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The RV Week with Phil Kates and Friends (May 15 - 21, 2004)

Saturday, May 15 - Introduction and Day One: "In the beginning ..."

Introduction
To embark on transportation on an orchestra tour away from the safety and relative ease of group travel (baaa, baaa, mooo, mooo) is not always easy, and in the case of orchestra touring, the "Road Less Traveled." For Phil Kates, second violinist, the adventurer, music educator, and individualist extraordinaire, this is a way of life.

I have found this out on several tours now with The Philadelphia Orchestra: in Vietnam where Phil organized chamber groups to perform at an orphanage (How I remember borrowing a xylophone from a Ho Chi Minh City Conservatory, and arranging rags for the group; and how Phil and I arranged tunes deep into the night prior to the orphanage performance.); in London where Phil was filmed for Music From the Inside Out as he performed and interacted lovingly with special needs children; in a previous RV week with the Orchestra touring through the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida, performing with him at schools, churches, and children's museums along the way; and in various adventures of travel in South America, southern France, and Spain, often showing up to concerts and travel deadlines just in time (much to Maestro Sawallisch's consternation).

The Europe Tour of 2004 with new Music Director, Christoph Eschenbach, is no different. We just finished a week of RV rental travel through Germany and Austria and back. The trip was appropriately adventuresome, filled with lots of humor, some buffoonery (as my dear wife calls it), some wonderful vistas, tastes, sounds, songs, and some danger and deliverance.

We will proceed with a day-by-day account:

Day One "In the beginning ..."
We had played a national radio broadcast concert in Braunschweig following an overnight sleeper train from Paris. Phil had promised me, after I bemoaned the fact that I had failed to bring a guitar along for the RV travel - something I had missed on our Southeastern United States RV trip back in 2000 - that divine Providence might provide a guitar for the trip.

Sure enough, in Braunschweig at a small music shop, Phil found a delightful 7/8 size classical guitar with a wonderfully sweet sound and intonation disposition, and relatively cheaply for Euro prices. (It will later be a gift for his sweet, folk-singing sister in Vermont.) We bounded off for an early morning train to Frankfurt, bags in hand and guitar on my back. We were set for the road!

At Frankfurt we trained to the airport and then cabbed to a village nearby to pick up the RV. And she was a grand big machine, a multi-wheeler that looked the size of bus or mid-sized semi truck. (Alas, her honking horn sounded more like the Road Runner "beep-beep" rather than your typical low truck horn.) Phil had gotten the correct international license to operate her. Laars and Sigfried at the rental place gave us instructions on how to operate her systems. (It was then that we learned the intricacies of emptying gray water and black water in a European camper system - yuck). We got our maps and directions for Frankfurt, and headed out. We drove straight into the city to get our bearings, find the Alte Oper Concert Hall, and see if there were any parking spaces to be found for the massive vehicle. After seeing some potential for parking the RV at the concert hall (next to the orchestra trucks) - this was a strategy at each concert location, to leave that city from the concert hall following the concert to get a head start on the next leg - we decided to explore the city a bit driving in the RV. It became a theme that we would get stuck in some small road in every city and have to back our way out of a jam, whereby one of us would jump out of the cab and play traffic cop (in German - ach!) while the other maneuvered the reverse.

We would have two concerts in Frankfurt, so after realizing that finding a place to park and sleep in downtown Frankfurt was out of the question, we found our way to a suggested Camping RV site on the edge of the city limits. It was a pleasant place with some trees and a stream. We found a choice spot where we could have shade and the stream nearby. After securing the spot we drove the RV to test our abilities on small suburban village roads and find a grocery store. We found a mini-sized, Sam's Club warehouse-style grocery store and dove in with grocery carts to stock up for the week.

Now you really know someone by their eating habits, and though I am not quite as adventurous an eater as Phil, we discovered after embarking with our own separate carts that we had duplicates of almost every item - down to the olives!!

The store was closing in a matter of minutes so we had a lot of food, and in doubles! We rolled back to the campsite, set up camp, unrolled the attached canopy awning from the RV, ate lunch, and relaxed - this is why we're doing this!

While Phil tried out some of the RV beds by napping, I sat out under the awning listening on headphones to Shostakovich's 10th, which we were about to play for the first time on tour. As the 3rd movement piccolo floated and chirped to a dainty ending, bits of milkweed were floating down from the gently windy afternoon sky. It was one perfect moment of many to come.

Phil and I roused ourselves from this dream state, to take a very convenient tram-subway car into the city which let us off right at the Alte Oper where we partook of a fine concert. Gil Shaham played his butt off in the Brahms, and our Shostakovich 10th, though quite on the edge - our rehearsal of the work in Philly, ten days earlier, was brief - was a satisfying and exciting rendition. Good crowd, nice Ruslan overture encore, done.

Now we were joined on our return to the RV home by Kim Fisher (principal second violin) and her 11-year-old son Cory. Having an 11-year-old's sense of adventure added to ours as we rolled their suitcases from the tram into camp. After situating them in their back bedroom, we all decided we were hungry. So, in what became a regular occurrence, we made a late night meal on the fine kitchen appliances that came with the RV. Kim, though admitting to not being a great cook felt compelled to lead the dinner making, but we all chipped in. Dinner was a fine pasta with pomodoro marinara and red pesto mixed in with lots of olives as well - yum. And Phil mixed an excellent salad. Before chowing down we said grace by sharing individual thanks around the table: Cory, for the RV and good food; Kim, for good friends; myself, for a sense of home away from home; and Phil, for all the good working out of details in the first day, and in days to come.

After dinner, dishes, and some gentle guitar tunes, we were off to sleep at around 3 a.m.

Don Liuzzi, Principal Timpani