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Welcome to your source for information of special interest to our Theatricals Customers. You may choose from any of the articles to the right:
By Bruce Pomahac, Director of Music You're going to produce a musical, and you've turned to the back of The R&H Theatre Library catalogue to check the instrumental breakdown. The title you have in mind calls for an orchestra of thirty. Suddenly your heart sinks. You've loved this score for years, and the sound of the Overture still thrills you each time you hear the original cast recording, but thirty players! You've got room for twenty, a budget for ten, and if you're lucky, a 50/50 chance of finding five who can make your dates. What are you going to do? Relax. Robert Russell Bennett, Hans Spialek, and Don Walker, the brilliant orchestrators who worked for Rodgers, Berlin and Kern in Broadway's golden era have already addressed your concerns. The arrangements they created had to function for the large compliment of players that would be engaged for the New York production as well as for whatever reduced instrumentation would be required on the road and in subsequent (smaller) revivals. By applying the classic rules of harmony and voicing, cross cueing and much musical ingenuity, these instrumental masters fashioned orchestrations that can sound balanced, blended and full even when performed by a handful of players. I often tell customers and colleagues who call with questions about instrumentation that what matters most is not the number of but the quality of the players available to them. Bring in the very best musicians you can find, fit, project over and afford. Then make sure you're (at least and hopefully more than) meeting the aural expectations of your audience. That's the right number of players for your orchestra. |
