It has been many months since I had the pleasure of writing this column, and a great deal has happened in the interim. You may remember we ended last season with performances from Wagner’s opera Götterdämmerung. This is the stuff conductors’ dreams are made of, so my summer began in tremendously high spirits. After a week unwinding in one of my favourite cities, Tel Aviv, I flew to Australia for two weeks with the Australian Youth Orchestra. Since it was to be my time visiting Australia, I arrived in Sydney a week before rehearsals began to spend time seeing the sights. Sydney Harbour is breath-taking, crowned by the iconic opera house. The British and Irish influence on Australian culture made everything strangely familiar, and I quickly fell in love with the warm and welcoming people.
The Australian Youth Orchestra is made up of the country’s finest young musicians many of whom are already performing with professional orchestras. Great youth orchestras have an irresistible energy: everyone is thrilled to be making music together and excited to be spending the summer with friends. The combination of the young musicians’ technical accomplishment and the generous amount of rehearsal time can result in performances that have a special brilliance and depth. This was certainly the case Down Under; it was thrilling to hear the orchestra master the challenges of Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiemand Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Danceswhile deepening my own interpretations of both pieces. After the concerts in Sydney we went on tour to Brisbane, by coincidence the hometown of Jacksonville’s associate conductor, Nathan Aspinall. It was a pleasure to be shown around the city by Nathan and chat about business at home.
After the concert in Brisbane I flew to England to attend my brother Adam’s wedding in a beautiful Tudor mansion in Surrey. Thence back to New York for my favourite summertime combination of the beach and score study on Fire Island. Once the season begins in September the concerts come one after another with alarming speed, so it’s important to prepare the music slowly away from the stage.
As many of you know, I grew up in Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland. I was fortunate to have an excellent music education at a state school. Even with the disgraceful cuts that the current British government has imposed on music education, it is still possible for students at most state schools to learn a musical instrument for little to no cost. The notion that music lessons are only for the rich and privileged – lamentably so often the case in America – hasn’t yet taken hold. In August I returned home to conduct the Ulster Youth Orchestra, an ensemble similar to the Australian, made up of the best young musicians from across Northern Ireland. This summer marked the orchestra’s 25thanniversary, and to celebrate we went on tour to Vienna and Bratislava, before a final triumphant concert in Belfast. We performed a piece by Hamilton Harty, a famous Northern Irish composer and conductor (notably of the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester), based on the Irish legend The Children of Lir. It’s an undervalued masterpiece that I’m planning to perform in Jacksonville. It gave me great pride to bring this music to Vienna, the Mecca of classical music, performing it with my compatriots right beside the Leopold Museum, the home of many of my favourite paintings by Egon Schiele.
I’m writing from Minneapolis, where it’s already close to freezing. For the next month I’m conducting a production of a new opera by Kevin Puts, Silent Night, which tells the story of the armistice between the French, German and British soldiers on Christmas Eve, 1914, deep in the trenches of the First World War. The rhythm of preparing an opera is very different from a concert. There is a lot more time given all the staging and costume requirements. It’s whetting my appetite for the Jacksonville Symphony’s production of Don Giovanni, which opens on January 25. For the first time in the orchestra’s history, we’re presenting a fully-staged production in Jacoby Symphony Hall. The action will take place on a stage built on top of the existing stage, with the orchestra front and centre, not buried in a pit. It’s an exciting experiment that will allow us to perform Mozart’s greatest masterpiece in a way that highlights his genius for both instrumental and vocal music. And speaking of vocals, we will welcome a spectacular international cast. Put the date in your diary; it’s coming up soon! In the meantime, do enjoy the Florida weather. I’m envious!
Originally published by the Florida Times-Union at:
https://www.jacksonville.com/entertainmentlife/20181028/conducting-electricity-relaxing-summer-was-full-of-preparation
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