andy Griffith Show. Of course, he was eager to do well alongside such established stars as Mr. Griffith and Don Knotts. They rehearsed for most of an afternoon, and finally Mr. Griffith said, “Well, I think we’ve rehearsed enough. Let’s go home.” Mr. Rickles pleaded, “No, let’s rehearse some more. You guys have millions of feet of film. All I’ve got are home movies of me and my cousin on a swing.”

Sir Thomas Beecham enjoyed conducting the music of Frederick Delius, and he was very particular in how he conducted it. After Sir Thomas died, Sir Malcolm Sargent rehearsed a piece by Delius. A storm formed, complete with lightning and thunder, and amid flashes of lightning, the fuses blew, throwing the rehearsal hall into complete darkness. In the moment of quiet that followed the thunder, Sir Malcolm remarked, “He doesn’t like it.”

Violinist Bronislav Huberman would not rehearse with conductor Pierre Monteux. Just before a rehearsal, he would send Mr. Monteux a telegram saying, “You know it, I know it, the orchestra knows it; will see you at the concert!” Actually, Mr. Huberman was correct. He, Mr. Monteux, and the orchestra had worked together so much that they knew the music they would perform together, and so the concerts always went well.

Early in his career, Walter Midgley worked in a variety program. At the band rehearsal, he went to a lot of trouble to get some of the rough edges smoothed out among the musicians, but at the performance he noticed that the musicians seemed to have forgotten everything he had taught them earlier at the band rehearsal. Therefore, he spoke to the conductor, who told him, “Oh, that was a different band you were rehearsing with.”

Some homosexuals have been devoted to dance, including Sergey Diaghilev, who organized the Ballets Russes. One day, while watching a rehearsal of George Balanchine’s Apollo, he turned to Mr. Balanchine and said, “How beautiful.” Thinking Mr. Diaghilev was talking about the music, Mr. Balanchine agreed, but Mr. Diaghilev said, “No, no. I mean [Serge] Lifar’s [*]ss; it is like a rose.”

Violinist Josef Gingold once found himself in an elevator with an elderly Arturo Toscanini, who was carrying and studying the score of Beethoven’s Eroica, which he would rehearse that day. Mr. Toscanini told Mr. Gingold, “Caro, I’ve studied 55 years this symphony, but is always possible, eh, that I could forget about one sforzando.”

A gay teenager in the early 1980s, Aaron Fricke once surprised his high school drama club by showing up for a dress rehearsal wearing fishnet stockings, an Afro wig, a corset, high heels, and a black cape, even though he was playing the role of a straight cabdriver. His outfit bothered no one—including his drama teacher.

African-American diva Reri Grist insisted on adequate rehearsals before singing. In Vienna, she was once told that there wasn’t time to hold a stage rehearsal for Figaro. She replied, “Then I don’t sing.” Time was found to hold a stage rehearsal.

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George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet once needed a leading dancer to perform as Apollo at short notice, and Peter Martins, a young dancer with the Royal Danish Ballet, was called in to dance. Everything seemed to Mr. Martins to go well at the first performance, and the critics agreed, but the next day at rehearsal Mr. Balanchine said to him, “Before we begin, you know, you do it all wrong.” (Mr. Martins says he got the impression during the rehearsal that perhaps the one thing he had done right was to show up for the performance.) Then Mr. Balanchine showed him what he wanted. Later, Mr. Balanchine told Mr. Martins’ teacher, Stanley Williams, that he had been impressed with the young dancer at the rehearsal: “I changed everything, and he remembered everything.” This led to Mr. Martins’ being asked to join the New York City Ballet.

The dress rehearsal for Primitive Mysteries wasn’t going well, although Martha Graham had worked on its choreography for over a year. Finally, she was ready to give up and take the dance off the program. Deeply frustrated, she screamed at her dancers, “That’s enough! Get out of my sight! Go home! Go away!” Fortunately, music director Louis Horst told the dancers to stay, then he went to Ms. Graham’s dressing room and talked to her. She then came out of her dressing room and began rehearsing again. On February 2, 1931, Primitive Mysteries debuted in New York’s Craig Theater. The audience applauded so much that 23 curtain calls were needed, and critics acclaimed Primitive Mysteries a masterpiece.

