Music Director of the YSO from 1986-1989
One of my fondest memories of my time with the YSO revolves around the performance we did of Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen, a study for 23 solo strings that lies at the center of the marvelous Indian summer Strauss enjoyed towards the end of his life. It’s an immensely complex work, demanding exceptional sensitivity and intense concentration from all its participants as they weave a tragic narrative over the course of a single, 25-minute span.
I was fortunate enough to have the cream of the crop of an astonishingly talented string section, all of whom were eager to take part. To kick off the process I organized a pizza party at my apartment on Wooster Street as a means of introducing everyone to the piece. We sat around my living room—each player having brought along their individual part—and I put on a superb recording with the Berlin Philharmonic and Herbert von Karajan and let the lush string textures wash over us. It was a great first step in what ended up being a memorable journey. We spent many hours exploring and refining the music together and by performance time we’d succeeded in making it a real piece of chamber music, with everyone fully aware not just of their own part but also everyone’s else’s too—a luxury afforded us by a long gestation process that just isn’t an option in the professional world. The performances in Woolsey Hall and, as part of our 1988 UK tour, at the Royal College of Music in London and at the Usher Hall in my home town of Edinburgh, were worthy of the effort we’d put into the rehearsals, and their memory still reverberates with me more than thirty years later.