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Thursday, October 11, 2001
Invigorating the symphony
New conductor will use unconventional methods to draw a more modern audience
By Brendan Walsh
Caller-Times

All photos by Michelle Christenson/Caller-Times

The Corpus Christi Symphony Orchestra hopes that 47-year-old Richard Rosenberg will invigorate the symphony by diversifying the organization’s musical offerings, thereby attracting audiences with more young people and Hispanics. Rosenberg will make his debut as the symphony’s conductor and music director Saturday at Richardson Auditorium.

In Richard Rosenberg's first year of teaching at the University of Michigan, the young conductor was asked if he had any ideas for enhancing the student symphony's Halloween concert, an annual event that drew nearly 5,000 costumed admirers to an Ann Arbor auditorium. Indeed he did.
   Rosenberg, dressed in a bat costume and suspended by his feet from the auditorium's ceiling, conducted Johann Strauss Jr.'s "Die Fledermaus" ("The Bat") while hanging upside down.
   "The musicians didn't know until the performance that I was going to do it hanging upside down, and some of them just stared at me with their jaws dropped to the floor and didn't play a note," he said. Still, it was a wildly popular performance and landed Rosenberg on the front page of the next day's Detroit Free Press.
   While he's not always that outlandish, Rosenberg is almost always unconventional. It's one of the reasons the Corpus Christi Symphony Orchestra hired him in March as the replacement for Maestro Cornelius Eberhardt, who stepped down after 25 years at the orchestra's helm.

Season opener

What: Venice, the Corpus Christi Symphony Orchestra season opener
When: Saturday, 8 p.m.
Where: Richardson Auditorium, Del Mar College
Cost: Tickets start at $15
More Info: (361) 883-6683

   The hope was that the 47-year-old Rosenberg - who is particularly well-versed in contemporary classical music and music of the Americas - would invigorate what had become a sleepy symphony. He will be expected to diversify the symphony's musical offerings and, in doing so, diversify its audience by attracting more young people and Hispanics.
   Rosenberg will make his debut as the symphony's conductor and music director Saturday at Richardson Auditorium.
   Well-rounded program
   Lee Gwozdz, the symphony's former executive director, has said that symphony ticket sales increased from 1997 to 2000. However, Gwozdz has pointed out, many of those tickets were bought in large blocks by corporate sponsors, and there were often open seats at performances. Gwozdz and other symphony officials expect interest in Rosenberg to result in fewer empty seats.
   This year, the symphony has 100 new season ticket subscribers, bringing the total to about 600.
   The program Rosenberg selected for his first performance is indicative of the type of music he was expected to bring. The evening will begin with a tribute to the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the form of Gustav Mahler's "Adagietto" movement from his fifth symphony; that will be followed by 20th-century American composer John Corigliano's "Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra."

Attracting a younger audience
Symphony conductor Richard Rosenberg hopes to attract a new and younger audience by offering:
More unconventional and unfamiliar 20th-century music, along with standards presented in a new manner
More music from American and Latin-American composers
Also, balcony tickets are available to students for just $5, and any open seat on the day of the show is also $5 for students.

   The concert continues with Erich Wolfgang Korngold's 1940 work "The Sea Hawk," and concludes with Tschaikowsky's "Symphony No. 4."
   "I try to approach a program like a chef approaches a meal. We have an appetizer and an entrée and a dessert that work well together," Rosenberg said. "Everything about this program is unconventional. Even the conventional music I'll be presenting in an unconventional way."
   New music
   For example, Rosenberg will attempt to lead the orchestra in performing the Tschaikowsky piece as the composer himself would have wanted it. The conventional contemporary approach, Rosenberg says, is to play the piece staccato, sharply and dryly. His take on the piece will be much more smooth and fluid.
   An even more dramatic departure from the norm is Corigliano's piece. The 63-year-old American composer won a Pulitzer Prize this year, and his somewhat atonal, 12-tone concerto is about as modern as Corpus Christi residents will hear this year. Rosenberg calls it "the most challenging piece we'll perform all year," but says that "Even if people don't think they like this style, if they give it a chance, I think they'll be blown away by it."
   Symphony timpanist Jim Rennier agrees that the music will be a challenge for the audience and the players. Rennier called Corigliano's piece "a real tour de force" but said that "it's good to play the music of living composers. If we continue to play the music of just the dead folks, the music becomes dead in itself. All music was new once."
   Surround sound
   Richard Hawkins, who Rosenberg unabashedly calls "the finest clarinetist ever," will be the symphony's featured solo artist. The unconventional performance also will include clarinets, trumpets and French horns stationed throughout the auditorium - not just on stage - to add to the sonic experience.
   "I will do nothing to scare audiences off," Rosenberg vows. "I will only program pieces that will help them feel included and as if they were co-producers, not as if we were just trying to lecture them."
   Another inclusive aspect of Rosenberg's programming is his tip of the hat to Latin-American composers. "Si, Si, Symphony," a Feb. 16, 2002, program at Selena Auditorium, includes 20th-century works from Argentina and Mexico. It's part of an effort to feature music by people other than "dead Europeans," as Rosenberg puts it. While the conductor likes the music in and of itself, he also hopes that it may hold special appeal to Corpus Christi's Hispanic community.
   Modern, classical music
   While Rosenberg claims that he is for the most part unaware of what's happening at other symphonies across the country, the move to include more 20th-century music seems to be a national trend. In recent years the Philadelphia orchestra devoted an entire season to 20th-century music, more than half the selections of a Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra season were written after 1900, and classical recording labels are releasing discs of 20th-century music by the Indianapolis Symphony and New York Philharmonic, among others.
   Rosenbeg's love affair with modern, classical music dates to his childhood. A Bronx native, Rosenberg has two older brothers. His father was a police officer, and his mother raised the three boys and worked in a high school. He grew up close to the Bronx Zoo, and for a long time planned on becoming a veterinarian or zoologist.
   His parents brought their children to free concerts in the parks, and also owned classical music records. Rosenberg listened to Beethoven's symphonies with the same reverence as he did the modern and (at one time) controversial "Rite of Spring" by Igor Stravinsky.
   "I didn't know ... there was one I was supposed to like and another I wasn't," Rosenberg said. To him, it was all just good music.
   This man loves his job
   He earned his undergraduate degree at Queens College where Lincoln Center was "his playground." He did further study at Yale, at the Peabody Institute and then studied privately in Europe.
   Since then Rosenberg has worked as a professor, and has waved his baton at orchestras from Juneau, Alaska, to London, from Argentina to Miami. He co-founded and serves as artistic director of the Hot Springs Music Festival, and before coming to Corpus Christi was the music director at the Waterloo/Cedar Falls, Iowa, orchestra.
   Asked what he would do with a few days off from the symphony, with no obligations involving music, Rosenberg has trouble answering. He suggests he'd do some reading, see a movie or build and repair furniture (a hobby of his), but his answers seem halfhearted, and it's hard to believe he wouldn't spend most of the time thinking about music and studying scores.
   "I'm a very lucky person because people actually pay me to do what I like to do. ... I've spent my entire life trying to acquire the skills and knowledge that it takes to be a conductor. At no point do I want to leave that."

   Contact Brendan Walsh at 886-3763 or walshb@caller.com

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