'Music from the Inside Out,' a portrait of the Philadelphia Orchestra

by B.L.C. ©2005

Daniel Anker, director; Tom Hurwitz, photographer. Auditioned October 1, 2005.

“What is Music?” That’s the question this documentary film opens with. Since its
principal characters are real musicians and not professional actors you might expect some profound answers, but what you get is a mishmash of responses, from “What a Question!” to “Hmmm, it’s a commitment for life.” [Note that all of the quotes we cite here are approximations.] Mr. Anker’s intent, no doubt, was to elicit comments that come from deep within these extraordinary musicians, and the “Inside” element of “Inside Out” is what makes this a fascinating film, even if we found the “Out” a lot less convincing.

Mr. Anker is a film director, not a musician, and that alone somehow lifts the
curtain between him and his “actors.” He’s not there to chat about last night’s concert or the new union contract or the conductor’s beat. He opts for spontaneity over design, always trying to catch his actors unawares. Exemplary camera work is necessary here to create the impression of men and women enrapt in their art. And since they are all different in terms of life experience and cultural derivation, we should not expect responses that can be pigeonholed and made to fit a predetermined script. So much the better.

We meet a musician who finds that riding his motorcycle over curvy roads helps him through the twists and turns of complex music scores. Violinist and sometimes painter Judy Geist attributes her feelings for music to a form of synesthesia common to other musicians, the sensation of colors produced by certain sounds. Still another member, hornist Adam Unsworth, has discovered that training for and running in the local marathon builds in him a determination to perform at his best every single day no matter how low he may feel.

Concertmaster David Kim gets a good chunk of footage. He tells of how his Korean mother drove him to become a great concert violinist. But she died when he was 14 and his “light” went out for a long time. He could not find solo performance opportunities in the big cities and was about to give it all up when he saw a movie that inspired him to succeed; he then went on to join the Philadelphia Orchestra and become more than a player—he’s an organizational
linchpin.

It’s understandable why Anker is not interested in cataloging the music being heard on screen or the technical aspects of music. But some of the scenes are put in for obvious reasons. Too much classical music might lose an average audience, so he gives us a clip of fiddlers Jason and Zachary DePue (presumably
brothers) joining a bluegrass ensemble and having some fun. Or of trombonist, Nitzan Haroz, developing a love affair with Latin dance music and hooking up with a salsa band. You can get profound about these doings or just accept it as an obvious part of a musician’s life. Along with the motorcycle driver and the marathon runner, these scenes might have been framed around the simple idea that symphony orchestra members need an artful break now and then, just a bit of, shall we say, bar relief.

The sequence in which Israeli born cellist Udi Bar-David teams up with Simon Shaheen, the Palestinian-born violinist and ud player, does not move us as it might have; it smacks too much of a gratuitous lesson in Apolitical Relations 101. And, though the scenes are attractive and the music-making quite winning, the street players doing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on the accordion and Bach “Badinerie” on tuned crystals (with icewater) are designed to let us in on a not so secret big secret: classical musicians recognize talent wherever it lurks. Bravo!

So this is a tribute to the inside of a symphony orchestra, the cogs in the wheel, not the driver. Don’t expect comments about the maestro. That’s for another time. But the talk we get is revealing. This reviewer may never hear the opening bassoon solo of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring the same way again, not after a comment like, “It sounds like a wounded bird ... you can hear the pain.” Musicians can get very specific about music like “Rite,” which they talk about more than any other piece. It being followed immediately by a clip from a performance of Tan Dun’s Concerto for String Orchestra, in which a bass player is required to grunt and groan, and then a bit in which the composer makes exotic vocal sounds in his Taoism, gives us the excuse to review this film as acceptable grist for the contemporary music mill. (We should not overlook the fact that, though “Rite” will be 100 years old on 2013, it is still as modern
as anything being written today, mainly because of its rhythmic energy and uncompromising dissonances.)

Yet the Philadelphians are still a classical orchestra in the pure sense of that word. David Kim may ask members to rise early and commune with nature while in Saratoga, to greet the day with the sounds and smells of “anticipation,”
and Oriental ideas are abundant because, like all orchestras today, the rosters are filled with players of Asian origin or derivation. But one feels we are hearing the real Schubert in his Ninth Symphony and, especially, his sumptuous Cello Quintet. Or Beethoven in his “Eroica” Symphony and noted overtures. Or Rimsky-Korsakov in Scheherezade. The same for Brahms’ First Symphony which ends the film. But here a problem asserts itself; the director is not sure how to end it and gives us the title crawl before the images and sounds of the work fade out leaving us to scratch our heads. What no bombastic finale? The “out” part of the title suffers from unclear direction and loose editing. But then, it’s still a movie, not a concert.

We hope the film will serve a useful purpose and do what many critics are saying it was designed to do—inspire our youth. Yet even in a movie house in open-minded and culturally upbeat Greenwich Village, we could hear groans and complaints as we filed out. Call it “bah relief?” Humbug! What the Dickens should you expect? Well, certainly something better than “ech!”