It was 1990 when Steven Braunstein first moved to the Bay Area, with his wife and his newborn son, to take a job as the San Francisco Symphony’s contrabassoonist. He was already an experienced orchestral musician, having done a 10-year stint with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra that he thought would be permanent. But the San Francisco offer was too good to turn down.
三十多年后，6月21日星期二，布劳恩斯坦宣布退休。
It’s been a good long run. Across the seasons, Braunstein has performed thememorable contrabassoon solosin pieces by Ravel and Holst, as well as the more standard ensemble work in music by Beethoven, Brahms and Mahler. He gave the 2002 world premiere of“Urban Legend,”a concerto composed for him by then-Music DirectorMichael Tilson Thomas。他演奏了室内音乐节目和教育音乐会。
在很大程度上,他做了伙伴关系with the same musicians, year after year — because Braunstein is far from alone in being a lifer. A job with an orchestra like the San Francisco Symphony is often something that stretches across the decades.
If you read personnel rosters as assiduously as I do (mostly for information, and also every now and then to tide me through a dull stretch of a concert), you begin to get a deeply intuitive sense of an orchestra as a landscape that shifts very gradually. The same names recur from season to season, anchoring different parts of the orchestra as more transient figures come and go.
斯蒂芬·保尔森（Stephen Paulson）是布劳恩斯坦（Braunstein）大部分职业生涯中大部分时间的首席巴松手，自1977年以来就占领了他的职位 - 长寿的壮举使他继续保持温柔，清晰和智慧的比赛变得更加惊讶。
Principal horn Robert Ward joined the orchestra in 1980. Much of the cello section, including Barbara Andres, Jill Rachuy Brindel, David Goldblatt, Carolyn McIntosh and Anne Pinsker, showed up around the same time.
音乐会大师亚历山大·巴兰特奇克（Alexander Barantschik）has been with the orchestra for more than 20 years, and I still think of him as the new kid on the block.
In this respect, the orchestral world is like a throwback to the postwar employment landscape, when it was not uncommon to spend your entire career in a single job, or at least working for a single company. It’s a contrast to many of the more fast-paced contemporary arenas (tech, finance and so on) where people are apt to switch jobs before they’ve figured out where the restrooms are.
其中一些是基本供需的非个人功能。鉴于该国顶级交响乐团数量有限，空缺很少，而且机动性受到限制。每次有一个主要职位的空缺（如目前在旧金山的长笛和大提琴）的开放状态时，它将成为大新闻，并取得深远的结果。
But it’s also true that the stability of an orchestra contributes to the consistency and character of its artistry. The ensemble as a whole, and each individual section within it, creates a distinctive musical style that is ideally a reflection of long and close collaboration.
“It develops out of respect and trust and listening,” Braunstein told me during a recent phone conversation. “It also involves everybody being able to let go of any preconceptions about the way a piece or a musical phrase ‘should’ go.”
即使有问题的作品是一项标准作品（例如贝多芬交响曲或莫扎特协奏曲），这是事实的确如此。总是有细微差别是可以动态处理的，玩家彼此了解得越好，他们从共同策略的曲目中汲取了更多。
大提琴家玛格丽特·泰特（Margaret Tait）说：“乐团确实是一支团队，我们互相融合。”他在交响曲45年后于2021年退休。“这是聆听同事在做什么，并根据您周围发生的事情实时将作品的部分放在一起的问题。”
当这些协作习惯足够深刻时，它们可能会跨越令人惊讶的较大差距。布劳恩斯坦（Braunstein）在西班牙的一个管弦乐队休假一年后回到旧金山时，引用了事件。他发现自己与长期的同事，巴松大战罗伯·威尔（Rob Weir）坐在一起，他因受伤而错过了比赛时间。
“这实际上是我们的第一次音乐会，”布劳恩斯坦回忆道。“我们必须一致演奏这种甜美的旋律，我们完全在一起，以至于我们每个人都认为另一个人没有玩过。这是对我们多年来发展的一切的奇妙重申。”
At the moment, the San Francisco Symphony is at a sharp inflection point, in ways that are both exciting and potentially worrisome. The arrival ofEsa-Pekka Salonenas music director signals a shift for the orchestra, both in the repertoire it tackles and the aesthetic priorities that will guide its performances of that music.
同时，乐团面临着相对较大的人员营业额，部分原因是决定大流行关闭是退休时时机的成员人数。因此，即使Salonen有机会与分享他的艺术前景的音乐家（Thomas在他25年任职期间他之前所做的事情）中库存，这在几十年前的一些深厚的大学传统中也会发生破裂。
“This is one of the reasons I feel bad about leaving now, when there are so many openings,” Braunstein said. “Because the culture of how the orchestra plays needs to be nurtured, so that the good things we’ve achieved over the last 30 or 40 years won’t evaporate.”
He’s not too worried though (and neither am I). Change is good, or at least inevitable. The orchestra’s deeper and more tenacious traditions — musical excellence, a spirit of adventure, a lively responsiveness to artistic stimuli — promise to continue unabated.
“I think we’re lucky here in San Francisco,” Braunstein said, “because whatever personal or internal issues we may have get put aside as soon as we walk out onstage. There are very strong personalities at work, but we have never let that get in the way of the music making.”