Alright, it's all yours.
John, I am rolling whenever you're ready.
Okay.
Well, thank you for being here.
My voice is going to be edited out completely.
Well, that's a relief.
Well, 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 lured 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.
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
in 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 the ability to just, to be enabled to give La Crosse the
best orchestra it 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, it's me working with a beautiful collection of people, board
members, donors, staff members, we now have a wonderful executive director, Eva Murray
Restle, and joining together, banding together, to sound the alarm that, you know, if you
want to have a great symphony, it's something in which we all have to make an investment,
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 in every orchestra in
the world had at that time, we did an all orchestral program, no soloist, and it culminated
in the performance of the Shikovsky 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.
Great.
Now, I know that you've served a music director for several symphonies across the country.
What makes the La Crosse symphony stand out?
What is it about the people here, 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 Crosse 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, honestly, I'm at a small business downtown, I'm at 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 can 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 on the street and say, oh, 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 at our various wonderful colleges, universities, to meet with faculty and students
and 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 what is often a magnificent
performance.
And the joy of that is that we had been able to put together such a beautiful collection
of individuals from this entire region, this Cooley 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 get 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 in education and building the audience of today and tomorrow.
So I mean, I'm thrilled to say again, not that I plan this, but our pre-concert talks
with members of our audience are jammed.
I mean, people want to know more about the music.
If there is a positive through what we've been through in the great recession and then
the COVID pandemic, it's that people, I think, take classical music less for granted.
And they love it and they want to 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.
So 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 Five, 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 look at my watch and I think it's because 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 rector to the church, and I don't know, maybe he's a disciple, but
I've spent my whole life with music.
Being a student of music, 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 love sharing with people 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 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 people.
Very nice people.
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 bit about the works?
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 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 lacrosse
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
Brooke, 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, but once a month
I got 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 was right
here in our own neighborhood of the upper Midwest, and she's going to be playing the
eternally beautiful violin concerto of Brahms.
So that's going 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
my, one of my great personal loves in the repertoire, which is the French repertoire.
We hear a lot of Beethoven, a lot of Shikovsky, all those guys, a lot of rock manoroff 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 Berlio's Saffany Fantastique, which we've done twice actually
here in my years with La Crosse, but this is going to be a celebration of the gorgeous,
glorious music of Maurice Ravel, who's one of the great French, one of the 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
Montnouet Antique, the Antique.