Making serious music

Sunday, May 09, 1999

Making serious music

On the eve of his 20th season as May Festival director, James Conlon seems poised for a career breakthrough

James Conlon

NEW YORK — “Would you like a coffee?” asks the conductor James Conlon, raising a dark eyebrow, one foot poised to run. We're in a dim interview room in the Alice-in-Wonderland maze of Lincoln Center's Metropolitan Opera.

Wearing a black turtleneck, he looks much younger than 49 as he dashes out and reappears, holding two paper cups of steaming espresso.

This is New York, his hometown, and his schedule is crammed not only with rehearsals for the Met's premiere of Carlisle Floyd's Susannah, but with performances with two major orchestras.

A few days earlier, he had been conducting Parsifal in Paris, where he is principal conductor of the Paris Opera and lives with his family.

'OUT OF THE BLUE'

Part of May Festival lore is how Mr. Conlon became its 12th music director. When former May Festival maestro James Levine was asked to list three names for his successor, he listed Mr. Conlon — three times.
“It came out of the blue,” Mr. Conlon says. The young conductor was invited to guest conduct in the 1978 season. He was hired for the next.
“All I knew was that I was going to get this job,” he says. “By the time I came, we were rehearsing Dvorak's Stabat Mater. All of a sudden, there it was.”

James Conlon is in demand — as he has been for more than 25 years. Yet, as Mr. Conlon takes the podium in Cincinnati for his 20th season as music director of the May Festival, many wonder why this energetic American maestro has never had a major American orchestra to call his own.

“When I was offered the position in Paris, it came as a surprise. So I assume that some surprise will happen in the next few years that will surprise you and me,” he says.

The Cincinnati May Festival was Mr. Conlon's first directorship in the international career he has built on two continents. Next year he'll be 50 — a prime age for a conductor. With eight major orchestras — including Cincinnati's — seeking a maestro, many consider him a strong contender for such a job.

In November, NPR's Susan Stamberg speculated that Mr. Conlon was being “scouted” by several American orchestras and the Metropolitan Opera. Last Sunday, Mr. Conlon was featured on CBS Sunday Morning.

“I think there's no question that it's time and he's ready,” says Ara Guzelimian, artistic adviser at New York's Carnegie Hall. “Whether the orchestras are smart enough, we'll have to see. After an early burst in America, he has based himself in Europe. It amazes me, in a world with such a shortage of talented conductors, that orchestras have neglected him.”

A quality resume
Consider his record. At the Met, Mr. Conlon has amassed more than 200 performances, behind only the Met's artistic director James Levine and former music director of the CSO Thomas Schippers.

The only major orchestra that he has not conducted is the Vienna Philharmonic. In early March, while in Boston conducting the Boston Symphony in three concerts, Mr. Conlon took a desperate call from the Philadelphia Orchestra, whose conductor had canceled. He stepped in to lead highly praised programs in Philadelphia and at Carnegie Hall — between opera rehearsals at the Met. He caught up on sleep with catnaps in the limo that chauffeured him between cities.

“Mr. Conlon saved the day,” wrote the New York Times, “and the grateful applause from the orchestra players when he finished seemed not a token but a genuine expression of musical respect.”

Now in his third season at the Paris Opera, where he has renewed his contract to 2004, Mr. Conlon has become increasingly high-profile. Part of the reason is that he has survived the messy politics and intrigue where two other conductors, Myung-Whun Chung and Daniel Barenboim, did not.

“I wouldn't have gone there if I hadn't thought that (administrator) Hugues Gall and I couldn't do this job together,” says Mr. Conlon. Their goal, he says, is to make Paris Opera a “highly functioning, absolutely modern” company with 360 performances a year.

Mr. Conlon still holds his 10-year music directorship with the Cologne (Germany) Philharmonic, with whom he has made six albums of music by post-romantic composer Alexander Zemlinsky for EMI. His contract expires next year.

“I will stay with the symphony long enough to make sure that I see a successor that I like” he says. “I've found making predictions useless, because I always end up doing something that surprises even myself. I never intended to stay in Cologne; I never intended to stay in Cincinnati.”

Busy schedule
Muscular, dark haired and standing about 5-feet-6, he conducts a conversation as if he's on a podium, waving arms at times, other times gazing intensely with long-lashed blue eyes. Although he does not have a photographic memory, he inhales musical scores in big gulps, and conducts 99 percent of his concerts from memory.

“I think it's genetic; my father had a very good memory for dates, faces and places,” he says. “For me, there's no magic to it. I have to study, I have to learn things.”

In 20 years, his schedule has not eased; if anything, he is busier than ever. His knack for switching seamlessly from opera in one city to choral music in another, was tested by his years as music director for the city of Cologne. Until leaving the Cologne Opera recently, he often rehearsed opera by day and conducted orchestra concerts by night — and vice-versa.

“The moment it's over, it's over and you're doing the next thing,” he says. “I believe in discipline; I believe in concentration.”

