{"id":353,"date":"2018-10-28T10:09:20","date_gmt":"2018-10-28T14:09:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.courtneylewis.com\/blog\/?p=353"},"modified":"2018-12-10T10:12:32","modified_gmt":"2018-12-10T15:12:32","slug":"australia-london-belfast-vienna-and-bratislava","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.courtneylewis.com\/blog\/2018\/10\/australia-london-belfast-vienna-and-bratislava\/","title":{"rendered":"Australia, London, Belfast, Vienna and Bratislava"},"content":{"rendered":"

It has been many months since I had the pleasure of writing this column, and a great deal has happened in the interim. You may remember we ended last season with performances from Wagner\u2019s opera G\u00f6tterd\u00e4mmerung<\/em>. This is the stuff conductors\u2019 dreams are made of, so my summer began in tremendously high spirits. After a week unwinding in one of my favourite cities, Tel Aviv, I flew to Australia for two weeks with the Australian Youth Orchestra. Since it was to be my time visiting Australia, I arrived in Sydney a week before rehearsals began to spend time seeing the sights. Sydney Harbour is breath-taking, crowned by the iconic opera house. The British and Irish influence on Australian culture made everything strangely familiar, and I quickly fell in love with the warm and welcoming people.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Australian Youth Orchestra is made up of the country\u2019s finest young musicians many of whom are already performing with professional orchestras. Great youth orchestras have an irresistible energy: everyone is thrilled to be making music together and excited to be spending the summer with friends. The combination of the young musicians\u2019 technical accomplishment and the generous amount of rehearsal time can result in performances that have a special brilliance and depth. This was certainly the case Down Under; it was thrilling to hear the orchestra master the challenges of Britten\u2019s Sinfonia da Requiem<\/em>and Rachmaninoff\u2019s Symphonic Dances<\/em>while deepening my own interpretations of both pieces. After the concerts in Sydney we went on tour to Brisbane, by coincidence the hometown of Jacksonville\u2019s associate conductor, Nathan Aspinall. It was a pleasure to be shown around the city by Nathan and chat about business at home.<\/p>\n

After the concert in Brisbane I flew to England to attend my brother Adam\u2019s wedding in a beautiful Tudor mansion in Surrey. Thence back to New York for my favourite summertime combination of the beach and score study on Fire Island. Once the season begins in September the concerts come one after another with alarming speed, so it\u2019s important to prepare the music slowly away from the stage.<\/p>\n

As many of you know, I grew up in Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland. I was fortunate to have an excellent music education at a state school. Even with the disgraceful cuts that the current British government has imposed on music education, it is still possible for students at most state schools to learn a musical instrument for little to no cost. The notion that music lessons are only for the rich and privileged \u2013 lamentably so often the case in America \u2013 hasn\u2019t yet taken hold. In August I returned home to conduct the Ulster Youth Orchestra, an ensemble similar to the Australian, made up of the best young musicians from across Northern Ireland. This summer marked the orchestra\u2019s 25th<\/sup>anniversary, and to celebrate we went on tour to Vienna and Bratislava, before a final triumphant concert in Belfast. We performed a piece by Hamilton Harty, a famous Northern Irish composer and conductor (notably of the Hall\u00e9 Orchestra in Manchester), based on the Irish legend The Children of Lir<\/em>. It\u2019s an undervalued masterpiece that I\u2019m planning to perform in Jacksonville. It gave me great pride to bring this music to Vienna, the Mecca of classical music, performing it with my compatriots right beside the Leopold Museum, the home of many of my favourite paintings by Egon Schiele.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m writing from Minneapolis, where it\u2019s already close to freezing. For the next month I\u2019m conducting a production of a new opera by Kevin Puts, Silent Night<\/em>, which tells the story of the armistice between the French, German and British soldiers on Christmas Eve, 1914, deep in the trenches of the First World War. The rhythm of preparing an opera is very different from a concert. There is a lot more time given all the staging and costume requirements. It\u2019s whetting my appetite for the Jacksonville Symphony\u2019s production of Don <\/em>Giovanni, which opens on January 25. For the first time in the orchestra\u2019s history, we\u2019re presenting a fully-staged production in Jacoby Symphony Hall. The action will take place on a stage built on top of the existing stage, with the orchestra front and centre, not buried in a pit. It\u2019s an exciting experiment that will allow us to perform Mozart\u2019s greatest masterpiece in a way that highlights his genius for both instrumental and vocal music. And speaking of vocals, we will welcome a spectacular international cast. Put the date in your diary; it\u2019s coming up soon! In the meantime, do enjoy the Florida weather. I\u2019m envious!<\/p>\n

Originally published by the Florida Times-Union at:<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.jacksonville.com\/entertainmentlife\/20181028\/conducting-electricity-relaxing-summer-was-full-of-preparation<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It has been many months since I had the pleasure of writing this column, and a great deal has happened in the interim. You may remember we ended last season with performances from Wagner\u2019s opera G\u00f6tterd\u00e4mmerung. This is the stuff conductors\u2019 dreams are made of, so my summer began in tremendously high spirits. After a week unwinding in one of my favourite cities, Tel Aviv, I flew to Australia for two weeks with the Australian Youth Orchestra. Since it was to be my time visiting Australia, I arrived in Sydney a week before rehearsals began to spend time seeing the sights. Sydney Harbour is breath-taking, crowned by the iconic opera house. The British and Irish influence on Australian culture made everything strangely familiar, and I<\/p>\n

Continue readingAustralia, London, Belfast, Vienna and Bratislava<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"nfd_image_url":"","nfd_onboarding_generated":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conducting-electricity","category-jacksonvillesymphony"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.courtneylewis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.courtneylewis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.courtneylewis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.courtneylewis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.courtneylewis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.courtneylewis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":354,"href":"https:\/\/www.courtneylewis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353\/revisions\/354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.courtneylewis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.courtneylewis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.courtneylewis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}