Free Peek X New Haven Symphony’s New Maestro at Festival
It will be like a homecoming when Alasdair Neale conducts the New Haven Symphony Orchestra as its new music director for a free concert on the New Haven Green on Saturday, June 22 as part of the city’s International Festival of Arts & Ideas.
The NHSO will be performing in concert, starting at 7 p.m. with three-time Grammy nominee Afro-Caribbean music group Tiempo Libre, one of the hottest contemporary Latin bands.
Neale is succeeding Guilford’s William Boughton, who is retiring after 12 seasons as conductor and music director of the fourth-oldest symphony in the U.S.
Neale, 56, is familiar with the city, although it has been greatly transformed since the last time he was here for any significant length of stay. Neale, who heads the Marin Symphony in California and the Sun Valley Summer Symphony in Idaho, received his master’s degree in conducting at Yale University’s School of Music in 1985, where he served as the conductor of the Yale Symphony Orchestra.
“It’s a community that I spent six formative years with in the 1980s and I have roots and friendships there still,” he said recently on one of his visits here.
Neale will have a residence in New Haven while maintaining his home in San Francisco that he shares with his husband, Lowell.
‘Something to be Grateful For’
Besides inheriting an orchestra that he calls “tremendously gifted and dedicated,” he is also going to be leading an arts institution that is stable.
Elaine C. Carroll, CEO of the NHSO, attributes the current health of the organization to a wide variety of factors, among them its partnership with musicians to work with the organization during economic hardships, creative marketing, the financial support of the community, its sizable endowment, its outreach efforts, and a game-changing grant that stabilized the orchestra in tough economic times.
The orchestra’s budget is $2.1 million and it has posted modest surpluses for five of the last six years. Overall, ticket sales over the last five years increased by 30 percent, with single tickets sales rising from 7,349 tickets sold in fiscal 2014 to 11,999 in fiscal 2018
“That’s something to be grateful for and something clearly to be preserved as well, particularly when one sees of the threats to other orchestras around the country,” Neale says.
But stable should not mean things should be status quo, he says.
“I feel it is my responsibility first and foremost to serve the community,” he says. “This is why this past year I spent time getting to know the city better. It’s given me a much more fully formed idea of what the community consists of and it’s quite multi-faceted. It’s all about creating a dialogue and forming relationships.”
Accessible, Informative, Enjoyable
“An essential part of my job is out reach to much more than the traditional orchestra constituents and bring in more people who wouldn’t normally come to a symphony orchestra concert,” he says. “That’s going to be a serious part of my attention.
He promises a varied repertoire.
“There’s no one area that’s been concentrated on,” he says. “There will be something for everybody and there will be some surprises, some unfamiliar music that I really believe in and I think will be both accessible, informative, and enjoyable to listen to.
“In the crowded marketplace that is the 21st century, it is so important for symphony orchestras to maintain their cultural relevance, to constantly be making the case that this is an art form worth preserving, that has stood the test of time, and has a place in our future,” he says. “That’s the key.”
Asked about his conducting life in the highly competitive world of conducting post-Yale, he said his first professional orchestra position was as assistant conductor at the San Francisco Symphony under music director was Herbert Bloomsted.
“I just saw him two months ago and he was guest conducting and he’ll be 92 this year,” Neale says. “He’s never missed a concert in his life.
“There are many different paths you could take [after school]. You can be an associate for a number of years and then get a job as a music director. You can go the youth orchestra way. Or the college route,” he says. “Some conductors start out as soloists, often as pianists and then they start conducting from the keyboard. Then they make the leap from the piano bench to the podium.”
When asked for a new slogan for this new generation of the NHSO he suggested “What’s next?”
“Though right now it is more of a question than a slogan—but that’s the question I have to answer, how do we plan for the next 125 years so that we can continue as vibrant and relevant an organization as possible,” he says.
Frank Rizzo is a freelance journalist who lives in New Haven and New York City. He has been writing about theater and the arts in Connecticut for nearly 40 years.