I recently had the pleasure of conducting the orchestra in Shenzhen, China. Shenzhen is an ultra-modern city just across the border from Hong Kong, which remains a special administrative region of China, with its own immigration regulations.
Between The Lines
The Summer Season has arrived and while most conductors rummage through their closets to find their white jackets, I dust off my golf clubs and head to the range!
Tchaikovsky’s epic ballet, Swan Lake, is a Mt. Everest of sorts for any ballet company, and certainly for the conductor. It is the quintessential ballet in most minds, as it is the representative work in the art form for most people.
Building a new ballet from vision to performance is something I had never experienced until recently at the Tulsa Ballet. As a part of the Company’s 60th anniversary season, Artistic Director Marcello Angelini commissioned choreographer Edwaard Liang to create a new full length storybook piece, and he chose the 14th book of L. Frank Baum’s classic tales of OZ.
January can be a dull month, but not so this year! Having led 12 performances of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker with the Tulsa Ballet and BalletMet Columbus, I enjoyed a week of travel to see family and friends before ringing in the New Year quietly at home with Barb in Columbus.
I recently performed Onegin with the Tulsa Ballet to great success. I was not familiar with the work, but it is a stunning setting of the Alexander Pushkin novel in verse, Yevgeny Onegin. The piece is choreographed by John Cranko, and the Cranko Trust is quite selective in licensing performance rights to the work.
The music world remembered an icon recently as it marked the 100th anniversary of the birth or noted conductor Robert Shaw.
With the passing recently of one of my teachers, Louis Lane, I am yet again reminded of my own mortality. I had the pleasure of knowing Mr. Lane during my time at CCM while he was leading the Dallas Symphony and teaching at the Conservatory.
The end of an old calendar year always seems to be replete with review and reflection, and my own personal exercise of this practice reveals that 2015 has been among the most meaningful years of my career! So many milestones and accolades have come my way!
