ESSEN, Germany — For the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, another day in Europe means yet another rehearsal.
On a bright, breezy afternoon in Hamburg last week, T-shirt clad musicians trickled into the famous Elbphilharmonie concert hall, the tallest building in the German city of about 600,000, nestled along the Elbe River. On the ninth day of a sweeping tour spanning nine cities in three European countries, the orchestra's hard work had already drawn acclaim for the musicians' "velvet delicacy and sledge-hammer violence," as one critic in Hamburg wrote.
Even before the first player took a seat to practice yet again, Lisa Gedris was hurrying about onstage — placing each musician's sheet music on the right stand.
She times herself to clock efficiency. "Fourteen minutes today," she said Thursday. "It should never take that long."
Gedris, the orchestra's librarian, is an essential cog — one of many in the vast machine of the tour. Bringing about 90 musicians and well over 100 instruments overseas takes years of planning, with schedules and travel plans timestamped down to the minute.
This adventure costs more than $2.5 million, a hefty portion of which goes to a touring company — essentially a travel agency — to help arrange the details as well as line up the trucking companies and cargo brokers to get the larger instruments and equipment in the right places at the right times.
The purpose: to show off a city's orchestra in all its might and majesty on the world stage.
Pittsburgh's orchestra is delivering, with conductor Manfred Honeck drawing new depths of sound and color from his musicians, who seem energized and inspired by new acoustic spaces and by the unanimously enthusiastic response from European audiences.
Between the concerts, it's all about logistics.
It takes dozens of people to keep things running smoothly, from security officers to stage hands to chaperones. There are flights and trains to catch. Dozens of instruments to keep track of (none lost this trip so far, although musicians have plenty of horror stories from years past about instruments left in taxis and hotel rooms). Buses from hotels — where the sounds of flutes and violins and trombones waft through the halls throughout the day — to concert halls and back.
And there's sheet music to transport and prepare.
Solo for librarian
Typically the orchestra employs a pair of librarians working together, but it sends only one on tour. As librarian, Gedris is the only silent musician in the orchestra apart from Honeck. She studied trumpet with a former PSO trumpet player, who happened to be married to a former PSO librarian. She started full time as a librarian in 2004.
Since then, she's been responsible for purchasing and maintaining the thousands of pieces of sheet music that the Pittsburgh orchestra needs to perform its concerts.
That adds up to tens of thousands of pages to watch over each year.
If a single musician doesn't have the right music or begins with the wrong piece, valuable rehearsal time is lost. In a concert, the effects could be more devastating.
Backstage at each concert venue on tour are three nondescript, bulky metal trunks, each weighing in excess of 400 pounds, filled with music by Tchaikovsky and Mahler and even parts for music from the video game franchise Final Fantasy.
The trunks are labeled with the orchestra's logo and bright orange arrows indicating right side up. They are the heaviest pieces of equipment that the orchestra is transporting from city to city.
Fortunately, they're on wheels.
Before the rehearsal at the Elbphilharmonie, musicians stopped by the trunks to return music they had "checked out" to practice still more in their spare time. Gedris shuffled the pages back where they belonged with lightning speed.
"I know how difficult being a player is, so it's my job to make to keep the books and library as smooth and low stress as possible," she said backstage, busily checking trunks and equipment.
Marking books?
Each piece of music in the trunks and in the orchestra's home library has its own history and handwritten markings.
Some belong to the orchestra. Gedris estimated the symphony owns in excess of 2,000 works in its home library, some purchased as far back as the 1940s. Such parts are steeped in an orchestra's history.
Other pieces are still under copyright and are owned by publishing companies. Of these, sometimes there's a specific copy reserved specially for the Pittsburgh Symphony. These parts also have handwritten markings from the conductors and players that conform to the orchestra's style of playing.
If Honeck likes to slow down a certain passage in the Mahler symphony the orchestra is playing on tour, for example, it will likely be penciled in to all of the musicians' parts from concerts past.
Sometimes, rented pieces come in clean, but sometimes they have markings from other orchestras that must be edited.
During rehearsals and concerts, even in Hamburg, Gedris spends her time backstage preparing the music for the season. This involves adding markings like dynamic or tempo markings a conductor may have requested or copying an extra page in to make awkward page turns in the middle of passages easier.
It also involves "bowings," or markings indicating which direction string players should move their bows to promote unity in sound. These must be approved by principal string players in advance of the first rehearsal.
"You can't get a degree in this. You really have to learn from another librarian," Gedris said.
As the musicians slowly filtered into the 2,000-seat Elbphilharmonie on Thursday to prepare for that evening's nearly sold-out concert (tickets ranged from about $33 to about $175), they occasionally stopped by to return their borrowed parts.
Sometimes, Gedris called out to ask someone to check something — "Anne! I have some bowings for you!" she called as the orchestra's principal cellist, Anne Martindale Williams, walked past on her way to the stage.
Williams pretended not to hear at first as a joke — checking bowings can be tedious. Then she looped back with a smile.
"Lisa's absolutely excellent. We couldn't do this without her," Williams said later.
Four kinds of tape
Gedris is a stickler for preparation, particularly during tours.
The first of her three crates contains all music for the tour and a couple of extra folders marked "do not touch!" in case of emergency. The sheet music that she places on musicians' stands is in folders labeled by instrument and position and includes all pieces of music for the tour. There's also a schedule explaining what music will be played on what day.
The second crate contains a complete set of backup parts for every instrument — in case anything goes awry, because you never know — as well as full sets of music for a couple of pieces — in case the orchestra needs to change its program on the fly.
"We've got 'Nimrod' from the 'Enigma Variations' packed in case someone important dies and we want to play a tribute," she explained. (Orchestras often use the soulful tune from "Nimrod" as an "in memoriam" piece.)
That third crate contains music for the upcoming season, which launches with a gala concert Sept. 17 back in Heinz Hall. Even on tour, she's preparing for work back home, although the orchestra won't rehearse it until after it returns on Sept. 5.
Gedris keeps a "concert black" dress hanging in one of the trunks, required attire for performances when she goes onstage to change music.
And there's more, including four different kinds of tape for repairing pages and for giving musicians something to grip. Those high-speed page turns while playing concerts can be perilous.
A missed page turn can leave a player silent. Gedris reported that one musician had mentioned that her pages stuck together during a turn at the first Elphilharmonie concert earlier in the week — The librarian applied a different kind of tape that fixed the issue immediately.
Backstage before a concert last week, Gedris sat alone at a table, head down, focused, meticulously copying markings onto a piece called "Starburst" by American composer Jessie Montgomery. Just a normal day, except with the Elbe River and a glorious city skyline visible from a nearby window.
It was very quiet.
The musician-turned-librarian prefers that to keeping the new recording of, say, Beethoven's "Pastoral" symphony playing in the background.
"It would just slow me down," she said.
