Shepherd School of Music is ready to hit the high notes again
SHEPHERD SCHOOL SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music is carefully turning the page after losing two of its highest-profile — and most beloved — faculty members within a year of each other. On the cusp of its 2022-23 season, longtime Shepherd School Symphony Orchestra conductor Larry Rachleff passed away last August at age 67, almost a year after the death of Rice Opera director Miah Im.
Although Rachleff had been at the university since 1991, Im was a relatively recent arrival, coming over from LA Opera in July 2020. In fact, announcing her death was one of the first things Matthew Loden had to do when the former Toronto Symphony CEO took over as dean of the Shepherd School from Robert Yekovich in October of 2021. In both cases, he had to balance honoring their rich legacies with reinforcing the school’s world-class reputation.
“The best way that we can do that is to make sure that we continue to bring in incredibly talented teachers and performers to the school, to make sure that the students have the best opportunity to learn, and so that’s what we’ve done,” Loden says.
“I think the mood generally has been one of sadness that we don’t have those incredible people in our lives any longer,” he adds, “but also real enthusiasm for the things that we see ahead of us, which is really quite exciting.”
A significant part of Loden’s job is anticipating vacancies and supervising the process to fill them. The Shepherd School’s relatively small size — fewer than 50 faculty members instructing just under 300 students, according to Loden — leaves it without a “deep bench of crosstraining,” the dean says. Most positions are highly specialized, but Im and Rachleff led “two of our largest platforms for teaching,” Loden explains.
Soon after the 47-yearold Im’s death from pancreatic cancer, Loden appointed Bethany Self as interim director of opera studies. She’s since steered the opera department for three semesters, including the inaugural productions in the brandnew, $100 million Brockman Hall for Opera. Faculty artists Jerry Hou and Don Schleicher helped steer the Shepherd School Symphony while the school readied the extensive roster of guest conductors that begins with Saturday’s concert under the baton of Andrew Grams, former music director of the Elgin (Ill.) Symphony Orchestra.
“I will say the Shepherd School faculty has done an extraordinary job of filling in the blanks,” Loden says. “Because so many of our faculty have been here with Larry for a couple of decades at least, they didn’t miss a beat in terms of stepping in to fill any kind of pedagogical void: showing up at rehearsals for the orchestra, making sure the students were doing OK, making sure individual sections of the orchestra or people in the opera program were well cared for, but were also still running after the same kinds of really important artistic ideals that both Miah and Larry felt were so important to imbue into our student body.”
The committee tasked with determining Im and Rachleff ’s successors purposely drew from a broad cross section of Shepherd School faculty. Members were asked to seriously consider what both the school and the professional music industry might look like as far out as 20 years in the future, with an idea of identifying the kind of talent that could make a similar impact on campus.
“We also (wanted) to make sure that we’re doing a really good job of identifying maybe lesserknown voices that we haven’t seen before,” Loden says. “It’s a very deliberative process. It’s like mini-searches, in that you want to make sure that you’re hiring the very best talent possible for what your needs are.”
In December, Rice announced that Joshua Winograde, the senior director of artistic programs and director of the Domingo-Colburn-Stein Young Artist Program at LA Opera, will take over as director of the Opera Studies program this coming July. An alumnus of Houston Grand Opera’s HGO Studio program himself, Winograde is exceptionally wellconnected within the sphere of young-artist programs that represents a crucial bridge between the academic world and the professional stage, Loden says. A master class he led for Rice students sealed the deal.
There, Winograde was “not only talking about sort of how to take an audition and how to present yourself at audition, but talking about the industry, talking about various productions that he’s worked on,” says Loden. “The kind of immediate excitement and enthusiasm that he instilled in the students, it was fantastic to see. We’re thrilled that we were able to land him.”
His HGO Studio mentors “instilled in me a kind of holistic philosophy of how to communicate as an artist, of how to sing, of how to be expressive in order to maximize the job, which is to provide people attending those performances that kind of experience that we feel only classical music, and only opera and classical voice, can really provide,” Winograde says. “That philosophy really regards the young artist as a complete interpreter of music and text.”
Loden hopes to have a successor to Rachleff lined up in time to start the 2024-25 season, he says. In the interim, the school has lined up an array of illustrious guest conductors, such as Shepherd School alum Cristian Maçelaru, music director of Orchestre National de France, in March, and HGO artistic and music director Patrick Summers for the April concert. Next season’s names include Robert Spano, music director for the Fort Worth Symphony and Aspen Music Festival; Nashville Symphony Music Director Giancarlo Guerrero; and Lidiya Yankovskaya of Chicago Opera Theater and the Refugee Orchestra Project, who also conducted HGO’s fall 2021 production of “Carmen.”
“I think the individual conductors represent exactly what we had hoped for, which is a roster of conductors who have the deepest level of international experience conducting orchestras around the world, but
With Andrew Grams
When: 7:30 p.m. Feb. 4 Where: Stude Concert Hall, 6100 Main
Details: Free (registration required); music.rice.edu
they also have a lot of experience working with students,” Loden says. “That doesn’t always come in the same package.”
Between the recent inauguration of new Rice president Reginald DesRoches and appointment of provost Amy Dittmar to fill his former position, not to mention the opening of Brockman Hall, Loden believes it’s an exciting time to be at the university. Now he just wants Houstonians to realize one of top conservatories anywhere happens to be in their backyard. Between Brockman and the other concert spaces in Alice Pratt Brown Hall, Loden estimates the Shepherd School now hosts some 450 performances a year.
“I think that if you’re in this business, people know about us,” he says. “If you’re not always plugged into the classicalmusic world, you might think that the Shepherd School is a bit of a secret for Houston. I’m hoping that we can stop being a secret and have more and more people know about us, and come enjoy the music.”