M, is that you sharing the principal's stand?
Yes.
Is this M right here? (second farthest to the right)
No. M is not in that shot. The first desk was further over to the right (or rather, the front of the stage) and when they shot the bass section, most of the time they selected that angle with the other three desks, maybe they thought it looked more "impressive" because there were more players in the shot, or maybe because they felt me and my stand partner were not beautiful enough
Well, she is a quite a good looking lady, I guess, so it must just have been me they didn't want to film
Generally, the UCSD TV guys (probably students from some "media" classes) and whoever directed and edited this don't really seem to have a clear idea of how to film an orchestra. They almost exclusively cut to the bass section when we played slow, quiet stuff. But there is also some real "action" stuff in there which of course looks much more interesting, especially when it comes to the basses where dynamic music directly translates into dynamic movement (or rather, the other way around...).
At the beginning of the second movement,
we had the main theme, but they filmed the horns which had just accompanying figures
You can't really hear that so well on youtube either, but in the DVD I have, you can actually hear us much better (and, of course, not just us basses, the whole orchestra sounds much better than here on youtube).
But you aren't missing much visually here. M looked like shit that weekend, seriously. I had been through 3 straight months of very brutal non-stop stress at work, lots of difficult and complicated projects which my company really fucked up, bad planning, bad scheduling, lots of mistakes, a lot of stupid shit and nerve terror. So the night before the concert, or rather in the early morning hours, after weeks of battling with myself, I had emailed them my notice which meant not just giving up that particular job, it also meant that I would have to pack my stuff and go back to Europe since my work visa was tied to that job. It also meant giving up everything I had built up there over 5 years, friends, and the La Jolla Symphony which was "just" a hobby for me but had still become important for me. Especially since I had spent 4 years training the bass section and they had very drastically improved and that concert was the first with our new music director Stephen Schick who is very cool and very competent, and with him, the future looks very bright for this orchestra...
All that was really hard to give up - but I have very strong principles, so I didn't have a choice...from my point of view
So this concert turned into my farewell concert and watching the video actually makes me really sad
Anyway, there are a few places in which I am in the frame, from a merciful distance
, like around 36:00:
