COVER STORY DAVID BAZEMORE
Music Academy of the
BEST
Reinventing Classical Performance for a New Century by Charles Donelan
A
t 3:30 in the afternoon on the Fourth of July — a time when many patriotic Americans have their hands wrapped around a cold beverage — 21 Music Academy of the West string fellows sit in Weinman Hall, their hands clasping the instruments that brought them here: 21 beautiful, precious violins. They have assembled for String Leadership Masterclass with Jorja Fleezanis, a violinist who is one of the world’s most distinguished concertmasters and a full professor at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. And despite the beautiful weather on this holiday Friday in Montecito, they are not alone, because directly across from them there sits an audience of some 30 people whose idea of fun on the Fourth of July involves bearing witness to great teaching. Fleezanis and her students do not disappoint. After leading the mostly soft-spoken young musicians through an opening discussion about the general principles behind leading a section of the orchestra, Fleezanis gets her first big-idea answer of the morning. It comes from Mia Laity, a 21-year-old student from the Manhattan School of Music who describes conducting as “putting into visual form the gestures that you hear in the music.” Fleezanis’s face lights up in agreement, and she responds to the remark by explaining that the conductor serves as “a kind of weathervane, something that translates the invisible into the visible.” And as she does so, the afternoon’s first big wave of pleasure and recognition courses through the attentive audience.“It’s happening,” people’s expressions seem to say. “Learning has begun.” “What else can a conductor give you?” Fleezanis asks, and when the answer “a vision” comes back, she gets excited again, exclaiming that this is precisely why the discipline of the concertmaster is so important because in tending to the conductor, he or she brings the whole orchestra closer to the music. “Great art represents the flame of life to me,” Fleezanis says, her expressive eyes locked in contact with those of her students. “It’s a mysterious thing, but in music I can hear it and feel it.” And so can we because the depth of the connection here, not only between the students and the teacher, but also between the Masterclass and its audience, has, on this late summer afternoon, suddenly become so immediate and tangible. I got the idea to check out String Leadership Masterclass from Patrick Posey, the Music Academy’s vice president of artistic planning and educational programs, who used it as an
example of what makes the Academy’s core audience special. “It’s the desire for intellectual stimulation that they bring to the experience,” Posey told me.“They will go watch Jorja Fleezanis or Glen Dicterow teaching a String Leadership Masterclass not only for the music but also for the ideas. It’s often the case that a Masterclass will include discussions of broad life concepts along with technical analysis of the music, and both of these are of interest to our audience. The concepts of leadership that our students are learning are universal.” And the instrumental Masterclasses barely scratch the surface as Marilyn Horne and her vocal fellows rehearse and prepare for this year’s opera production of Carmen.
New Horizons
The Masterclass is not the only place to witness evidence of great leadership at the Music Academy of the West this summer. Under Scott Reed, the dynamic young president who took over in 2010, the school/festival has rapidly positioned itself at the head of a new generation of classical musicians, serving as both a top training program and a uniquely stimulating environment for prestigious visiting artists. This season alone, more than 30 guest artists will participate in programming that has grown progressively more adventurous, but without losing the thread of its educational mission. On Saturday, July 12, the Academy Festival Orchestra will take the stage at the Granada with visiting artist Jeremy Denk, the distinguished pianist and author who is without question the hottest classical performer in the world today. Having spent five days here last summer, Denk, who just concluded a resoundingly successful turn as music director of the Ojai Music Festival, has chosen to come back to the Music Academy this summer for two full weeks and to appear in concert with the Academy Festival Orchestra, rather than only performing in recital. In 2014’s classical music world, it doesn’t get any better than that. And yet for the Music Academy of the West, it does get better because while Denk’s extended stay represents a huge coup, it’s not even the biggest news of the year. Earlier this spring, the school announced an extremely ambitious and far-reaching new partnership with the New York Philharmonic. As of this summer, maestro Alan Gilbert and a team of N.Y. Phil musicians will come to the Music Academy every season for the
LEARNING TO LEAD: Students in Jorja Fleezanis’s Masterclass on String Leadership prepare to become concertmasters of professional orchestras.
next four years. In 2015 and again in 2017, the entire New York Philharmonic will visit Santa Barbara, first for a performance at the Santa Barbara Bowl next summer and then to collaborate with the Academy Festival Orchestra in a celebration of the school’s 70th anniversary. For the Music Academy’s students, however, these concerts are just a small part of a much bigger deal because 10 of them will be chosen every summer to travel to New York City in the fall, where they will participate in 10 days of special mentoring sessions with N.Y. Phil musicians and where they will play public concerts of chamber music designed to put the artistry of the Music Academy’s fellows in front of a New York music audience. Patrick Posey, who spends much of the year in New York City and who came to the Music Academy from Juilliard, waxes enthusiastic on this subject, observing that “by the end of 2017, we will have put 40 of our students through this process, where they play chamber music together in New York and showcase for that audience what we are doing here. To put it another way, the New York Philharmonic is coming here, but the Music Academy is also going there, and that’s not something that any other festival or music school in America can say.” A big project such as this one typically has multiple roots, and that’s definitely the case here. Perhaps the biggest one was planted two summers ago, when Matthew VanBesien, the executive director of the N.Y. Phil, began coming out to judge the Music Academy’s concerto competition. Clearly, VanBesien liked what he heard and felt strongly enough about the talent he had found here to translate his perceptions into action. But Posey also points to another important factor, and a homegrown Santa Barbara one at that, in the generosity and vision of the Mosher Foundation, which has underwritten the Music Academy’s Guest Artist program since 2011. Created by Samuel B. and Margaret Mosher, who owned the 45,000-acre Dos Pueblos Ranch, the foundation today is run by Ed and Sue Birch, close friends of the Moshers and devoted cultivators of the performing arts, health care, and education in Santa Barbara. When Scott Reed came to Birch in 2011, they brainstormed to create something that would have the impact
July 10, 2014
THE INDEPENDENt
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