Right after the Gala with Gil Shaham, I headed to Washington D.C. to continue my work with Washington National Opera (WNO) at the Kennedy Centre, site of last season’s exhausting but wonderful Washington Marathon with Porgy and Bess. Incidentally, I recently learned that the performance at which I, aged seven, told my Mom I wanted to become a conductor was a performance of Porgy and Bess by Houston Grand Opera with whom I just gratefully received a Grammy nomination for Jake Heggie’s Intelligence. What are the odds of that biographical circle?
It’s a special privilege to return to company you’ve bonded with as strongly as I did with WNO during Porgy, but I was particularly joyful to return to conduct Aida, a work that I first encountered as performed by Leontyne Price – who so inspired and encouraged me to get into classical music as child. I’d watched her 1980 performance of Ritorna Vincitor with Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonicad nauseum on our Betamax player and getting to finally conduct it within Francesca Zambello’s wonderful production was incredibly fulfilling. Leontyne is still alive, so perhaps I’ll yet have the honour of meeting her!
