Alright, it's all yours.
John, I am rolling whenever you're
ready. OK.
Well, thank you for being here.
My voice is going to be edited out
completely.
Well, that's a relief.
We'll have the outtakes on the
website.
So, you have been with the
La Crosse Symphony for 15
years, since 2010.
That's right.
What originally drew you to
this position?
That actually goes back a long,
long way. When I finished my
work on a Marshall Scholarship
at Cambridge University,
I was lured, and I
say that in the most wonderful way,
I was lord to the Twin Cities,
to Minnesota for the
opportunity to be the guinea pig,
as it were, in this newly
founded conductor apprenticeship
program between the Minnesota
Orchestra, the St. Paul Chamber
Orchestra, and the Minnesota Opera.
So I was living in the Twin cities.
And the La Crosse Symphony was
looking for guest conductors in
1993, 1994.
And I had an absolutely wonderful
time, which I
just retained
in my memory, this wistful
time discovering this beautiful
city nestled on the banks
of the Mississippi.
And then so in 2010,
the LSO was doing a music director
search.
So I was at that point, I was like
the
suitor.
standing at the doorbell with the
bouquet and the box of chocolates.
Because I really wanted to come to
La Crosse and settle down and do
the work I think I've always been
meant to do.
So they blessed me with this
wonderful job and it was
the post 2008 world
for orchestras and there
were profound financial challenges
and we
truly met those challenges
and through this beautiful
community And, um...
the ability to just to
be enabled to to give lacrosse
the best orchestra could possibly
have and that's been our journey
together.
What were some of the
things that you instituted to
overcome some of those challenges?
Well, it's not me personally,
I mean it's me working with a
beautiful collection of people,
board members, donors, staff
members, we now have a wonderful
executive director, Eva Murray
Restel, and
joining together, banding
together, to sound
the alarm that, you know, if you
want to have a great symphony,
it is something in which
we all have to make an and
just an
amazing collection of people.
who were able to
kind of go around the community and
trumpet the cause of the great
performances we were doing.
And it was, I can tell you exactly
when it happened, the moment
when that all
changed.
It was the very end of my first
season when because
of the financial challenges
that we and every orchestra in the
world had at that time, we did
an all-orchestral program, no
soloist.
And it culminated in a performance.
of the Tchaikovsky Fourth Symphony,
after which the audience basically
went crazy.
And kind of based on that, we were
able to build a financial future
for this orchestra.
Now, I know that
you've served as music director for
several symphonies across the
country.
What makes the La Crosse
Symphony stand out?
What is it about the people
here or the community that
has made you want to stay here for
the last 15 years?
Oh, what makes me want to stay here?
It's La Crosse itself.
This is such a
beautiful community.
It really is, this greater
La Cresse community.
Again, here on the banks of the
Upper Mississippi, this
incomparable natural beauty,
this kind of pre-alpine
setting, the Mississippi Alps, as
we call them.
And the people are just so
nice.
The nicest people I've ever met.
And everywhere I go, I'm
Honestly, I'm at a
small business downtown.
I'm in a gas station on
the outskirts of the city,
and people know who I am.
And they say, oh, you're here for
the next concert.
What more could I ask for?
And again, we have an orchestra that
just gets better and better.
That's perfect, that's perfect.
What do you enjoy most about
your role as music director here
with the LSO?
I honestly enjoy everything
about what I do here.
I love being out and about in the
community. I love meeting people.
Again, it's just great to get
stopped in the street and say, oh,
are you? This is,
again, what a conductor dreams of.
It's always a pleasure to be,
again out and about, out
in the restaurants, at church
on Sunday.
Here are various wonderful
colleges, universities to
meet with faculty and students.
take a class now and then.
That's, again, an unexpected
joy.
But of course, the pinnacle is
what we do together on
this stage for three
extremely intense three-hour
rehearsals.
And when I came here, they
allowed me to adopt the
British model of rehearsing, which
is a three- hour session.
So we have three incredibly intense
rehearsals that culminate
in but is often
a magnificent performance.
And the joy of that is that we have
been able to put together such a
beautiful collection of individuals
from this entire region,
this coolie region, this what we
call this driftless region
that truly the performance
is the culmination of
all of those, all of that intensity
of those rehearsals.
And you know, whether you're the La
Crosse Symphony, or the New
York Philharmonic, if you can do
that regularly, time and
time again, week in and week out,
it just doesn't get better as
a conductor. It doesn't better than
that.
And that kind of cloud nine
is where we're at in La Crosse at
the symphony.
Wonderful.
You mentioned a couple of times
the community, how wonderful
the community is.
It is. What are some of the
ways in which the
community and the
orchestra collaborate,
or what programs do you
have that sort of reach out into the
community that involve the
community?
Well most recently we
have focused,
by which I mean the last 15 years,
we have focused a lot more on
education and building the
audience of today and
tomorrow.
