Designing a Young People’s Concert Series

Delta David Gier: It has been a pure joy for me to work with such a wonderfully creative team at the New York Philharmonic: Ted Wiprud, Director of Education, Tom Dulack, Scriptwriter, and Matias Tarnopolsky, former Manager of Artistic Planning. Oftentimes a conductor is a creative island without anyone to bounce ideas off of, so this has been quite a treat for me. No lack of creativity with this bunch.

Tom Dulack: David always came to the actors’ rehearsals and rehearsed with us. Unheard of thing for a conductor to do. He was often a virtual member of the acting troupe, his dialogue thoroughly integrated with ours. Terrific!

DDG: Our collaborations generally have begun with a day-long retreat including the four of us. We begin with a theme that ties the four-concert series together, supplied by Ted. The repertoire is chosen around the theme, of course, but each program is carefully balanced, taking into consideration not just repertoire to serve the pedagogy, but also what makes for a powerful, satisfying listening experience. We all agree that the primary goal is to give these families a concert experience they will want to repeat again and again. The pedagogy is very important and we want everyone to come away from each concert more knowledgeable, but each program also needs to be emotionally moving as well.

Regarding pedagogy, once we have had our retreat and have laid out the season’s repertoire, we begin the process of teaching. Ted usually begins the dialogue with a list of pedagogical points, to which I add. Ted has a good sense of what can and needs to be taught in a setting like a Young People’s Concert. We can always count on him to keep us from superfluous rambling.

Tom is a wonderful playwright and director, and a non-musician, which has made his role crucial to the process. He forces the pedagogy to be understandable to fresh, young ears. Ted and I dump teaching points into his lap, at which time he begins his unique process of translation and interpretation which somehow, after many, many rounds of emails between the three of us, comes out into a great script. Usually around 10 or 11 AM the morning of the performance!

TD: Avery Fisher Hall is, of course, not built for theatre work; the sight lines are awful. Live television feeds helped a lot when the budget could still accommodate them. But normally I have been forced to have actors play all over the house, up in the boxes, in the aisles, wherever I could get away with it.

I first persuaded the Philharmonic to hire an actor in the second season for our Romantic concert.An actor who had starred in one of my plays in a California production came out and played Berlioz in a section about the Symphony Fantastique. He was also the guest host, and played the piano as well as acting out the execution scene from the symphony. The following year I hired four young actors and wrote a little script for them in which they created thumbnail sketches of eight or nine of the characters in Romeo and Juliet, to help the audience better understand the pedagogy related to the Prokofiev Romeo & Juliet.The success of that show allowed me to keep pushing for more theatre participation in the concerts, and this season Ted was particularly enthusiastic about the idea and helpful in supporting and expanding our theatre initiatives.

DDG: Another point that we all consider to be quite important is that each concert must include at least one substantial piece of standard repertoire, 12-15 minutes in length. These have ranged from pieces like Till Eulenspiegel to movements of symphonies like Sibelius’ 2^nd and Shostakovich’s 10^th. We have never backed away from music that might be considered more difficult for young listeners, rather considering how each piece fits the program and then how best to introduce it in a way that makes it comprehensible. I have always lobbied for a living composer on each program, and we always try to have them present to talk about their work.

Nor have we shied away from difficult pedagogy. For the Capitals of Music series, we really tried to delve into each city’s musical identity: What makes Bernstein’s New York unique? Which are the musical techniques that make up the New York sound? How did the music of Gershwin and Copland incorporate American elements to galvanize a style that is recognizably American? In Music 4 Imagination, we dug deeply into Prokofiev’s music for Romeo and Juliet – not the easier, lighter music, but the really powerful music surrounding conflict in the ballet. The point was to explore how a composer helps you to experience drama, specifically through the use of harmony and instrumentation. We had two pages of musical excerpts for that program, a lot of detail, great teaching.

TD: Basically I try to dramatize the pedagogy with actors, dancers and singers. I believe that it is essential to give young people something to look at in a concert as an alternative to lectures. I always want the theatrical component to help the young people understand the music better. In our Ravel’s Paris concert, I brought Diaghilev on stage with a French dancer who was supposed to embody the spirit of Paris and who at times evoked memories of Isadora. This was Heather Lipson, a brilliant Los Angeles-based dancer I met the previous year when I was doing a concert with the LA Philharmonic on Berlioz. For our first concert this year about New York, we had Jamie Bernstein hosting and we staged America from West Side Story with five singers.

Over the four seasons I have been doing this, I have also coached guest artists in delivering their lines, written dialogues for guest artists, and generally have been in charge of all the staging that involves non-musical elements to the show.

DDG: Tom’s incredible dramatic sense really comes to fruition in his work with the actors we have included as a part of these programs. He finds wonderful people and then incorporates their natural strengths and abilities into dramatic interpreters of the music. I think again of the Romeo and Juliet program, where four actors seamlessly weaved in and out of characters in Shakespeare’s tragedy as well as interacting with me in order to bring the pedagogy to life. Brilliant.

TD: In our 3^rd concert, entitled Mozart’s Vienna, I had the idea of bringing together the young singer/dancer Adam Alexander who embodied the spirit of Bernstein’s New York from the first concert, Heather Lipson again as the French dancer from our second Paris concert, and an 18^th century aristocratic fop. The idea was that a competition had developed as to which was the supreme capital of music. I had the concept of a kind of Pirandello-esque situation where these three characters – space and time travelers – find themselves unaccountably together in Vienna at the end of the 18^th century. Vienna teaches Paris the minuet, and New York finds something in Beethoven he can jitterbug to. It was in this concert that David first articulated the idea that Mozart’s Vienna was wherever Mozart’s music was being played.

DDG: Tom’s creation of “Herr Fopf” for Mozart’s Vienna was an unforgettable, absolutely outrageous character that came close to stealing that show. But how ingenious to incorporate that character under the circumstances – we had just lost funding for our live cameras, so all of a sudden our audiences, who were used to seeing a close-up play-by-play, had to go cold turkey visually. The comedic element of that program really carried us through and once more brought the teaching to life.

TD: In the final May 2^nd concert about Russian music, the key to me was fairy tales. I decided the spirit of Russia should be a child, a fairy tale princess. I had used an actual child in an earlier concert to great effect narrating Britten’s Young People’s Guide to the Orchestra, and was going to look for another child, when I remembered Alesia Lawson whom I had seen doing a kids’ show in Florida a year before. She is 25 but looks about 12. So we hired her, and brought Heather back for the third straight show, and Adam came back as New York. We had lost our Viennese fop to another show, and so we replaced him with Thomas Baird, an authority on Baroque dance I’d worked with in several earlier concerts. He is a pure dancer but agreed to do some acting for us. I concocted the theatrical scenario for the time and space travelers, wrote their dialogues, conceived of the climactic dance to the Mozart 40^th Symphony, helped shape it as Heather choreographed it, and then rehearsed the hell out of it over the final two days and into Saturday morning.

The audience went crazy that afternoon. Really crazy. For me it was a triumphant culmination of four hard years of work. And a vindication of my ideas.

DDG: This has been a real privilege for me. The New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts continue to be the cutting edge. I am honored to have been a part of this team.