A New Season and a Kind of Homecoming
This past spring, in Memphis, I picked up the score to Verdi's Requiem — a piece I've been conducting for thirty years — and for the first time, I wasn't scared. The first several times, it felt like standing at the foot of Everest, or lining up for a marathon I wasn't sure I could finish. This time, it simply felt like coming home. I've spent the months since trying to understand what changed in me, and I think the answer has everything to do with where this next season is taking me.
Listen to our performance of “Sanctus” from Verdi’s Requiem with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra. Watch now!
A Threshold in Memphis
For most of my life, the Verdi Requiem has been mother's milk to me. It's sat at the very center of my thinking since I was seventeen and first decided I wanted to spend my life on a podium. So conducting it has always carried a particular weight — the sense that I had to be equal to it. This past spring in Memphis, with four world-class soloists and a chorus of two hundred voices, that weight lifted. I wasn't proving anything to anyone. I was simply, fully there.
The Requiem ends on a single whispered word — libera me, deliver me — and then it fades into nothing. We held the silence in the hall afterward for a full twenty-five seconds. Nobody moved. The mezzo Jamie Barton and I talked about it later: that goosebump sense that the music had carried us all somewhere none of us can quite describe. For lack of a better word, I'll call it the spiritual realm. After thirty-six years on the podium, I can tell you honestly that it's among the greatest things I've ever been part of.
I've come to think of that night as a threshold. Last season carried me to podiums all over the world I'd never stood on before. This coming season turns the other way — toward home, and toward the music that made me. The Memphis Symphony celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, and we've built the season around the big choral canvases that are closest to who I am. In October we bring Vaughan Williams's Dona Nobis Pacem — a prayer for peace — and next May we close with Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony. A season that travels from "grant us peace" to rising again. That feels exactly right for where I am.
The Night I Staged a Riot
One of the things I'm proudest of in Memphis is a series we call Orchestra Unplugged. If you grew up when MTV and VH1 ran their Unplugged sessions, you know the spirit of it: the band lets its hair down and does something it normally wouldn't. We take a single piece, pull it apart, play you the excerpts, then perform the whole thing with supertitles scrolling above the players so you always know what to listen for. We just did it with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring — the work that famously caused a riot at its 1913 premiere. So I planted eight people in the audience. Right at the end of Part One, one of them stood up and shouted, "Does anybody else think this piece stinks?" Another yelled at him to sit down. For a moment, half the hall was sure a real brawl had broken out — until I let them in on it, and told the story of the actual riot before we played Part Two. I love surprising people. It might be the most fun I've ever had on a stage.
A Few More Roads This Season
The year has its share of adventures beyond Memphis. We open the Memphis season in September with the marvelous young cellist Bryan Cheng playing a concerto by my dear friend Mason Bates, alongside Tchaikovsky's Fourth. In February I return to the desert for my Arizona MusicFest. And in March I'll be in western New York with the Buffalo Philharmonic. Different orchestras, different halls — but the same thing I keep chasing: the chance to go deep with an audience rather than simply pass through.
If This Is the Year You Come
If you see me in concert this season, don't fret over when to clap, or what to wear, or how much you're supposed to know. Come the way you'd come to any other night out. If we finish a big, blazing final chord and you want to applaud — please, applaud. Honestly, the strangest moment for us on stage is when a movement ends with a bang and the room stays silent because everyone's afraid to break some rule. Those rules are barely a century old anyway. Brahms himself once fretted that no one would keep programming his First Symphony because audiences hadn't clapped between the movements. So clap. Gasp. React. An honest response is never the wrong one.
What I'm Exploring
People sometimes assume audiences only want the warhorses — the greatest hits. And those pieces are miracles; I'll never argue otherwise. But a steady diet of nothing but them is like sitting down to steak and roast beef every single night — no vegetables, no dessert, nothing new on the table. Even if you're sure that's all you want, I know it isn't. All music was once new. Every masterpiece we now hold sacred was, at some point, a strange thing an audience had never heard. So the part of my job I love most is getting to be the kid at show-and-tell — holding something up and saying: here's this thing I've just discovered that I'm crazy about, and I think you're going to love it. That's what a living composer like Mason Bates gives a room. It's why you'll find a new voice on nearly every program I build this year, right alongside the ones you already treasure.
Come Along This Season
So here's my invitation: come spend an evening with us this season — in Memphis, in Baltimore, out in the desert, wherever our paths happen to cross. Sit down, let the rules fall away, and let the music do what it does best. There's nothing I'd love more than to look out from the podium and know you're in the room.
With gratitude,
Robert
Fall 2026 Appearances
September 19 & 20, 2026
Memphis Symphony Orchestra with Bryan Cheng, cello — Bates Cello Concerto; Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 4
September 26, 2026
Meridian Symphony Orchestra with Barrie Cooper, violin — Vaughan Williams The Lark Ascending; Mendelssohn Symphony No. 4
October 4, 2026
Baltimore Chamber Orchestra with Ricardo Morales, clarinet — Copland Clarinet Concerto; Appalachian Spring
October 10 & 11, 2026
Memphis Symphony Orchestra & Chorus — Vaughan Williams Dona Nobis Pacem
October 24, 2026
Memphis Symphony Orchestra & Opera Memphis — Verdi Rigoletto
November 22, 2026
Baltimore Chamber Orchestra with Bryan Wallick, piano — Ravel, Bizet & Chopin
December 5 & 6, 2026
Memphis Symphony Orchestra — Magic of Memphis
December 21 & 22, 2026
Memphis Symphony Orchestra & Chamber Chorus — Handel Messiah