Andrew Constantine is set to make his Arizona debut with the Phoenix Symphony this week, conducting a program he believes should build to an exhilarating climax with Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2.
“And I can’t think of many better orchestras to be performing it with,” says the British conductor, who moved to the States in 2004 and currently serves as music director of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic in Indiana and the Reading Symphony Orchestra in Pennsylvania. “I came to Phoenix a little over a year ago to hear the orchestra and was enormously impressed. And since then, I’ve had friends who have been out to see them as soloists who have given me incredibly glowing accounts, so it’s an exciting prospect to be playing a work as challenging as the Rachmaninoff with them.”
With Michael Christie approaching the end of his run as the symphony’s music director this season, Constantine is looking forward to seeing what kind of rapport he can develop with the orchestra this week.
He’s been hailed as “a brilliant representative of the art of conducting” by the late Ilya Musin, with whom he studied at Russia’s Leningrad Conservatory in the early ’90s. But Constantine thinks he would bring more to the position than his skills as a conductor.
“I think I have an ability to engage not only with an orchestra but with the community that supports the orchestra. I’ve been a very avid proponent of all sort of projects and strategies at my other orchestras to broaden the orchestra’s appeal to as many people in the community as possible. I think that’s an absolutely essential prerequisite in anybody who aspires to be a music director in today’s climate, which is very challenging to us all.”
Making the orchestra accessible to everyone is a key component of Constantine’s philosophy.
“Conducting the orchestra, selecting music, planning programs, things like this, that’s half the job,” he says. “The other part is really working your damnedest to increase the profile of the orchestra, to increase the community’s love of the orchestra. I’ve always worked to break down the barriers and the perception of elitism. I think the classical-music industry has let itself get in a trap, if you like, in that we’re regarded as being elitist rather than elite. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with pursuing something to levels and standards that are as high as possible. But they should be done in the realm of being as attractive to as many people as possible.”
A lot of the programming Constantine does with the symphonies he directs is geared toward fostering a strong relationship with the audience.
“I often go out in the lobby before the concerts and greet people to make them feel welcome,” he says, “because at the end of the day, your greatest advocates are going to be the audience you have now. They have to go out at the end of the evening and say to their family, friends and other people they meet, ‘Wow, this is the place to be; you’ve got to go to the symphony; it’s a great night out.’
“You have to create an atmosphere where people feel comfortable coming in, and then you have to gain their trust so that you can present them with music that under their own aegis they might not come along to hear but they think, ‘Well, you know, Andrew planned that. He knows what we like. I trust him.’ ”
He also tries to have an educational component to the programming.
“One of the things I created in Fort Wayne,” he says, “is a series called the Composer Revealed. It’s a wonderful way of contextualizing the life of a given composer, showing people that Beethoven wasn’t somebody who lived on a cloud and sent his music down by Royal Fed Ex. He was somebody who really existed. I think that’s something we lose sight of more and more. Educationally, we’ve let ourselves down in this country and in Europe as well. More and more music and great art and history are taking the backseat in people’s educations.”
Regardless of how the selection process for music direction goes, the guest conductor says he’s looking forward to this week’s performances.
“It’s fabulous music, of course,” he says. “And (clarinetist) David Shifrin is a wonderful soloist. The Mozart concerto is one of the most sublime works for the instrument, written at the end of Mozart’s life — an instrument he loved for a player he was personally fond of and had done a lot of work with.”
The work by Debussy, he says, “is equally sublime and ethereal in its own way but a totally different sound from the Mozart piece.”
“Debussy was exploring a different range of tonal possibilities when he wrote this prelude. He was very much somebody who was trying to create his own style, his own language at the time. And it’s something that exploits the timbres and potentials of the orchestra in different ways than earlier repertoire — say, classical music from Beethoven through Mendelssohn, Schubert, people like this. So it was really quite a stunning departure in many ways. Of course, there was a degree of outrage when it was first performed, but it’s come down to us as his abiding masterpiece, I think.”
As for Rachmaninoff, Constantine says, “I don’t really know what to say about Rachmaninoff that hasn’t already been said. It’s a wonderful piece to conduct. It’s exhilarating from any performer’s point of view. And I’m sure it’s going to bring the concert to an enormous and resounding conclusion.”
