Music that Changed Me
Conductor
Conductor James Conlon
Music director of the Los Angeles Opera and principal conductor of the RAI National Symphony Orchestra in Turin, James Conlon has conducted most of the world’s major orchestras since his debut with the New York Philharmonic in 1974. Alongside Grammy-winning recordings, writings and TV appearances he has created the OREL foundation, a website dedicated to suppressed composers. In 2019 Conlon focuses on Verdi, giving 35 performances of seven works, including five different operas in Europe and the US.
Ican’t live without MOZART. I saw Don Giovanni when I was 12 and it stunned me, although I couldn’t possibly have understood it. Mozart has been a major part of my life ever since. Symphony No. 40 was the first piece I conducted at the High School of Music and Art in New York City at 15. I left the course feeling that I had really enjoyed myself – not so much the quality of the performance, but the process. I have now conducted close to 200 performances of his operas.
VERDI surpasses that figure – I will give my 500th Verdi performance at the Salzburg Festival this summer. My very first exposure to opera was La traviata when I was 11. I became obsessed with Verdi the following year after hearing Rigoletto. The New York Public Library had a vast lending library. I borrowed a recording with Jussi Björling and listened while playing cards with my father. I was so engrossed in the music that I could barely concentrate on the cards. Immediately after graduation from the Juilliard, my first job offer was to conduct Falstaff; my first European invitation was Macbeth at Scottish Opera; and my first opera in London at Covent Garden, Don Carlo. Verdi opened me up to a curiosity about Italy. Armed with a rudimentary vocabulary of my Italian grandmother’s dialect and archaic expressions from Verdi librettos, I took a trip to Italy at 20, leading to a lifelong devotion to Italian culture.
I fell in love with SCHUBERT Lieder in high school and enrolled in a class of song literature. As I had a terrible voice, I became one of two accompanists. When I saw that Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears were giving two recitals at New York’s Hunter College in 1969, I rushed to get tickets. I was a fan of Britten’s, already familiar with Peter Grimes (which I’d seen at the Met in 1967) and the War Requiem. There were two programmes: Schubert’s Die Winterreise, followed by Schumann’s Dichterliebe, and Britten songs. I still get goosebumps when I think of it. Britten’s pianism was breathtaking, among the most beautiful I’ve heard – fluid and colourful, simple and unforced. I was struck by Pears’s charisma and stage presence. I became devoted to Britten’s music over the years and in the three years surrounding his centenary, I performed six of his operas, two church parables and over a dozen choral and orchestral works, all culminating in a city-wide celebration of his music in Los Angeles in 2013.
MAHLER, like Mozart, is for me a necessity. I once saw Bernstein conduct Das Lied von der Erde with Dietrich Fischer-dieskau and the New York Philharmonic. I was in the second row looking straight up at them. The last movement, Der Abschied, was one of those moments when the world seemed to stop, and my life with Mahler began. When I later sang in the chorus of the Second Symphony, I couldn’t sleep afterwards. After three complete cycles and hundreds of performances, I still feel the same.
I had an epiphany about ZEMLINSKY’S music by accident. When I was 40, I heard his tone poem Die Seejungfrau on the radio. Through him, I became aware of the great volume of music by other composers who have been marginalised due to Nazi suppression. My mission to familiarise musicians and audiences led me to create the OREL Foundation, a website of information about these composers and their historical and musical context. It’s a first step but much still needs to be done to rectify this injustice. For anyone who loves music from the early 20th century, Zemlinsky will be a discovery – I believe he is among the great composers.