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What is your background?
Is it music history? Playwriting?
It has been a long road. I was an actress
in my 20s, I learned about theater from
standing on the stage and speaking, but
I was always thinking of dialogue, and
what it would be like to see something I
had written on the stage. I had no idea how
to get there. I did theater for a while, but
I’m six feet tall. It was hard to cast me. I
was the founder and artistic and managing director of two avant-garde theaters in
Manhattan. I worked as a journalist and
was doing playwriting on the side.
Then I was offered a full-time Oscar
Hammerstein scholarship with Tisch
School of the Arts as a playwright and lyricist. That was my commitment to writing
full time.
Theater
meets symphony
A Visit with the BSO’s Playwright-in-Residence
by Martha Thomas
I
n 2013, Didi Balle was appointed Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s
(BSO) playwright-in-residence, perhaps the first to hold such a title
for a major symphony orchestra. ¶ Balle’s Symphonic Plays™ are a
unique hybrid of theater and symphony that was born when she
penned CSI: Beethoven for the BSO in 2008. In that performance,
Music Director Marin Alsop conducted the orchestra in segments of
the composer’s oeuvre, while an actor, playing Ludwig, along with three
actual doctors (medical and PhDs), tried to puzzle out why the composer lost his hearing at an early age. ¶ Balle has two productions on the
BSO’s 2014–2015 season calendar, Shostakovich: Notes for Stalin (Nov.
14 & 15), originally commissioned by The Philadelphia Orchestra, and
the premiere of Tchaikovsky: Mad But for Music (Apr. 10 &11).
8 O v ertur e |
www. bsomusic .org
I understand you met Marin Alsop
years ago?
I worked with Marin in New York. Her
first orchestra, Concordia, commissioned
me to do write and direct “Radio Rhapsody,” a musical tribute to Paul Whiteman and his orchestrations. Rhapsody in
Blue was the centerpiece, which premiered
at Aeolian Hall, and the lens through
which it was told.
Where does the journalism come in?
I kept a bread-and-butter job working for
almost 13 years as a contributing editor
with the syndication department at The
New York Times. All these skills fed into
the symphonic plays.
What is the process of casting and
staging a symphonic play?
After I’ve written the piece and the music
is nearly finalized, I cast. I’ve been casting through Skype, and after I cast, I
send scripts and Skype-rehearse with the
actors, but, starting with the Tchaikovsky
piece in April, I will fly to Baltimore to
cast in person. It allows me to edit, to cut
what doesn’t work, to time. I welcome
the actors’ input. They’re very polite,
but when they have something to say, I
really listen.