Sir Adrian Boult once accepted an invitation to conduct British music with a famous American orchestra that was known for a few eccentric qualities. Sir Adrian and the orchestra practiced well together, and he was able to remove the eccentric elements of the orchestra’s performance and replace them with elements of nobilmente. However, at the concert, the orchestra played with all of its original eccentricity and with none of Sir Adrian’s nobilmente. Following the concert, an annoyed Sir Adrian asked the concertmaster why the orchestra had played one way during rehearsal and a very different way during the concert. The concertmaster replied, “The rehearsal’s all yours—but the concert’s all ours.”

Fred Astaire was a hard worker who believed in practicing even things that weren’t likely to appear in his movies. While rehearsing for Funny Face, he was dancing with an umbrella, and director Stanley Donen asked him to open the umbrella and dance with it to see if any moves happened that would look good in the movie. Mr. Astaire opened the umbrella, danced with it, then closed it again—all impeccably. Mr. Donen asked him how he was able to do that so well, and Mr. Astaire replied, “I’ve practiced it.” According to Mr. Donen, that was part of the secret of Mr. Astaire’s success: “He would practice things that didn’t have any immediate connection with anything.”

When it came to his dancing, Fred Astaire was a perfectionist. He sometimes rehearsed 18 hours a day, losing up to 15 pounds in the process. In addition, when his dancing partners rehearsed with him, at the end of the practice, they would sometimes find blood in their shoes. Mr. Astaire once explained why he rehearsed so much: “I wanted to make it good, then make it better.”

Albert E. Kahn spent several months photographing Soviet ballerina Galina Ulanova, always being careful not to interrupt her in her practices, performances, or teaching sessions. Once, he did interrupt. Ms. Ulanova had been teaching 19-year-old Katya Maximova to dance Giselle, and at one point she had embraced her. Mr. Kahn had not caught the moment with his camera, so he asked her to repeat the embrace, saying, “It was such a beautiful moment.” She replied, “That beautiful moment is gone forever. Now you mustn’t interrupt us. We’re working.”

Hans Richter once conducted an Anton Bruckner symphony at a time when the works of Bruckner were seldom played. During the rehearsal, Bruckner himself was present. At one place, Richter ran into difficulty and called to Bruckner, “F or F sharp in that chord?” Flushed with pleasure, Bruckner leapt to his feet and answered, “Anything you like, Herr Kapellmeister; go on, go on!”

Buddy Ebsen is perhaps most famous as Jed Clampett onThe Beverly Hillbillies; however, he and Vera Ebsen were a famous brother-and-sister dance team during the 1930s. Frequently, they rehearsed in hot, unvented, rehearsal halls, leaving pools of sweat on the floor. Other people used to come into the rehearsal hall, look at the pools of sweat on the floor, and ask, “Were the Ebsens here?”

Herbert von Karajan sometimes did the lighting for the operas he conducted. Sir Rudolf Bing felt that frequently his lighting was murky, and after Mr. Karajan once told him that the lighting for a certain opera had required “eight full-length lighting rehearsals,” Sir Rudolf replied, “I could have got it that dark with one.”

Vaslav Nijinsky’s Le Sacred de Printemps was, in the words of critic Cyril W. Beaumont, “an attempt to show the birth of human emotion in a primitive age.” It was very difficult to execute, and when it was unveiled for the first time, it required 120 rehearsals, although only six performances were given.

Gladys Cooper complained that Noël Coward believed that actors should show up at the first rehearsal knowing their lines, whereas she liked to learn her lines during rehearsals. Mr. Coward told her, “I did not expect word perfection at the first rehearsal, but I had rather hoped for it on the first night.”

Peter Ustinov was habitually late for rehearsals. By accident, he once arrived 10 minutes early for a rehearsal. Sir Peter immediately apologized to the director, Denis Carey, “I’m sorry, Denis. Utterly unforgivable. I assure you such a careless mistake will never happen again.” Mr. Carey said later, “It didn’t.”

Anna Pavlova took dance rehearsals seriously. Early in her career, she arrived at the Marinsky Theatre, but discovered that she had forgotten her practice clothes. No problem. She wrapped two towels around her body and practiced—despite the sniggering of the stagehands in the theater.