Andrew Litton

Thank you so much for asking me, Michael. It's a pleasure to have something to do during these days of the pandemic.

Yes.

Wow.

No, no, no. Just a couple of years, but oh well, I don't remember exactly, probably closer to four years, but it was fantastic to have, you know, be a student at Juilliard and then have—have an orchestra where you could go try things out for real, you know, without a teacher looking over your shoulder.

And, uh, it was fun and I, of course, got to know Westchester quite well then. So, it's—it's only natural that I'm living here now in Westchester. It's a beautiful part of the—of the area.

[Laughs] Mercy.

Yeah, well, it's—the very first time was actually, uh, at Juilliard when I was in my second year, I guess. Uh, yeah, that—that would be about right. And, uh, I—I got invited to play Rhapsody in Blue in Moscow with Yevgeny Svetlanov conducting, and I had never played it with orchestra. I'd played it, uh, as piano solo version since I was 15, 16.So, I got—and then this is the great thing about having parents that lived five blocks away and a mother who loved people and was a really great cook. So, I could get my friends to do anything gratis by just inviting them for dinner. Because, you know, they were students, they were students, they were hungry, and nothing like a great home-cooked meal.So, I literally pulled together a 26-piece band to do the original Ferde Grofé jazz band orchestration of the piece, um, and the fee was dinner afterwards, party afterwards at my parents'. So, it was—it was a really fun experience, and that was actually the very first time I tried playing and conducting.Um, I—one of my idols, of course, as a—as a young musician, young American wannabe conductor growing up was Leonard Bernstein, and of course, he played and conducted all the time. So, I felt like, "Gee, when I grow up, I want to do that too." And Rhapsody in Blue, of course, is probably the best piece to start out with because so much of it is piano alone, orchestra alone, piano alone, orchestra alone. And when they play together, the piano is very much a concertante part, so you're not important, you know.So, so it really—it worked out amazingly well and, of course, I loved the dual challenge and, and so I've been doing it ever since. With a very small repertoire, to be fair. There are not, in my humble opinion, that many pieces that don't need a conductor. Now, of course, a conductor would say that, but, um, I think once we got to late Beethoven and the romantic, beginning of the romantic period, orchestras and soloists musically became much more adversarial. So, you need a sort of ringleader for the orchestra, so when it's time for the orchestra to make an exclamation, it doesn't go "Whaaa" as they're sort of guessing where to play, but "Bam!" you know. [Shapiro laughs] A perfect example is the Emperor Concerto, you know. [Mimics the opening chords] You know, it's—you need to have that tug-of-war of between two people, basically.

No, that's—that's absolutely true. There—well, there's several Beethoven concertos that have that issue.

Yeah, and, uh, it's—it's a challenge. I mean, it's a little bit of close your eyes and pray, but, but a lot of the great pianists actually have a system. Um, so, there's—there's actually underneath a—a kind of beat, whether it's five counts, four counts.

Um, and that's great. But some of the younger pianists that you work with, they haven't thought this through, and...

So you're like, "Okay." So, but it's that, that is a challenge. But, but anyway, getting back to play-conducting, um, so, my repertoire is the two big Gershwin pieces, the concerto and the Rhapsody in Blue. I don't do the Second Rhapsody. Um, I, I do, um, the, uh, Shostakovich Second Piano Concerto, which is in one tempo for each of the three movements. So, again, conducting not necessary. Um, at least as far as being a traffic cop.Ravel G Major, which works incredibly well because it's chamber work anyway. The, the string count is actually listed by the composer, and it's a very small string section. And the second movement is this gorgeous, of the second half of the second movement is this gorgeous duet between the English horn and the piano. And as a conductor, and I've conducted it alone many times, I mean, you know, just—just conducted it many times, and you really feel like you're the third wheel, you know, it's like, "What am I doing here?" [Shapiro laughs] It's so much of this dialogue between the soloist and the English horn player.So, um, so that I feel that piece works phenomenally well when you're facing into the orchestra and just communicating as a chamber piece. And, in fact, the most recent—I, I played it most recently in March in Singapore, exactly 365 days from the last time I conducted a note of music. So, I, March 5th, 2020, I was in Singapore, gave the final cutoff and, uh, well, it was the ending of Shostakovich 10. And I never imagined that it would be exactly 365 days later before I'd work again. And such—that's what COVID has been like, so, you know.

Absolutely.

Yes. Yes.