So I mean I'm thrilled to say,
again not that I planned this, but
our our pre-concert talks with
members of our audience are
jammed.
I mean people want to know more
about the music.
People, if there is
a positive through
what we've been through.
in the great recession and
then the COVID pandemic,
it's the people I think take
classical music less
for granted and they love it
and they wanna know as much
as they can about it.
So with the audience of today,
again, that's always a
pleasure to talk about the music
and why we put a certain program
together. But we've also,
in the last few years, really built
our education programs
with young people in the community.
through the Boys and Girls Clubs of
La Crosse, and some
of our great corporate sponsors,
in this case the Mayo Clinic,
and we've been able to really
develop an audience of Tomorrow, and
not just for a future
audience to be in these seats,
you know, listening to their
Beethoven 5, but for people,
for more people, for as many
people as possible in this
community, to have classical
music as a beautiful
part of their life.
That's ultimately the goal.
I wanted to ask you a little bit
more about the
pre-concert talks, because
a lot of orchestras
they'll put together notes and
those notes go in the program,
and why take
the extra time to
meet with people and to
go through that in addition
to the concert notes?
Well, we have wonderful program
notes in the program per se.
And I'm very old fashioned and I do
believe in having a printed booklet
with you when you go into that
chair to hear, to
have your experience with
live performance.
But what's beautiful
about the pre-concert talk is it
allows me to have, to further
build a relationship with my
audience. And I,
for all my faults, I seem to have a
gift of walking into a room.
and I just start speaking,
and in about 35 minutes I
stop.
I mean, I look at my watch,
and I think it's because I,
growing up in,
I had a wonderful church growing up,
and the rector was very
proud to say that he composed his
sermon as he was crossing the
street from the rectory to the
church.
And I don't know, maybe I'm his
disciple.
But I've spent
my whole life with music.
being a student of music.
I wouldn't, I'm not a scholar, but
a student of music and I like to
think a student of
history and culture
and the arts and I'm, I love
sharing with people what I
what I do know by this
point of the journey about
what makes this music great and what
makes it so relevant absolutely
relevant to our lives and
I it's always a pleasure to
share what I know and people
seem to enjoy it or else they're
just being even nicer than I think.
They are nice.
Thank you very much.
We've determined that.
Can you talk a little bit about the
May 3rd program,
about what the orchestra
will be playing, what
the theme of the concert is,
and a little about the
works? Thanks for watching!
Well, this is the last big concert
of the season, so in the
tradition of such a performance
in May, it really
is the spring fling, if you will,
and it brings the whole community
together.
It's a program that's, it's really
a jam-packed program that brings
together kind of
everything that we've been focusing
on throughout the year and
years.
And we start with
two short works.
that are conducted by
or conducted by
two wonderful
individuals who have made
important donations to
the orchestra, we call them the
Conductor wannabes, and
these winning
contestants get to conduct
the La Crosse Symphony Orchestra and
a short kind of favorite work.
We move
from them to one
of the great world
class classical
music soloists from
right here in the Midwest, one of my
greatest Chicago
colleagues, the great,
great American violinist, Rachel
Barton-Pine, with whom I
was very privileged to make
many years ago, 20 years ago was,
what remains a rather famous
recording of a
piece called The Scottish Fantasy
by Max Brook, one of the great works
of the late romantic repertoire,
which Rachel and I were able to fly
over to Scotland and the
famous the Usher Hall in
Edinburgh with the Scottish Chamber
Orchestra. We made that recording
which still gets played all
over the place. I get about once a
month, I get an email from someone
saying, oh I was driving through
Ohio and I heard your
Brooke Scottish fantasy.
So we celebrate that great
partnership that Rachel and I have
had and also not only
the personal partnership but again
this truly world-class
musician who is right here.
in our own neighborhood of the upper
Midwest, and she's gonna be playing
the eternally beautiful violin
concerto of Brahms.
So that's gonna to be a real honor
to work with her on that.
Then after the intermission,
we wrap up the concert and
wrap up the season celebrating
one of my great personal
loves in the repertoire, which is
the French repertoire.
You know, we hear a lot of
Beethoven, a lot a Tchaikovsky.
All those guys, a lot of
rock man are off these days, but we
tend to forget the French repertoire
outside of literally two
or three party pieces like
Debussy's La Mer and the
Berlioz's Symphony Fantastique,
which we've done twice actually here
in my years with
La Crosse. But this is gonna be a
celebration of the
gorgeous, glorious music of Maurice
Ravel, who's one of the great
French, one of masters
of French Impressionism.
and he's very, very famous for a
piece called Bolero, which is
used in movies and commercials all
the time. This is going to
celebrate, we've put together,
we have a wonderful artistic
committee, and they and I
have put together a beautiful
montage of three
works, three of the greatest
orchestral works of Maurice Ravel
that all center on the
dance.
An incomparable gem called
The Manué Antique,
the Minuet, the Antique.