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Since stepping down as music director of the Ravinia Festival in 2015, James Conlon has returned twice to the summer home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and he will be back for a third time on Aug. 6. “I always look forward to Ravinia,” he said, “and I always look forward to the Chicago Symphony, be it downtown or at Ravinia.”
Appropriately, given the pandemic that gripped the world, Conlon will lead the CSO in a program of works by Mozart, a composer whose music he believes can have a healing effect. “I believe it is very healthy to listen to Mozart,“ he said. ”Perhaps he understood something in his intuitive way of the workings of the universe and the human organism. But I feel always better physically, spiritually and mentally after I have either conducted Mozart or heard Mozart. That’s just me, but I have a feeling it’s a lot of other people as well.”
Conlon, who was Ravinia’s music director for 11 seasons, still has fond memories of Ravinia’s concert performances of Mozart operas that he led in the festival’s Martin Theatre. “That still stands out to me as such an enormous pleasure,” he said. “This is a smaller dose of that same type of pleasure.”
The conductor, who made his debut with the New York Philharmonic in 1974, is well known for presenting works by composers who have been overlooked or under-recognized, particularly those who lost their lives or found their careers turned upside down by the Nazis before and during World War II. But for this Aug. 6 concert, he has chosen familiar works: the overture to The Marriage of Figaro, Violin Concerto No. 5 with soloist William Hagen and Symphony No. 41 (Jupiter).
“Well, I do known repertory,” Conlon said. “People in interviews and things tend to focus on when it’s out of the ordinary. But don’t forget, there is a basic canon, a basic repertory, and there is a lot of great music, enough for nine lives. And I certainly still love doing all of it, so Mozart is at the top of that.”
Conlon has a reputation for longevity in the major posts he has held. Nowhere was that more in evidence than at the esteemed Cincinnati May Festival, where he served for 37 years as music director, one of longest tenures ever of any artistic leader of an American classical-music institution.
But he broke that tradition last year when he stepped down in September after just four years as principal conductor of the RAI National Symphony Orchestra in Turin, Italy; he was the first American to hold the position. The official ensemble of RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana), the Italian public broadcasting network, it is one of the world’s leading radio orchestras.
Conlon explained that his departure was simply a matter of his contract ending. He will continue with the orchestra as a guest conductor, and he already made one such appearance in March and has other engagements planned elsewhere in Italy. “It’s true that if you compare the amount of time at the RAI with all my other music-director tenures, which are historically long, compared to most tenures of most people, it’s a short tenure,” he said.
But if Conlon’s time in Turin was unusually condensed, he is holding true to form at the Los Angeles Opera, where he will begin his 16th season Sept. 18 with Verdi’s Il trovatore. “This is a music directorship that has given me particular pleasure and sense of mission,” he said. “It was still a comparatively young opera company when I came to it. What I could not have known is how much I was going to love it. So I hope and intend to stay.”
The latest title he has added to his resume is artistic adviser of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Marin Alsop concluded her 14-year music directorship with the ensemble at the end of the 2020-21 season, and Conlon was invited to oversee its artistic activities as it engages in a search for her replacement; he will lead several sets of concerts each season. “They came to me, explained what they needed and the situation and I accepted,” he said. “I am not a candidate for the position. I’ve made that clear. I’m there to run the ship for three years or until they find a music director, and I’m very happy to do so.”
For his first set of concerts Oct. 1-2 with the Baltimore Symphony, he will helm a program that includes William Dawson’s largely forgotten Negro Folk Symphony. Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra premiered the work in 1934 at Carnegie Hall, and the famed conductor later recorded it with another ensemble. Conlon led the work with the Aspen Festival Orchestra on July 18 at the Aspen Music Festival, and he has plans to perform it as well with the Cincinnati Symphony. “I am now officially baptized as an advocate of this piece,” he said.
Conlon believes many other works by Black composers have been unfairly ignored and are waiting to be rediscovered. “Since the George Floyd murder, we are looking at ourselves again and asking ourselves questions, which we should be, and one of the things that comes up for a classical musician is that there’s a lot of good music there that has been neglected,“ he said. ”So this is a small step in trying to help to correct that.”
With the end of Conlon’s tenure with the RAI National Symphony Orchestra, he no longer has a music-director post with an orchestra, something he has had for much of his career. He has no plans to seek another such position, but he’s keeping an open mind. “I will just continue to do what I’ve always done, which is to conduct and to be serious about my music-making and not to look for jobs. If a job finds me and I like it, I will take it. So, nothing’s changed.”
