WELCOME!

Welcome to Conducting Electricity. Since September 2014 I’ve been writing for the Florida Times-Union, keeping everyone up to date with what’s happening at the Jacksonville Symphony. These posts are reproduced with permission.

I also write about what’s going on in my life as a performing musician and the music I love, while trying to demystify my strange profession of conducting. I love to hear from you, so please leave comments. If there’s a question you’re dying to ask, or a topic you’d like to know more about, please send me a note and I’ll address it in a future post. Enjoy!

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Paris, Adés and Dante

Posted on Courtney Lewis

This weekend, I head to France to spend six weeks conducting a very exciting new ballet with music by the English composer, Thomas Adès, for the Opéra national de Paris at the famous Palais Garnier. Inspired by Dante Alighieri’s 14th century epic poem, “The Divine Comedy,” “The Dante Project” is a rarity in new music: a piece that lasts the whole evening. Clocking in at 90 minutes, “Dante” is a ballet in three acts, each depicting a locale of the afterlife: Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory) and Paradiso (Heaven). With choreography by Wayne McGregor, the acclaimed British choreographer, the ballet made its debut at the Royal Ballet in Covent Garden, London, last year and now enters the repertoire of the Paris Opera Ballet with performances throughout May.

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Getting ready for “The Magic Flute”

Posted on Courtney Lewis

On April 28 and 30, the Jacksonville Symphony will present one of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s most beloved and famous operas, “The Magic Flute”. The two performances will be the culmination of several years of planning and preparation, and the Symphony’s largest production of the season. This is the story of what goes into staging an opera in Jacoby Symphony Hall. Before our last opera production, “La bohème”, I met with Tony Nickle, Vice President of Artistic Administration at the Symphony. We plan all the classical concerts together. We’d been delighted with the success of our first opera production in Jacksonville, Mozart’s “Don Giovanni”, and we were keen to build on that momentum. I wanted to perform more Mozart; he is, after all, the greatest of

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