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I just have been so fortunate in my life to work with phenomenally talented people.

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The privilege of just rolling up your sleeves every day, going into a rehearsal room and just working on the art collectively.

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I love this job and who wouldn't.

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I started out actually with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra professionally and then I got sidetracked to Houston.

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I was 18 years at Houston Grand Opera and had a fantastic time.

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But I always loved orchestral conducting and I thought I could be good at it.

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If you have a life as a guest conductor, you can't make a difference.

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But if you invest in a community, you can make a difference over the time.

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And that's what I hoped I would be able to do.

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So I was able to come into Madison and see what we were doing and what we were not doing.

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For example, we weren't doing a matinee.

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Here we are 32 years later, it's our biggest audience.

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So I started that.

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What I didn't know when I arrived was that when Rowland took this from an unpaid community orchestra to a paid orchestra back in the 1960s,

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he invited the heads of the department at the University of Wisconsin to be the principal players in the orchestra.

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So they never auditioned to play.

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For me that was a closed shop and I blew it open.

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One, two, four, and ten.

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We started blind auditions.

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Oh my God, the things change.

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You don't get into the orchestra now unless you're really phenomenal.

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This is not a full-time orchestra.

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This is a fully paid orchestra.

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Every time it sits down, it's paid, but it's not full-time.

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But they fall in love with the city and they find a way to live here and work here, which is really great.

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It was a little touch and go when I first came here because the acoustical problems were monumental.

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And what are you going to say?

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Don't come to the symphony because it'll sound like crap.

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In 1985, when they opened the Oscar Meyer, which was a refurbished capital theater, they didn't really change it in the sense of what its acoustical problems were.

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Now I found this out.

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There was a young people's concert and I wasn't conducting it and I came to hear it.

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And I sat underneath the balcony where there were 900 seats.

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And the orchestra sounded like the worst high school orchestra you ever heard in your life.

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I mean, awful.

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And if anybody sat underneath there, they would never come again.

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During the same piece, I went upstairs to the mezzanine and to the upstairs.

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And it sounded like Carnegie Hall.

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I learned pretty early on that a woman by the name of Pleasant Rowland, who was married to Jerome Frouchy,

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they demonstrated their interest in being philanthropists for the arts.

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And Pleasant, of course, created the American Girl doll.

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And then she sold it to Mattel and Jerry was co-investor with her.

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And then Jerry, he gave us the money.

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Over $200 million, the largest philanthropic gift ever in the arts to build over to your hall.

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And I think he saw the possibility of what that could do for downtown and indeed it did.

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Now we had a hall that had a real acoustical shell.

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It had a real acoustical environment that was designed to have great acoustics from the beginning to the end.

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It was beautiful.

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And Pleasant wanted it to be high-end.

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She wanted you to walk in there and feel the beauty of natural wood.

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And she gave us the gift of the Overture Concert Organ, which is a magnificent 4,000-pipe organ.

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I sort of had the idea for this weekend because I remembered way back when Overture Hall opened,

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the open house that Jerry stood in the doorway and welcomed people off the streets,

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and I thought, you know, we should do that.

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You know, Overture Center is our home where we play, and we should just invite people in,

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and then we bring together the community with all different kinds of music.

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It's my last concert as music director, but it's not my last concert because, you know,

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the orchestra was very nice to name me, music director emeritus.

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You know, as conductors get older, we don't mind giving up all the planning

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and the administrative duties and the auditions and all that kind of stuff,

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and we just want to make music.

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And so I'm glad that that's what I'm doing next year with the symphonies is making some music,

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because that's the most fun.

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One, two, three.

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Since I was 14 years old, I have been conducting almost every day of my life.

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So, to not do that anymore, it's going to be different, and it might be hard,

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but the thing is, most of us who conduct, we play an instrument,

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and we can have a personal relationship with music, you know,

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and I love that so much.

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I could sit here and play for hours if I wasn't studying, you know,

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for my next symphony concert.

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I get out some Chopin and try to work my fingers, you know.

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So, I think I'll be just fine.

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MUSIC