Copious Notes

The Lexington Philharmonic Orchestra will announce its choice for its new music director at Friday night’s concert, bringing to a close a two-year search for the successor to George Zack.

George Zack, whose successor will be named Friday. Photo by Matt Goins.

“This is the way we always wanted to make the announcement, and it looks like we’re on track to do it,” said Larry C. Deener, President of the Lexington Philharmonic Society, Inc.

Zack announced his retirement in December 2006, setting in motion a two-season search that saw 10 candidates conduct the Philharmonic between October 2007 and last month. Two candidates withdrew from the race after visiting — February auditioner Alastair Willis and March candidate Mei-Ann Chen.

That leaves eight candidates in contention for the spot:

• Kayoko Dan, assistant conductor of the Phoenix Symphony
• Alexander Platt, music director of the Waukesha Symphony in Wisconsin, resident conductor of the Chicago Opera Theatre and several other posts
• Darryl One, music director of the Victoria Symphony Orchestra in Texas
• Daniel Meyer, music director of the Asheville Symphony Orchestra in North Carolina, resident conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and several other posts
• Alfred Savia, music director of the Evansville Symphony Orchestra in Indiana
• Scott Terrell, resident conductor of the Charleston Symphony Orchestra in South Carolina
• Jeffrey Pollock, last post was assistant conductor of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra in Texas
• Morihiko Nakahara, music director of the South Carolina Philharmonic

Deener said the announcement will come just before intermission of Friday’s concert, which will feature the Lexington Singers and Lexington Philharmonic performing works by Gabriel Faure and Ludwig Van Beethoven. Lexington Singers music director Jefferson Johnson and University of Kentucky Symphony Orchestra director John Nardolillo will co-conduct the concert.

At the concert, Deener said plans are to have brochures available with the programs for next season’s Masterclassics series, which will be the new conductor’s first season with the Philharmonic.

Mei-Ann Chen, a popular contender to succeed George Zack as music director of the Lexington Philharmonic Orchestra, has withdrawn from the race.

Mei-Ann Chen.

Philharmonic executive director Peter Kucirko said that Chen sent an e-mail to him and the search committee Tuesday saying she was taking her name out of consideration. She is the second candidate to withdraw from the race. Alastair Willis, who conducted the orchestra in February, bowed out the week after his audition.

“Mei-Ann has withdrawn from the search on the advice of her manager, that she not take on the responsibility of this position in light of her rapidly growing career,” Kucirko said.

Kucirko added that Chen said, “the LPO has much potential and Lexington is a memorable and beautiful place to live.”

Chen is currently the assistant conductor of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and is a contender for music director posts in other cities such as Memphis, where she will conduct next season.

She conducted the Philharmonic on March 27 and zoomed to the tops of many observers’ lists. In his review of the concert, Herald-Leader contributing music critic Loren Tice said she should be the Philharmonic’s pick, and in a poll on this blog, more than half the voters said she should be the orchestra’s next conductor.

The Philharmonic’s search committee has eight candidates left to choose from who conducted from October 2007 through January this year. The committee met to begin considering candidates on Tuesday night. It was aware of Chen’s withdrawl when it met.

Whoever the committee selects, it will be the Philharmonic’s first new music director since George Zack took the baton in 1972. He conducted his last concert with the orchestra Sept. 12 and will officially retire when his successor takes over the job.

The orchestra has one concert left on its current season: An April 17 performance with the Lexington Singers which will be co-conducted by Singers director Jefferson Johnson and University of Kentucky Symphony music director John Nardolillo. The announcement of the new music director is expected at or before that performance.

There are nine contenders to become the next music director of the Lexington Philharmonic Orchestra.  But in a completely unscientific, inconsequential-except-for-fun Copious Notes poll, just over half the readers voted for Mei-Ann Chen, the last candidate to audition with the orchestra.

Mei-Ann Chen conducts the Lexington Philharmonic in a rehearsal March 24. Photo by Rich Copley | LexGo.

Chen, currently assistant conductor of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, received 51.6 percent of the vote.

All of the contenders received at least a few of the 64 votes. Chen’s closest competitor in the poll was October 2008 auditioner Scott Terrell, who received 20.3 percent of the votes.

Here’s how the vote broke down:

• Mei-Ann Chen, auditioned March 2009 — 51.6%
• Scott Terrell, October 2008 — 20.3%
• Darryl One, January 2008 — 9.4%
• Daniel Meyer, February 2008 — 6.3%
• Alexander Platt, November 2007 — 4.7%
• Kayoko Dan, October 2007 — 3.1%
• Morihiko Nakahara, January 2009 — 1.6%
• Jeffrey Pollock, November 2008 — 1.6%
• Alfred Savia, March 2008 — 1.6%

Two notes: The poll ran from March 28 through April 5, with only one vote allowed per computer. There is no way of knowing whether voters actually saw any or all of the auditioners. Like I said, this was for fun.

