Better Late Than Never…..

This is a post for all young conductors out there.  Let me tell you about the day I was invited to conduct the Cleveland Orchestra….. and turned them down.

Many years ago, when I was starting out as a conductor and I received an offer to conduct the Cleveland Orchestra.  For most young conductors, and some older ones, the decision to take a gig like this would be a no-brainer.  But me, being young and stupid, I didn’t know any better.  So I turned them down.

There was a madness to my method here.  I was coming off of several weeks on the road running around conducting, I was tired, and I was scheduled to go on vacation with, if memory serves, this cute girl I had been stal….. uhhhh…… dating.  I needed some time off.  But it was still a real dilemma what to do.

I called up The High Muckety-Muck of the Very Large Orchestra who occasionally provided me with advice and asked that person “what should I do?”  That person’s reply was “Go on vacation.  They’ll call back.”  So, that’s what I did.  I turned down a gig with the Cleveland Orchestra, fully expecting that they’d call and invite me back soon.

Years went by.  Every time I’d look at my schedule for the upcoming year and, no  surprise, no Cleveland.  Eventually I just gave up looking, fully expecting that I had blown my one and only chance of ever conducting this orchestra.  That girl?  She’s my wife, and we have two growing boys, a nice life in Minneapolis, and well-used passports.  But no Cleveland.

Then, when it was least expected, I got a call.  The Cleveland Orchestra had hired me to conduct, of all things, the score to Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights.  Not how I was expecting to make my Cleveland debut!  None-the-less, I have done this score-to-film routine many times, and City Lights is something of a specialty.  It’s a phenomenal film with great music, but it’s bloody hard.  Rite of Spring? Compared to City Lights it’s a piece of cake.  Co-ordinating and timing music with Charlie Chaplin is the hardest thing I regularly do, and now I was to do it in Cleveland.

Funny enough, before last Wednesday I’d never been to Cleveland.  But as soon as I got there I felt at home.  You know the reputation – a faded rust belt industrial town where you could fire off a howitzer down main street at 8 pm without worrying about hitting anything other than a stray pigeon.  That wasn’t an issue – I grew up in Buffalo, which is exactly the same situation.  What I wasn’t expecting, though, was the phenomenal food.  I started off my stay by eating at Lola’s, Executive Chef Mike Symon of Iron Chef fame.  Little did I know this was a harbinger of things to come.

Conducting an orchestra of the caliber of Cleveland for the first time can be a wee bit intimidating.  But a strange thing happened – musicians keep coming up to me and saying variations on “remember when we did this concert in that place together 15 years ago?”  I swear I ended up knowing 15 people on stage from one place or another.  The rest of them were equally as welcoming.  That was very reassuring, and now the only thing left to do was conduct.

A very wise man told me years ago that if you’re going to a major orchestra for the first time, do something they’ve either never done or haven’t done for a long while.  This was exactly the situation in which I found myself in Cleveland.  It is a great advantage as a conductor when the orchestra not only wants you, but needs you to do well.

So how did it go?  Well, it was sold out.  It was the Cleveland Orchestra.  It was City Lights.  And for a brief 87 minutes the Gods of Timing decided to smile down upon us.   When it was over the roar of the crowd told me all I needed to know.  14 years after first being invited I had finally made my Cleveland Orchestra debut.

Better late them never…