Conducting Electricity

Courtney Lewis of the Jacksonville Symphony says a Beethoven piano sonata may be the pick-me-up we all could use right about now. I’m sure I speak for many of you when I say it’s been a long time since I had this much time on my hands. The effect of the coronavirus on the performing arts has been devastating. At the Jacksonville Symphony, we are terribly disappointed by the cancellation of the SHIFT Festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., at which we would have been performing this week. Like many orchestras around the world, we have canceled our concerts through the beginning of May. It’s a strange thing being a conductor with no concerts. More than an instrumentalist or a singer, you feel

Continue readingTake 20 minutes for Beethoven

Next weekend we will perform a masterpiece by a composer who, for me, expresses the feeling of being human more richly than any other: Edward Elgar. Even within his hyper-sensitive, evocative, nostalgic and romantic oeuvre, Elgar’s Violin Concerto stands apart as a work of unparalleled tenderness and yearning.  By 1910, Elgar was at the height of his creative powers. World famous, he was riding high on the successes of “The Dream of Gerontius”, the Enigma Variations, the First Symphony and the Pomp and Circumstance Marches. Such was his reputation that the greatest violinist of the day, Fritz Kreisler, wrote asking for a violin concerto. The timing was perfect; Elgar had been making sketches for years, well aware of the prestige of the genre (it is

Continue readingElgar’s Violin Concerto