A year from now, in the fall of 2016, the next music director and principal conductor of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra will begin his or her tenure as the eighth music director in the orchestra’s 80-year history. That’s the plan, anyway. Nothing is simple, quick, or assured in the circuitous process that symphony orchestras go through to choose a new music director; for KSO, it’s been going on since September 2013, when Lucas Richman, who had been the orchestra’s director since 2003, announced he would step down following the 2014-15 season.
“I wish I could say the process doesn’t take long, but it does,” says Rachel Ford, KSO’s executive director. “It is what it is. By the time you know the date of a conductor’s last concert, you will already have one more year programmed, and so you’ve got to look two years out. The people you want to engage already have their music lives programmed as well. They’ve got gigs and commitments.”
By February 2014, a 23-person committee comprising KSO musicians, board members, and staffers and members of the community narrowed a list of 150 applicants down to 30 contenders.
“At every stage of the process, we’re looking at a few main things,” says Gabriel Lefkowitz, KSO’s concertmaster and a selection committee member. “First, does this applicant have the experience to even be considered for the job? Then we watched their submitted performance videos. You can’t glean from a video how they interact with people, but you see what their musicianship is, their technique, and their craft as a conductor.”
A few months later, the committee chose six finalists, each of whom has been booked for a guest conductor spot in KSO’s Masterworks series for the 2015-16 season. Each spot includes a week of rehearsals and performances with the orchestra and a soloist chosen by the conductor and a post-performance interview. (Each finalist was required to choose, in collaboration with the KSO staff, his or her own audition concert program and soloist.) The finalists are Marcelo Lehninger, who appears this weekend, plus Shizuo “Z” Kuwahara, Aram Demirjian, Eckart Preu, Jacomo Rafael Bairos, and Steven Jarvi. In addition to the six, three guest conductors from the 2014-15 season were interviewed during their time in Knoxville and are also being considered: Sameer Patel, Lawrence Loh, and Vladimir Kulenovic.
For committee member Jeffery Whaley, KSO’s principal horn player, the videos and Skype interviews were essential in selecting the finalists. But he admits that there is an obvious limit to what one can learn from them. “It is far more telling to have them stand before us on the podium and sit across a conference table from us. … In the rehearsals, we are able to see how each conductor interprets his score and communicates musical ideas to the orchestra. Was the rehearsal environment tense and stressful or relaxed and casual? Did the music improve throughout the week or did the performance sound very similar to the first rehearsal?”
So what are the criteria for a new KSO music director?
One need only eavesdrop on a few lobby conversations at KSO concerts to come away with the general critical view among KSO’s supporters that the orchestra made enormous progress during the tenure of Lucas Richman and, with the right artistic leadership, could be poised for an even greater reputation.
“The ideal candidate must represent so many different things—a good musician, a good stick technician, a good director, a good facilitator,” Lefkowitz says. “If you’re really fortunate, you can find one person who does all of those things well.”
That means the next director will also be involved in the orchestra’s education and outreach efforts.
“A majority of our work is outside the Tennessee and Bijou Theatre concerts, out in the community,” Ford says. “We couldn’t exist in this form if a few concerts were all we did. We have to reach out to people. We need a music director who wants to be involved in the community, and, particularly in Knoxville, someone who is also committed to education and outreach, because that’s what we do.”
Knoxville Symphony Orchestra performs music by Shostakovich, Ravel, Debussy, and Respighi at the Tennessee Theatre (604 S. Gay St.) on Thursday, Oct. 22, and Friday, Oct. 23, at 7:30 p.m. Marcelo Lehninger, a finalist for KSO’s music director position, will conduct. Tickets are $13-$83.
Alan Sherrod has been writing about Knoxville’s vibrant classical music scene since 2007. In 2010, he won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts—the Arts Journalism Institute in Classical Music and Opera—under the auspices of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He also operates his own blogs, Classical Journal and Arts Knoxville.
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