Well, I was shy, I was little. I was very young, I was with my parents.

I was a bit shy, so.

That's—

That's right. Um, I studied—my, my final teacher at Juilliard was Nadia Reisenberg.

Bob Sherman's mom, Steve Sherman's grandma. Um, but, uh, but before that, I was studying privately from the age of 11 with Irwin Freundlich, who was chairman of the piano faculty. And, um, my—he died, um, two days before my entrance audition to, to Juilliard.

So, I, I contacted Nadia and I said, "Can I put you down as my teacher? My teacher's dead," you know. But I'd studied with him from age 11 to, to 18. And so he was a huge influence. Both of—

Well, I, I think again, before we went on air, you talked about how you're a composer who conducts, and I'm definitely a conductor who plays piano. And the reason for this is that I started piano just before I turned six. At 10 years old, I started going to the Leonard Bernstein Young People's Concerts. Again, a very short walk from, from where my parents lived. And it would make a much better story, Michael, if I told you that it was the first concert that was the epiphany. It wasn't, it was the fourth or fifth one. And he did Pines of Rome, which the program is still available on, you know, on video. Uh, it's called Anatomy of an Orchestra. And I just was fascinated by this piece of music, how amazingly well he articulated about it and explained all these, these four vistas in Rome. And, of course, the ending with the extra brass and it get louder and louder and he's jumping higher and higher. [Shapiro laughs] And I just came out of then-Philharmonic Hall and said to my mother, who of course paid for these little—I went with my best friend, you know, these two little 10-year-olds—"Mom, I want to be a conductor." And she just sort of rolled her eyes, and I—I'll never forget that. And it wasn't that she was being disrespectful, but as recently as that morning, I affirmed that I wanted to be a fireman. So, she wasn't taking it terribly seriously. [Shapiro laughs] And not just any fireman, the fireman on the back of the hook and ladder. Now, we're of the same vintage, we remember those great old fire trucks in New York City with the one guy all alone in the back, way up high. Again, people looking up to you, but [Shapiro laughs] it was a very different kind of control.And, uh, but I was very serious about it and, fortunately, very, the closest family friend was Richard Horowitz, the timpanist of the Met, who actually retired after 66 years in 2012, being the longest-serving principal player in any orchestra ever. But, um, he—he started taking me, whenever homework and piano practice allowed, to sit next to him in the pit at the Met.

So, when you're 10, 11, 12 years old, you don't know operas. Of course, it's—there, it's all new. And, of course, um, what they were doing mostly in those days, with—with the great Italian operas. They did, they did all the time, night after night. And in Italian opera, there's always subito fortissimo loud timpani rolls when somebody's been betrayed, or somebody's been found out for doing something.

And, of course, I didn't know when those would come and I'd sit right sandwiched between the wall of the pit and his biggest drum, the 30-inch drum. So, I literally was on top of the timpani, if you will. And he would go, "Pst," and I'd grab my ears. And so, I, you know, and then it'd come blasting in and then he'd go— [Laughs] All clear, you know.

Many times, many times. Yeah.

Nello Santi and Patanè, uh, these were the guys, of course, who sickeningly conducted all these Italian operas by memory, you know, I mean, just—

Right.

And, and natural, natural, you know. It was, it was, uh, extraordinary. I mean, my first recording, just to show you, was, um, the, the first Tosca with Callas, di Stefano, and Gobbi.

Yeah, that's conducted by, uh, Victor de Sabata.

And it is an extraordinary lesson, conducting lesson, just listening to it. And again, I had it on LP, I practically wore it out, and then, of course, in subsequent years, got it on CD. Um, it is exactly what you're talking about, the give-and-take, the elasticity, but all what's in the music. It's not, then, they're not superimposing.And what's fantastic, too, the Rome orchestra of that day, and we're talking early '60s, they had this wonderful ability to slide between notes, do these portamenti, that are kind of lost. I mean, that's been my whole sort of back a lot—background to my conducting career, is I put these back, wherever I've been. Sometimes to the detriment of the music, [Shapiro laughs] but most of the time, I think it really works. And I feel, if we're talking about authentic instrument practice, this is how things were done. You know, when Puccini was alive, this is how they played. And, so, um, so it was—it was really an, an eye-opening experience as I got to older and realized just how great this very first recording I ever owned was.

