Rising star Canellakis conducts orchestra
Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra continues its search for new director
In a cozy apartment on New York’s Upper West Side, Karina Canellakis grew up immersed in a life of classical music.
Her father Martin was a conductor, her mother Sheryl played piano and her younger brother Nicholas was a cellist.
She was a violinist, who fell in love with the instrument as a 3-year-old when she saw Itzhak Perlman playing on an episode of Sesame Street. By 12, she picked up a conductor’s baton.
Now 36 and a rising star of the classical music world, Canellakis is in town to conduct the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra during performances Friday through Sunday at The Marcus Center for the Performing Arts.
Among the pieces the orchestra will play is Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony.
“I first heard it with my dad conducting, when I was 2, sitting on my mom’s lap. Apparently, I stayed awake for the whole thing,” Canellakis said as she sat backstage at the Marcus Center.
With the symphony on the lookout for a new music director, audiences should look closely at the roster of guest conductors.
And, perhaps, they should take a good long look at Canellakis, who appeared with the MSO last season.
She has the musical goods — her career as a violinist included playing regularly with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
And she has the pedigree — Sir Simon Rattle encouraged her to pursue conducting.
Most of all, she has star power. In 2014, in her fifth week as an assistant conductor with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, she was called in at the last minute to conduct Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 8.
She hadn’t rehearsed the piece,
hadn’t even played it before. But music director Jaap van Zweden had a shoulder injury and couldn’t go on.
It was the musical equivalent of subbing for an injured Aaron Rodgers.
“You could feel they were really with me, we’re going to make this happen,” she said, describing the immediate bond she felt with the orchestra.
Canellakis is now in the second year as a globetrotting guest conductor, appearing on stages from Los Angeles to London to Hong Kong.
“It’s easier to say how many weeks a year that I’m at home, which is about five,” she said. “I literally live out of a suitcase.”
As a conductor, Canellakis said she believes “in trusting the musicians. This is very, very important to me. I do not believe in dictating every tiny little thing.”
When the conductor and musicians work together, the results are sublime. Canellakis recalled feeling intimidated before making her European conducting debut with the renowned Chamber Orchestra of Europe in 2015.
“I thought I would die of nerves. I thought what am I doing here,” she said. “But then as soon as I got up there, the playing was so beautiful that we just did chamber music with each other. I don’t even know what I was doing. It’s the mystery of conducting. You just try to breathe with them and look at them, think the music and feel the music and get it to magically exist.”
Asked if she might be interested in leading the Milwaukee Symphony, Canellakis smiled.
“All I can say is that I like the orchestra very much,” she said. “I think they are extremely diligent. Impeccably wellprepared in the first rehearsal. It’s a highly professional, refined organization. So there’s definitely a huge amount of trust that I feel when I’m here with the Milwaukee Symphony. I really trust them.”
She said she is “enjoying making music with them.”
Speaking generally about the prospects of one day becoming a music director for an orchestra, Canellakis said it’s “a big commitment that shouldn’t be taken lightly.”
“I don’t believe that a conductor should view it for his or her own purposes,” she said. “I think it needs to be as close to a love relationship as possible.”
For Canellakis, it really is all about the music. She says a symphony orchestra is “the heart of a city” able to bring people together as they deal with the stresses of day-to-day living.
“We need music more than ever,” she said. “And we need, especially symphony concerts. It’s a form of human collaboration that is unlike anything else that exists in the world. Even dance or acting or other art forms don’t involve the same kind of oneness, 80 people becoming one as an orchestra playing.”