TMF alum teach skills that go beyond music
Aspiring financial and commerce warriors know they need to both “hard” and “soft” skills to succeed. It’s the same with classical musicans.
In business, the hard skills are all about statics, marketing, computers, and such. For a musician, the hard skills are different, everything from fingerings and bowings to counting time and reading music with facility.
But where soft skills are concerned, the two worlds start to look similar. Like business folk, classical musicians must master networking, time management, selfconfidence, interpersonal relations and the culture of their profession.
And that’s where the Immanuel and Helen Olshan Texas Music Festival comes in.
For 27 years, the annual festival, held at the University of Houston’s Moores Music School, has attracted talented young musicians, usually in their early 20s, from across the country. They come together to play in the TMF Orchestra, performing ambitious and challenging programs.
Saturday evening’s kickoff festival concert is a fine example of the meaty concerts the TMF Orchestra presents. The program includes three big, colorful scores by Ottorino Respighi: “Roman Festivals,” “The Fountains of Rome” and the “Pines of Rome.”
Thanks to years of training in colleges and conservatories, the musicians selected to participate at TMF already have the hard skills to perform Respighi’s Roman Trilogy.
But where soft skills are concerned, they have things to learn. And, according to three musicians who have been part of the TMF, the festival places special emphasis on the development of those skills.
Bulgarian-born cellist Lachezar Kostov has been associated with the TMF since 2011 — first as a student, or a “fellow,” as they’re called, and now as an instructor.
“The fellows learn what being a classical musician in the 21st century is all about,” Kostov, says from Baltimore, where he recently won a position in the Baltimore Symphony. “You can’t be a one-trick pony, who only does one thing. And It’s not just about how well you play. Keeping a job in an orchestra, or maintaining a freelance career, are things that we teach at TMF.”
This year, Kostov will be teaching 10 student cellists. He’ll also give a lecture about orchestral auditions and participate in a panel discussion about relationships between musicians’ unions and orchestral management.
Another alumnus, French horn-player Anni Hochhalter, has pursued a career in chamber music, as a member of Houston’s Windsync Wind Quintet. Hochhalter was a TMF fellow in 2009 and 2011, and she credits the festival with giving her the skills she needed to establish her ensemble.
“The instructors encouraged us to perform in all kinds of public spaces,” she says. “This requires a different skill-set, and you learn to appeal to a broader audience. I don’t know that I had those skills at the time, but I do today.”
Now, she says, her experience at TMF is “coming full circle.” This month, she’ll lead a workshop entrepreneurship for classical musicians.
“When I was a student, I participated in these kinds of workshops,” she says. “Now, I look forward to sharing everything I’ve learned with the students.”
Bass-player Eric Larson — a member of the Houston Symphony who has been teaching at TMF for 15 years — explains that the festival is structured to introduce students to the working environment of a professional orchestra.
“In university, music students might spend a month preparing an orchestral concert. But at TMF, they have to do it in a week,” he says. “This simulates the schedule of a professional orchestra.
“Also, the students don’t just learn from the faculty, they learn from one another.”
A week after Saturday’s Respighi blowout, on June 18, the TMF Orchestra will tackle Sergei Rachmaninoff ’s “Symphony No. 1,” plus works by Anton Webern and Alban Berg with Houston Symphony conductor laureate Hans Graf will be on the podium.
On June 25, the concert will be mostly Russian, featuring Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet” overture and Igor Stravinsky’s “Petrouchka.” Benjamin Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” (narrated by St. John Flynn) rounds out the program. This performance also will be presented free of charge on June 24 at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion.
For the “Grand Finale” on July 2, the orchestra will play Richard Strauss’s expansive “Alpine Symphony,” plus Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “Sinfonia Concertante for Four Winds in E Flat.” All concerts are at Moore’s School of Music, unless otherwise noted.