Nutcracker Season

The opera season just ended, and San Francisco Opera's Ring Cycle won't come around until next summer. I'll be spending the next six months looking behind the scenes when I can, and watching other music, theater, and dance performances. There are wonderful overlaps in the arts, especially in the Bay Area. But this post may be the first time anyone has linked the fearsome Richard Wagner with the Nutcracker.

That's because my French-horn-playing friend Bill performs with both the SF Opera and San Francisco Ballet orchestras. Two days after the season-ending opera, he began playing for the ballet's beautiful Nutcracker, which runs through December 27. I see it, live or on public television, almost every year.

I first met William Klingelhoffer when I went to the opera house to ask him about playing Wagner, whose operas are the world's longest (see August 3, 2010 post). With another horn player, Bill leads the opera orchestra's French horn section. As I explained a while back, Wagner demands eight French horns for the Ring--as opposed to the normal four--so when Bill is first horn, he's head of a section that includes four horn players who don't normally perform with his orchestra. He says it's like being a baseball pitcher, who's mindful of the whole game but also has to narrow his focus to simply getting those fastballs over the plate. Bill has to concentrate on making a big sound with all those other horns as well as on playing solos.

But a ball player sits in the dugout a lot. With Wagner, the horn functions as both woodwind and brass--a part of two sections of the orchestra--"so we're playing all the time," says Bill. "You have to pace yourself, like a pitcher paces himself over the game. You need something in reserve; I mean, the first act of Gotterdammerung is something like an hour and 45 minutes by itself."

So the two-hour-long Nutcracker is a piece of cake or candy (easy for me to say), although Bill knows how to challenge himself. "You know how a baseball player hits 'for the cycle,' meaning he hits a single, double, triple, and home run in the same game? Last year I played Nutcracker for the cycle: I played all four horn parts--first, second, third, and fourth--on various days in the same run!"

Bill says he's up to about 700 performances of Nutcracker all told. And you gotta keep things interesting. But he's sticking with first horn this year. "I'm imagining a more Zen approach: Nutcracker as meditation. Ohhhhhhmmmmmmmm....."




Nutcracker photo c Erik Tomasson, SF Ballet
Photo of Bill: me