Welcome to my first posting in this very new world (for me at least) of blogging. Those who regularly attend Washington Concert Opera may be aware that, although I live in DC, I am Australian by birth, and have lived in London and Cardiff as well as Sydney. Some might even be aware of my secret desire to live in Paris again: living in that City of Light for over a year as a child turned me into the most ardent of francophiles.

My love of travel and experiencing different people and cultures  is, curiously enough, one of the reasons I love being a conductor of classical music, and opera in particular. When conducting opera, I completely immerse myself into the specific musical, cultural, linguistic, poetic and emotional world of the composer, librettist and their chosen story. It’s a really incredible head-space to be in. For example, the last time I conducted La Bohème, I was transported to the artistic, bohemian milieu of Paris in 1849, as seen through the lens of Puccini and his librettists (who conceived and wrote the opera in Italian) in 1896, almost half a century later, in a beautifully traditional production sung by an wonderful all-American cast, and performed in the magnificent Benedum Center (1912) in Pittsburgh. For those with a heady imagination, such an experience is completely intoxicating and great fun: welcome to my world…

As intoxicating a cocktail of artistic experience as a fully-staged opera performance
can be, I don’t necessarily need all the trappings of the stage to feel part of an incredibly satisfying performance. Washington Concert Opera is a great example of what can be generated by pure musical and emotional communication. When you have principal singers, orchestra, chorus and conductor all on the same stage singing and playing their hearts out in order to communicate what can’t be communicated by words alone, you have a distilled musical and emotional experience that is hard to beat! There is also something quite wonderful in seeing a singer in a concert dress transform into a character infront of your eyes and ears. Mostly, in a fully-staged opera, one is carried away immediately to another world, and the performers wholly present themselves as their costumed personas. This is more difficult in concert performances, but actually there are times where I love knowing that there are two personas on stage: the singer in their formal dress or tails, and the character that is created and comes through from the performer’s mental and musical embodiment of their story.

As the son of an Australian father who was a french academic, and a physical education teacher and dance loving Hungarian mother, it now seems to me that I was destined to become a conductor. From my father I inherited a love of language, the ability to hear and process sound to a high degree, and a fascination with European culture. My mother gave me physical co-ordination, the desire to interpret musical sound through my body, and a direct connection with Europe.

My journey so far has been a fascinating and rewarding one, but I still feel it is just begininng…

Please feel free to join me as it continues through this blog!