“He's been very wise in the way he's planned and developed his career,” says Anthony Fogg, artistic administrator of the Boston Symphony, where Mr. Conlon guest-conducts annually. “He chose to slowly build his repertoire in the opera house, so he's now emerging as a very well-rounded, mature artist whose performances are well-considered and have a great deal of integrity about them.”

“He's one of the most unjaded musicians I know. You get the sense he can't wait to get up in the morning and put in an 18-hour day,” Carnegie Hall's Mr. Guzelimian says.

Mr. Conlon's energy and focus may be the only way he can make room for his family life. He and his wife, soprano Jennifer Ringo, live with their daughters, Luisa, 10 and Emma, 2¹/₂, in the Latin Quarter of Paris. In March, they were all with him in New York.

“We were at an Easter egg hunt together (at the home of former Cincinnatians Ron and the late Judith Arron), and he was out in the garden chasing his daughters, rather than worrying about his Susannah rehearsals,” Mr. Guzelimian says.

Mr. Conlon has “a hunger, a need, a love for whatever he's doing at the moment,” says Robin Graham, principal French horn of the CSO and friend since their days as Juilliard students.

In 1972, as a 22-year-old wunderkind, Mr. Conlon was thrust into the limelight after he conducted La Boheme at Juilliard and was noticed by the diva Maria Callas.

“I did not realize that I was about to have the success that would launch my career,” he says. “All I could think of was, that I had loved this opera.” Two years later, he made his debut with the New York Philharmonic.

Popular conductor in school
At Juilliard, Mr. Conlon took over the middle-ranked orchestra when his teacher, Jean Morel, became ill. Many musicians in the school's top orchestra defected to play with him, Ms. Graham says. He worked with future stars such as violinists Ida Kavafian, Nigel Kennedy and current members of the New York Philharmonic.

“He was the same age as many players, and had an incredible, youthful enthusiasm. It was a group effort; he would listen to others and was very interested in everything,” says Ms. Graham, who recalls giving him a horn lesson so he could better understand the instrument.

Together they learned Mahler symphonies (numbers 5 and 6), thus beginning Mr. Conlon's lifelong love of Mahler, and the opera Boris Godunov. For the latter, Mr. Conlon decided to learn Russian, and struck up a friendship with Ms. Graham's grandmother, a Russian immigrant. Since then, he has also become fluent in Dutch (he had the Rotterdam Philharmonic before Cologne), French, Italian and German.

“I remember watching him in an opera master class, with an aria from La Rondine, and I was just amazed at his knowledge of the intimate details of Puccini's life, details in Italian pronunciation, mechanics of vocal production — it all came very comfortably to him,” Mr. Guzelimian says.

For Mr. Conlon, the preparation, the detail, are all part of his scheme of things.

“A lot of us artists, and I include myself, tend to be very egocentric, very self-centered,” Mr. Conlon says. “Some of us confuse our art with ourselves. It's very important for us to remember that any artist is there to be a medium from one to another. My job is to move whoever happens to be listening to my music.”

"Enlightened' method
Still, convincing 100 musicians and opera divas takes strength of conviction, he admits. “However, there's an enlightened and unenlightened way to have that strength. The importance of having an enlightened approach was made on me at a young age.”

Next season, Mr. Conlon will face 160 choral conductors when he leads Carnegie Hall's choral workshop, which was for nine years led by Robert Shaw, who died in January.

“I think he's always been good — it's not that he has suddenly come into his own,” says Brian Kellow, executive editor of Opera News, who has placed Mr. Conlon on the magazine's June cover. Mr. Conlon, he believes, is the only conductor of his generation who possesses the experience, repertory, talent and enthusiasm that make him a candidate to succeed Leonard Bernstein.

Is he poised to take on an American orchestra? “I don't think he would turn up his nose at it. If the Boston Symphony happened to be available, I think he would seriously entertain the idea,” Mr. Kellow says.

Still, Mr. Conlon revels in working in Europe, drinking in the cultural experiences. “It gives you a much vaster human vocabulary,” the conductor says.

“It's not just a gig to him; it's a very deeply felt experience,” Mr. Kellow says. “That's why he keeps coming to Cincinnati. He's a builder. He has a very personal stake in developing the audiences wherever he is, digging deeper and making more connections. He's had a lot to do with the fact the (Cincinnati) audience is so loyal and willing to take on a diverse repertory.”

Few institutions have succeeded in sustaining such a high artistic level over such a long period as the May Festival, says Boston's Mr. Fogg.

“It takes the support of the community, but that support can only be engendered by the inspiration of the person at the top.”

“As I look back, those 20 years went very quickly,” Mr. Conlon says. There is no one high point, but “years and years of building together.

“As artists, we are very lucky to be able to do what we love. We also bear a responsibility, a contract. I have a contract with the music, and secondarily to the human beings who are performing it.

“Those two responsibilities are important to remember, because you're always making music through a community of musicians, a community of singers.”



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