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The Team: |
Day 1 Tuesday (4/6/99) What a remarkable day! I awoke at about 5 am., my body still making the adjustment to Budapest time (10 hours ahead of Mountain Time). Don woke up about the same time. We both were excited in anticipation of today’s events. I had some bread, juice and yogurt for breakfast after which we started to work on the final corrections. While Don worked to finish correcting the score, I worked on correcting the parts. Rich went through all the parts and made sure all pages were there and in correct order. When Don finished with the score he helped with parts. We finished up just in time. At 11:00 Szidonia arrived bringing pastries. David arrived shortly after and we jumped in his little car and headed for downtown Budapest. We stopped and exchanged some currency, the rate being 230 forints/dollar that day. I traded in $45 and ended up with 10,517 forints. After this stop we continued to the Matav Music House. This building is about 6 years old and is located on the Pest side of the Danube. It’s a very modern practice/recording studio and houses the Matav Hungarian Symphony. The recording room is hexagon in shape with baffles built into the walls for different acoustic adjustments. The sound of the room is excellent. |
Our first duty was to meet with the conductor and sound engineers to discuss the plan for the day. Don had emailed the midi files containing the click track previous to our trip.
While Istvan and Balint worked on getting that up and running, Don and I met with Matyas Antal, the conductor, to make him aware of our changes to the score. This included a few cut measures (final film frame adjustments) and notes that we had changed in the parts but did not have time to change in the score.
At about 2:30 David showed up with lunch, open faced sandwiches covered with all sorts of delectable toppings. The musicians had been drifting in slowly, some practicing their parts (our first opportunity to hear what we had been working on for months), and at precisely 3:00 we started the session.
Immediately we could tell that these were
talented players. It took about 2 takes for them to become comfortable with the first cue
and with Don’s style of writing. But as soon as they figured out the direction of the
music, they played beautifully, especially nailing the big Romantic sections. The
orchestra has a slightly darker sound than American orchestras. Don
attributed that to the tuning used in European orchestras. A majority of the musicians are
fairly young. Istvan (the engineer) had a very relaxed rapport with the conductor (Antal)
and players. You could tell they had all worked together on many recording projects. He
has a great ear and made some wonderful suggestions to the orchestra. All of this time
Szidonia was
communicating Don's and my wishes with amazing fluency. She is a remarkable woman,
knowledgeable in music as well as communication. I suggested several scoring changes which
Don really liked and which came naturally to me. I am earning my keep.
On several cues we had to reduce the orchestration,
it being too heavy or unclear. Don and I had discussed this possibility while he was
composing and I putting the score in Finale, deciding that it would be easier to score a
little heavy and to drop out instruments in the session rather than add them. So our plan
was working. We also had a few wrong notes which glaringly stated themselves. All of these
changes were taken in stride and handled quickly by the conductor and orchestra. The horns
seemed to be cut more often than any other instrument and there was joking and laughter
about them liking us for reducing their workload.
Every hour the orchestra had an 8 minute break so we would get up and walk around or just talk about how great the orchestra was playing. We listened to one cue and were amazed at the quality of the recording. They are running the snake into a Yamaha Pro Mix 1 and sending stereo outs to a DAT deck and into Pro Tools. Around 7:00 jet lag hit me hard. The session lasted until 10:00. The musicians voted for going an extra hour so that the Thursday session would be shorter. We completed about 24 minutes of music (25 cues) today in 7 hours. This was much better than we anticipated for the first day, taking into account adaptations by everyone for a new project. After the session David and Szidonia took us back to the apartment. They both said that there were very few notes that needed to be corrected compared to even those parts from pieces that had had months to be composed and scrutinized. So our diligence in proofing has paid off. At the apartment we went over the day’s activities and accomplishments. We were all very tired. Everyone we have met so far has been gracious, friendly, and extremely professional.