Also, if you had not heard before, February 2009 auditioner Alastair Willis withdrew from consideration.

As for the vote that matters, Philharmonic search committee chair John Carpenter says the committee — which had several members out of town for spring break, last week — will meet Tuesday night to begin the selection process.

Here’s our slide show of the candidates in the Lexington Philharmonic’s music director search. Mouse over the bottom to get controls. Click on the little comment cloud to the left to activate captions. If you click on a photo, it will take you to a larger version of it at Picasa, and you can click the link at the bottom left for a larger version of the whole show.

When we started the Lexington Philharmonic’s search for a new conductor, Barack Obama was still best known as a Senator from Illinois, AIG was pretty much known only to financial folk and golf fans, and CentrePointe sounded like a term out of Rand McNally.

OK, the length of the search for the Phil’s new music director has not been as dramatic as those comparisons that tell you the last time something happened dinosaurs were roaming the Earth. But, it has been a long journey for the orchestra, its search committee and the Philharmonic’s audience.

Now, with Mei-Ann Chen’s concert complete, all of the candidates have crossed the Singletary Center for the Arts concert hall stage, and it is up to the committee to choose from the nine hopefuls — 10 came to town, but February candidate Alastair Wills took his name out of the running after his appearance.

It’s been a dramatic couple of years for an orchestra that had the same person, George Zack, on the podium for well over three decades.

In the last two seasons, I know I have learned things about conducting and so has the audience.

Conducting is an entrepreneurial pursuit: Starting with Kayoko Dan, back in October 2007, I began hearing story after story about how aspiring conductors had to pull together pick-up orchestras to help them sharpen their skills. Alexander Platt, Mr. November 2007, organized performances of Benjamin Britten operas at Cambridge. Chen made friends with composition students at the New England Conservatory and organized performances of their works. If you play an instrument, you usually have that instrument to practice with. If you play large groups of people, that’s another thing altogether.

Mentors mean a lot: Scott Terrell, who we saw last October, went on about how influential David Zinman has been in his career. Chen did not have enough words for Robert Spano of the Atlanta Symphony, where she is assistant conductor. Almost every candidate we talked to had some sort of mentor who helped him or her develop and helped them get their feet in the first few doors.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mei-Chen accepts applause and flowers at the conclusion of Friday night's concert with the Lexington Philharmonic. Photo by Rich Copley.

When the search for the Lexington Philharmonic Orchestra’s new music director began, Tubby Smith was still the basketball coach at the University of Kentucky.

Friday, the same day Smith’s successor was dismissed, the search for a new Philharmonic music director finally reached an end.

“I barely made it through the door,” Mei-Ann Chen, the 10th and final candidate to succeed George Zack as music director of the Lexington Philharmonic, said to folks who attended her pre-concert chat before she conducted the orchestra in a crowd-pleasing program of Beethoven, Mozart and Brahms.

Chen gave the early arrivers an abbreviated — seriously, the 15-minute monologue was abbreviated — version of her musical autobiography with some fresh details, like that in Portland, she succeeded a line of directors that had been with the Portland Youth Philharmonic 30, 40 and 7 years, which seemed like a pertinent detail as she is now vying to succeed Zack, who is closing out a 37-year run.

Chen recognized Zack from the stage while addressing the concert audience, getting the maestro to stand in the audience and thanking him for letting her conduct Johannes Brahms Symphony No. 4, a very important piece to Zack and Chen.

She was fresh from an emotional afternoon with the symphony, telling the preshow audience that while reviewing its poignant second movement, she found tears were rolling down her face.

Conducting opera in college was very influential, Chen said, “because you realize every piece has a story.”

The story she saw in Brahms was a composer who didn’t write his first symphony until he was in his mid-40s because he was afraid he would pale in comparisons to Beethoven.

Pre-show chat moderator and Philharmonic bassist Joe Tackett introduced his standard question saying, “my next question happens to be about music that will make you cry,” and then he asked how many bass concertos Chen would program in her first season.

Chen batted it back to Tackett and said he should go out and find a wealthy donor to fund a bass project for the orchestra.

Talking about programming an orchestra, Chen said it takes two years to get a sense of a new music director’s vision and another three years to see it start to play out. That would seem to say that if she got the gig, Chen would be interested in staying around a little bit longer than the Philharmonic’s search process.

Coming Sunday, here and in the paper: We’ve learned quite a bit about conductors over the last two years.

Click here for Loren Tice’s review of the show.

Click here to tell the Philharmonic what you thought of Chen.

Now that we’ve seen everyone, vote in our poll, to the right.

Stay tuned to le blog, LexGo, and the Gutenberg edition of the Herald-Leader (which is as cool as Chucks and vinyl). As soon as we know who the new Philharmonic music director is, we’ll let you know.

Mei-Ann Chen conducted the Lexington Philharmonic in a rehearsal Tuesday night in the Singletary Center for the Arts Concert Hall. Photo by Rich Copley.

