Post by RangerRick on Aug 3, 2016 0:01:25 GMT
Macon (Buford) Georgia
2014
Adrian Gnam, Robert Gutter, Gregory Pritchard
NOT RECOMMENDED!
The competition parameters were unclear, the teaching was largely not helpful. They mislead us about what orchestra we'd be using - it wasn't the Macon Symphony, but a pickup group in a suburb. We performed in a high school auditorium to a small crowd. The orchestra was not ready for the repertoire. Gnam's teaching was good, and Gutter's was ok, but Pritchard, who is the organizer, was not really helpful at all, and spent a lot of time getting in your video.
I'd say it's not worth it.
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Post by JDS on Oct 17, 2016 15:15:06 GMT
I did this 7-8 years ago, both in Macon and in St. Petersburg. Adrian Gnam was indeed very good. Oleg Proskurnya was helpful and kind outside of class; when we were on the podium, he was a VERY old-school Russian teacher, and I would not recommend him to the overly sensitive. (Then again, if you're overly sensitive, this is likely the wrong profession...) Leonid Korchmar, head of conducting at St. Petersburg Conservatory, and Piotr Gribanov, also a professor there, were extraordinary, fiery conductors and teachers, and took 'having the score memorized' to a whole other level. The score was naturally, organically, unselfconsciously part of them, and every gesture meant something. (The whole point was to absorb some of Ilya Musin's technique, which, to grossly oversimplify, is based on Wagnerian 'melos' and finding 'the ideal gesture' and never, ever lapsing into vertical, ictus-driven conducting.) The Russian musicians played not right on the beat, nor as off the beat as they do in Dresden or Amsterdam, but somewhere in the crack, on the back side of the beat. They did this, it must be said, absolutely together. It took some getting used to. For that reason, I thought the best teacher in the whole bunch was Sian Edwards, now running the program at the Royal Academy of Music. Musin called her his best student. She was extremely helpful in bridging the gap between the Germanic, beat-driven Max Rudolf/Hermann Scherchen way most of us had been taught and the much more 'between the beats' Musin approach. The Russian men were quite dogmatic about things being too slow, too fast, etc., whereas Edwards sides with Bernstein, teaching that it's intimately personal and connected to one's own pulse/heart rate.
I can only assume from the above post that Korchmar, Gribanov, Proskuryna, and Edwards are no longer involved. If so, this is a great shame. I would encourage everyone to take any opportunity to study with Korchmar or Edwards especially.
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