The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
‘Miller Conducts Tchaikovsky’ on Thursday in Woolsey Hall
2nd of 3 finalists’ auditions for conductor’s post
NEW HAVEN — The second of New Haven Symphony Orchestra’s three audition concerts to help choose a new music director/conductor takes place Thursday with a night of Russian masterpieces in Woolsey Hall conducted by Rebecca Miller, an American who leads several orchestras these days in Great Britain.
The long search process (drawing 150 applicants) began in 2015 when current maestro William Boughton and the NHSO announced he would be exiting after the 2019 season. Finalist Alasdair Neale conducted Mozart’s “Piano Concerto No. 20” and two other pieces on Feb. 15 in his guest bid; the third will feature David Amado conducting “Symphonie Fantastique” on April 12.
California-raised Miller played piano, violin and flute as a kid and hit her stride in high school when she attended a summer program at Tanglewood in Massachusetts.
“And I noticed that as a pianist in a piano trio, you sort of take on a leadership role ... almost as a conductor is in terms of having all the parts in front of you,” Miller said in a phone interview from London, where she conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra. At that point in her teens, her mother asked if she ever thought about being a conductor, based on her ability to work with people, interpret music and study how music is put together. (And her mother should know; Leta Miller is a flutist and musicologist.)
Rebecca Miller took conducting lessons and then graduated from Oberlin Conservatory with a piano degree, studied conducting at Northwestern University and the Royal College of Music in London, where she met British pianist Danny Driver and they eventually married. She worked in England (where they say “crotchets, quavers and semiquavers” as the names of notes) and came back to America to conduct in Houston and New Orleans, before moving back to the U.K. to work.
Miller, the mother of two young children, said there were some adjustments to working in England, not the least of which is rehearsing “very efficiently” since there’s “extremely little rehearsal” time there.
Asked about the state of women conductors, Miller said, “It’s a hot topic at the moment, I think. When I first moved over here in 1999, it was being talked about as well. Marin Alsop (the Yale-educated female conductor) was just starting some of her jobs over here at that point ... and there was this talk about the new wave of female conductors. But then the whole issue kind of
went dormant again.”
She said there’s been some momentum, “but it’s just not working itself out. It needs some positive action, as well as with (creating) female composers.” That’s led to recent initiatives in England to encourage more women to be composers, and Miller teaches conducting courses that include women, who “do need more encouragement than men. The men need no encouragement at all; they have no problem putting themselves forward.”
She works to include women-composed music when programming concerts, saying there “is so much good music out there” from female composers — in the 19th century until now. (She included “Piano Concerto in C Sharp Minor” by Amy Beach in her Philharmonic CD “Beach, Chaminade & Howell: Piano Concertos.”)
The New Haven program, which Miller chose, consists of: ⏩ Borodin’s “In the Steppes of Central Asia”
⏩ Tchaikovsky’s “Symphony No. 4”
⏩ Shostakovich’s “First Cello Concerto” featuring returning cello soloist Nick Canellakis
Wait. Did someone say “Russian” amid the disturbing news reports about that country these days?
Miller said it’s a recurring question in music: the political implications and the music itself. It comes up, for example, when a Jewish person conducts Wagner, she said.
“Quite often, we have to grapple with these sorts of situations . ... Do we separate the political from the music itself ?” she said. “... The Russians are not getting a particularly good name in the newspapers these days but you cannot discount the immense contribution that Russian music has made to the orchestra repertoire. I mean, you just can’t put together a season of programs without Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff or Stravinsky ... staggering musical giants ...”
Miller said you really need to know about Shostakovich to appreciate his work — “all the things he went through under the Soviet regime and having to endure threats on his life and continual threats of arrest. And being told basically how to write and what to write and what he was allowed to write. I think a lot of his pieces were written under duress, and have a lot of darkness and anger and frustration in them.”
She said she’s always been fascinated by the backstories “and it’s probably the reason I got into conducting in the first place. It’s actually my job to do that, to come to the orchestra rehearsal with an understanding of the context.”
Confessing that we always wonder what exactly the conductor is signaling from the podium with his or her gestures, Miller said it’s not about being animated for the audience or keeping the music’s pace as much as adjusting instruments’ volume and instructing orchestra members to listen to other components.
“If I (make) a big gesture with my left hand toward the horns, I’m wanting the whole orchestra to listen to the horns at that moment, as well as the audience,” Miller said, “because part of the job of the conductor is to focus the attention of the orchestra and their listening ... whether they’re listening to their own section or ... across the orchestra to somebody they’ve got to play with who is 30 feet away.”
Miller said her interview with the NHSO led her to believe it’s an organization open to new ideas and change.
“I think that orchestras have to reinvent the wheel, because we can’t just be complacent about audiences, we can’t be complacent about music education ... (or) what music means to a community. And we have to continually ask ourselves, ‘Are we serving the community?’”