Click the play button to hear Mei-Ann Chen chat about how she got into music to entertain her parents and when she realized her dream of conducting an orchestra:

Copious Notes podcasts are available on iTunes.

As a student violinist in Taiwan, Mei-Ann Chen always memorized her music so she could watch the conductor.

It was not just a desire to be responsive to the conductor’s every direction. She wanted to watch what the conductor did so she could someday be one herself.

“When I played in an orchestra for the first time, when I was 10, I was fascinated with this person who didn’t make any sound but connected with so many people to inspire them to make the biggest sound in the room,” Chen says. “That, for me, was the ‘aha’ moment.”

Conducting, she discovered, was her form of musical communication.

The next couple of decades presented a mountainous, curvy road to the podium for the musician, who holds the distinction of being the first student at the New England Conservatory of Music to simultaneously earn master’s degrees in conducting and violin. Chen has since held posts as the music director of the Portland (Ore.) Youth Philharmonic and, currently, assistant conductor of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.

This week, she is in Lexington in search of her first music directorship of a professional orchestra. She is the 10th and final candidate to succeed George Zack as music director of the Lexington Philharmonic.

“This is a city with a quality of life that’s hard to find sometimes,” Chen says, looking out the window of the restaurant at the Downtown Lexington Hotel and Conference Center on Tuesday morning. “When you could have a nice place to live and do what you love, that’s wonderful.

Read the rest of this entry »

As season announcements go, this is about as spare as it gets, but that is because the Lexington Philharmonic still has to choose a music director.

Evelyn Glennie

According the orchestra’s season-ticket solicitation letter, the Phil’s 2009-10 season will open with percussion soloist Evelyn Glennie, the world’s only full-time percussion soloist. Glennie is noted for that and her circumstances: she is profoundly deaf. Glennie has been profiled on 60 Minutes and many other outlets, been the subject of a documentary film, released more than 25 recordings and been named “Dame Commander” in her native England.

Glennie’s last Lexington appearance was in October 2004, when she presented a percussion concerto by Bright Sheng with the Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra at the Singletary Center. A program has not been announced for the Sept. 25 concert with the Lexington Philharmonic, which will open its first season under a new music director.

The Philharmonic’s search for a new music director comes to a close Friday night with an audition concert by Atlanta Symphony Orchestra assistant conductor Mei-Ann Chen. The Philharmonic’s search committee expects to name the new director sometime in the next several weeks.

Since the new conductor has not been named, the Phil has only released concert dates for the next season, noting Glennie as the season-opening soloist and the annual performance of Handel’s Messiah Dec. 11. The season includes seven concerts, down from the Philharmonic’s usual eight MasterClassics performances. The season-ticket solicitation letter says the orchestra will collaborate with UK Healthcare on an April 2010 concert.

Philharmonic executive director Peter Kucirko said the Philharmonic decided to go with a seven concert season so as to not schedule two concerts in April thereby, “competing with ourselves.” Kucirko said eliminating an April concert was not part of any cost-cutting measures, and he did not know the date or program for the UK Healthcare concert.

These are the Philharmonic’s dates:

• Sept. 25, with percussionist Evelyn Glennie
• Oct. 16
• Nov. 13
• Dec. 11: Handel’s Messiah, with the Lexington Singers
• Jan. 22
• Feb. 12
• March 5

The Philharmonic is currently renewing season tickets for current subscribers. They have until April 10 to renew. Visit the Phil’s website or call (859) 233-4226 for more information.

The most recent candidate to audition for music director of the Lexington Philharmonic Orchestra has withdrawn his name from consideration.

Alastair Willis takes a bow after conducting the Lexington Philharmonic Feb. 13. Photo by Rich Copley | LexGo.

Alastair Willis, a Seattle-based conductor who was raised in Russia and England, conducted the Philharmonic on Feb. 13. He was the ninth, and penultimate, candidate to succeed George Zack as music director of the Philharmonic.

Earlier this week, through his agent, Willis sent the Philharmonic’s executive director, Peter Kucirko, a short e-mail bowing out of the race.

“Thank you for inviting me and auditioning me in Lexington last week,” Willis wrote. “I am grateful for the time and effort you invested in me, however upon much reflection I sincerely feel this position is not right for me at this time and therefore would like to withdraw my candidacy.”

Search committee chairman John Carpenter said Willis’ audition week went well and, “God must have different plans for his career.”

After terms as an associate and resident conductor with the orchestras in Cincinnati and Seattle, Willis embarked on a freelance conducting career that includes a regular gig with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble.
Kucirko said it is not uncommon for candidates to withdraw from music director searches. Carpenter said that considering this search has been going on for two years, he is surprised only one candidate has dropped out.

“We’ll pick from nine,” Carpenter said of where the search stands. “We’re in a strong position going into the final candidate, and after that, I believe we will be able to make a great choice.”

The final candidate is Mei-Ann Chen, who will conduct the Philharmonic at 8 p.m. March 27. She is currently assistant conductor of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.