Back to Baltimore

Last week, I was excited to return to the U.S. for a week with the wonderful Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. As you can see in the  photo of the Washington Monument taken from my hotel room, the weather was beautiful and crisp, but boy was it cold too! 🥶 

For those of you who read the previous two posts, yes…I was very recently in the States with the Charlotte Symphony, followed by a week with the Hamburg Symphony. Having also had Christmas in the Caribbean, I’ve spent the last two months almost entirely on the road and, as unsure as I was exactly how I‘d hold up to all the flying and jetlag, it’s been a blast!  

My week with the BSO added John Luther Adams‘ Pulitzer and Grammy award winning tone poem Become Ocean to my repertoire. This evocative journey into the majesty of the earth‘s oceans, clocking in at an epic forty-two minutes with 92 musicians, lighting effects and amplification, was a truly unique experience for us on stage as well as for our audiences, and I was thrilled by their positive response. I enjoy departures from the well-trodden repertoire path, and this one, alluding to the hot-button topic of climate change, was particularly rewarding.

In ultimate contrast to that very watery opening, audiences at Strathmore Music Center and Meyerhoff Symphony Hall (see pics below) enjoyed a return to terra firma with Dvorak‘s earthy Cello Concerto played by the wonderful Spanish Cellist Pablo Ferrandez (see below). The Dvorak is one of my favourite concertos and Pablo knocked it out of the park on the favourite of his two (!) Strads. As usual the BSO was a joy to conduct. 

That leaves just one more engagement in my 2022/2023 winter season – the revival of Ted Huffman‘s production of Kris de Foort‘s opera The Time of Our Singing which starts rehearsals at Theater St. Gallen in Switzerland today. 

More about that in the next post!