Strasbourg

From the first day of my tour with the Tehran Symphony Orchestra (TSO) it was clear that I was in for an incredibly profound experience, rich with culture, politics, and especially music. I arrived in Strasbourg still with no idea what to expect and still barely a clue about what was going on. The moment it really began for me was when the musicians first poured through the door and flooded onto the stage for the dress rehearsal. Our mere handful of French musicians was swallowed up by 150 Iranian musicians – men with darkened, eastern features and exotically beautiful women wearing black headscarves, all speaking Persian – I suddenly felt myself immersed in a world that I realized I knew nothing about. The differences between our societies goes back as far as the Roman and Persian Empires, so that even in recountings of history they have always been the foreigners, and I have no basis for understanding their world. In those first moments, we had no idea yet that the wordless and overwhelmed smiles we exchanged with our neighbors would soon blossom into much deeper friendships, and that the music we would make together would forge connections between us.

The night before I left, I came down with a sudden attack of bronchitis. Fortunately, I immediately got on medication and overdosed on lots of good vitamins, so it never became serious. By the morning of the first day, I still hadn't been given clear directions about where I was supposed to be when, or how to catch the train to Strasbourg. So I teamed up with Claire, an oboist also coming from Paris, and we made our own plans. We met at the station and bought our tickets for a train at 11:30am, and once we were in Strasbourg we navigated our way to the concert venue completely by ourselves. This whole project has happened so fast and seems so completely surreal that I suspected when we walked up to the welcome desk at the concert hall and told them we were with the TSO they would look at us like we were crazy and we would realize the whole thing was just a dream. But they simply smiled and indicated where to go, “Oh yes, of course, door A.” On the other side of door A, sure enough, we found stagehands setting up an orchestra's worth of chairs and other props.

The first thing I did was inspect the harps. We had been given two brand-new Aoyamas (the Japanese mark), model Orpheus 47. They were in very good condition. The strings were spaced wider at the top and angled like a Lyon&Healy, but it didn't turn out to matter for the music that we would be playing. We were given our parts a matter of minutes before the first downbeat – just enough time to glance through and decide that the pedal-changes could be sightread. The harp parts were well-written, thankfully, and not too technically difficult. The main challenge would be to become familiar with the style and the structure of the music so that we could recognize our cues for where to come in after 230-some-odd measures of rest. (I will write a post dedicated to the symphony to more completely describe all its musical characteristics.) I was playing second harp to Marianne Eva Lecler, who turned out to be a very solid orchestral harpist and very easy to work with. I think I hadn't heard of her before now because she lives in Bordeaux and is not actually based in Paris. Quadrilingual in French, Spanish, Russian and English, Marianne has a fierce French temper and a tendancy to complain bitterly about every tiny thing until you'd think the world must be coming to an end. But in concert she is extremely supportive and clear-headed. I appreciated how she would indicate to me where we were when we were counting measures and how she would always offer me a little silent applause after we'd pulled off a passage well.

Getting started was rough. The rehearsal was mostly conducted in Persian, with a few sentences in French throw in from time to time to help us figure out where we were. I spent the first minutes of the rehearsal consulting with the double-bass player behind me, in broken English, to try to catch up on all the alterations to the score that had been made during their first rehearsals in Iran (cut measures, corrected typos, etc.). Even though we were finally there in person, the organization of the operation was not necessarily clearer than before. Most things we wanted to know, we still had to go figure out for ourselves.

The symphony starts with what is essentially a duet for flute and harps, and the conductor had us play the first page over and over again so many times that if we had rehearsed the whole symphony like that, it would have taken several days. Eventually we moved on, with only a couple more hitches. As first oboist of a symphony written by an oboist-composer, Claire's part was particularly important, which she fully appreciated only when the flutist suddenly remembered to give her the page with her cadenza, two measures before she had to play it! In this way, we got our fingers around the music before we had to perform it in public for the first time.

Our dress rehearsal went for three hours, without a break, ending with just enough time for us to change, but not to eat, before the concert. The house was full. The symphony was received warmly with a standing ovation – something I rarely see here in France – and followed by an encore of Brahms. Already, though, there were signs that our tour was not to be solely about the music. Video cameras were aimed on us at all times, from all directions; interviews were conducted in the lobby before and after the concert; and green swaths of cloth waved from the audience forshadowed the political demonstrations that would come to dominate our concerts.

Clambering into our buses afterward, we gobbled down KFC that was delivered by taxi and handed out to us for dinner. There was no real chance to see Strasbourg, since our hotel was in the outskirts of town and we would be driving on to Belgium early the next morning. This is the nature of orchestra tours. We were, however, treated to luxurious suites at the hotel, free WiFi, and a hotel bar that showed a steady stream of Michael Jackson music videos on flatscreen TVs. Lingering downstairs until way too late at night, we made our first bonds of French solidarity and Iranian exchange. I went to bed with my heart still pounding.

Article in the Tehran Times.