Memphis Symphony celebrates 75th anniversary

There's a particular hush right before the first downbeat of a new season — and this year I got to break it with music written by one of my dearest friends. Earlier this month at the Cannon Center, we opened the Memphis Symphony's season together: Bryan Cheng's cello in Mason Bates's Cello Concerto, and after intermission, the great sweep of Tchaikovsky's Fourth. Thirty-six years on the podium, and that downbeat still feels like the most hopeful sound I know.

Memphis Symphony Orchestra Celebrates 75th Anniversary

The Memphis Symphony Orchestra opened its 75th-anniversary season this September — my 11th as Music Director — and I chose to begin it with a piece by someone I've known for more than 30 years: Mason Bates.

Long before Mason was a two-time Grammy winner whose music is played by orchestras all over the world, I commissioned the very first orchestral work he ever wrote. Watching him grow into one of the most performed composers of his generation has been one of the great joys of my life — I sometimes say I feel like the proudest musical big brother alive. So there was something deeply right about raising the baton on a new season with his Cello Concerto, the cellist Bryan Cheng joining us as soloist.

People sometimes ask why I'd open a season with a living composer instead of a sure-thing warhorse. My answer is simple: all music was once new. Somebody had to program Tchaikovsky's Fourth for the very first time, too — and after intermission, that's exactly where we went, into that symphony's storm and its hard-won blaze of an ending. Old and new on the same night, in conversation with each other. That's the whole idea.

I sat down with WKNO here in Memphis to talk about the season ahead, and I keep circling back to the same feeling. Seventy-five years is a long time for any orchestra, and this one has weathered plenty to get here. To stand in front of these musicians on an opening night, in a hall full of people who chose to spend their evening with us, is a privilege I'll never take lightly.

Photo: Opening night, 75th Anniversary Season of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra

The Music I Was Built For

In October we turn to the repertoire that shaped me before any other. On the 10th and 11th, the Memphis Symphony and Chorus perform Vaughan Williams's Dona Nobis Pacem — "grant us peace." My degree from Eastman is in choral conducting; my teacher, Donald Neuen, was a protégé of the legendary Robert Shaw, and I was lucky enough to work with Shaw himself. That lineage lives in everything I do on the podium, but it comes fully home when there's a chorus in front of me. Vaughan Williams wrote this as a plea against war, and its title says everything about why we still need it. Some music entertains. This music asks a whole room to breathe together.

Portraits of America in Baltimore

Between Memphis weekends, I head to Maryland for my third season with the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra — an ensemble of the region's finest players and some of my favorite music-making anywhere. On October 4th we present Portraits of America, built around two Copland gems: the Clarinet Concerto, with Philadelphia Orchestra principal Ricardo Morales as soloist, and Appalachian Spring. There's a particular openness to Copland — those wide, prairie-clear harmonies that somehow sound like hope itself. After a few seasons together, this orchestra and I have built the kind of trust where I barely have to gesture and they're already there. That's when the music starts to feel truly alive.

What I'm Exploring: Permission

Lately I've been thinking about how to make the concert hall feel less like a museum and more like an invitation. Here's something I love to remind longtime concertgoers: the strict etiquette we treat as sacred is barely 130 years old. Before about 1890, audiences clapped between movements, called out, responded in the moment. Brahms once wrote to his friend Josef Joachim, genuinely worried no one would keep programming his First Symphony because the audience hadn't applauded after the first movement. So this season, my ask is simple. Come as you are. Don't fret about when to clap or what to wear. If something moves you, let it show — an honest response is never the wrong one.

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With gratitude,
Robert