What I Wear Onstage
So I’ve been trying out a new outfit for summer concerts.
I wore it at the Hollywood Bowl at the Sgt. Pepper’s concert surrounded by rock-and-rollers, and it was no big deal. After all, I wasn’t wearing a captain’s hat, sunglasses, turtleneck sweaters, etc. like some of my colleagues were. But when I wore the same outfit last week to conduct a SF Symphony show w/ Bernadette Peters, I was the funkiest dressed besides Ms. Peters herself. This caused a mild stir, and an amusing description by Meredith Brody at sfweekly.com:
“The appearance of Edwin Outwater, resident conductor of the San Francisco Symphony from 2001—2006 and now Music Director of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony in Ontario, Canada, in a white shirt and dark tie, and close-fitting black vest over shiny grey trousers with prominent back pockets (needing only sleeve garters to evoke a riverboat gambler), elicited appreciative murmurs from the audience – something like wolf-whistles pitched so high that only a dog could hear them.”
Whenever I wear anything slightly different, I’m sure to get a mention in the paper. What does this mean? I think it means people are tired of tails, but are also slightly nervous when something new comes out, like the audience reaction described above.
Anyway, I’ll continue to play around with wearing different things in the right context. One thing I will not wear is the ghastly asian-mystic Nehru thing that so many conductors insist on wearing. Only two people should be allowed to wear this: Seiji Ozawa, who does the asian mystic thing very well, and Christoph Eschenbach, who looks like a starship captain which is also cool (”engage!”)