The Phoenix Symphony opens its 2013-14 season with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and its famous “Ode to Joy” chorus. The guest conductor is Andrew Grams, a rising star who was mentored by Franz Welser-Möst at the Cleveland Orchestra. In June, he was named music director of the Elgin Symphony Orchestra outside Chicago.
Grams debuted with the Phoenix Symphony in 2011, conducting Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5, a troubling masterpiece steeped in both mourning and triumph. Now he’ll be conducting one of the best-known symphonies in the repertoire.
“You don’t want to just mimic what you’ve heard before,” he says. “It’s our job as the musicians to stand on the shoulders of the people that came before us and to learn from the work that they did and see how can we find another dimension, how can we get even more out of the material than what is already there.”
Born in Maryland, Grams studied at the Juilliard School and started his career playing violin for the New York City Ballet Orchestra. He likens his decision to become a conductor to an actor who decides what he really wants to do is direct.
“At a certain point a lot of us want to be actually be the one making the interpretive decisions,” he says.
In addition to Beethoven’s Ninth, Grams will conduct another choral work, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Serenade to Music.” It’s set to text from Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice,” which waxes poetic on the “music of the spheres”: “Here will we sit and let the sounds of music / Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night / Become the touches of sweet harmony.”
“Rachmaninoff himself said that this was the most beautiful piece of music he had ever heard in his life,” Grams says.