Well, we try. I try. And, I mean, not only do I now, because I've been doing this for so long, have very often my own parts for the orchestras wherever I go, so all the slides I want are already written. But when, when I ask for a slide, um, there are—there are different styles of slide, and so you need to know what your—what you want. Because as soon as you say it correctly, they'll do it tastefully.But if you just say, "Could you slide between these two notes?" and it's not a terribly good orchestra, you're going to get a—you—it's going to be a comedy routine, you know, it's going to sound terrible. So, so it has to be—this—this is the key thing. Like any effect, like stopped horns, like any effect in music, this is an effect. It's not the musical result. The musical result comes from if the effect works or not. Um, and so it's really important that it doesn't become a means to an end, but actually just a nice way to get to the end.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, I mean, I, I find—

Yeah, well, actually, a better example than Puccini is, is Elgar. Oh, since you're talking about the Brits, and I do, you know, my career started in the UK, so, of course, I have a lot of experience working with the British orchestras. And what was so great is, very early on, I got to do a lot of these British pieces, like Elgar and Britten, Benjamin Britten, and Delius, and Walton. And, so they kind of taught me, because if you actually just take in what they're giving you naturally, and this goes back to what your original question was, you learn, you go, "Aha, I get it. So this is what needs to be done."Then you go play, for example, Elgar, which I think is even more difficult than Delius to export because the music is so personal. It's so uniquely English. Um, and, and I love it for that. I mean, I love that it's just so clearly, just like Gershwin is so clearly New York, you know. I mean, there's no other, you know.So, with Elgar, the danger is, because it's very romantic music, as we all know, to overdo it. And if you o—if you overdo it, if you let the rubati get too far, um, it becomes like bad Richard Strauss. It really does. It doesn't stand up to that sort of treatment. Um, Elgar is much more about heartbreak than heart-on-sleeve, "I'm dying, she's dying," you know. It's not like that at all. It's—it's much more subtle. It's the little suspensions, it's—it's, and, and he really notates his music very carefully, like, there'll be one bar of largamente and that's it. You're done. Don't make it two bars, it's one bar. And, so, you know, so that's been the challenge, uh, I found.And what you said about the La Scala orchestra playing Italian music, yes, there is a certain amount of ownership that orchestras have, but the funny—of their own culture. But the funniest example of what we're talking about here was in Bergen, where I was for 12 and a half joyous years.

And, and I'm doing—we're actually recording the Grieg Piano Concerto for their umpteenth time. It's—it's my first time, and it's with Stephen Hough. And I get off the podium at one point and say to the concertmaster, who is Norwegian, um, "Espen, what's the Norwegian tradition in this passage? Because I'm trying very hard to get—to get it together, and it's not happening, you know." It's sort—sort of one of those typical things that also can happen with national music of one's own in one's own country, is that things get kind of, "Yeah, we don't need to rehearse that, we know that." And so, obviously, for recording, I wanted to clean up this one passage.He says, "What's—" I said to Espen, "What's the Norwegian tradition here?" He said, "You're the Norwegian tradition." [Shapiro laughs] I said, "Me?" "You're the conductor, you're the tradition." And I was like, "Okay, well..."

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Exactly.

I think he was! But it was just so funny because, because you, as, as you know, we conductors spend so much time worrying about just that, that you want your French music to not have a foreign accent, you want your German music to not have a foreign accent, you want your American music to not have a foreign accent, but to just sound innate, like we play this every day.And one of the great moments in my very early career was when I was principal conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony, which was my first symphony orchestra post. Um, by the third year of my tenure, we got a review in a London paper that said, "The Bournemouth Symphony is the best American orchestra on this side of the pond."

Because that meant when we played Copland and Bernstein, it didn't sound like Delius or Elgar, you know. So, that was really fun and, of course, you know, I'm way over-reading into it, but it still was a nice compliment to get.

Actually, actually no. I, I wasn't involved with City Ballet. What happened is, uh, I, in my first year at Juilliard, uh, February, my good friend Bill Wolfram calls and says, "Andy, you got to help me out." I said, "What's up?" He said, "I have been invited to play piano solo on stage for Rudolf Nureyev and some other stuff."

It was Nureyev and Friends. It was a unique, New York, and they presented it. It was at the then-called Minskoff Theatre, I don't know what the name's been changed to now. And it literally was a week of work where the first piece was piano solo on stage with Nureyev and me, and that was it. Second piece was Trout Quintet with the Murray Louis Dance Company, and it was his—he was the invited company. And then, a Cole Porter arrangement for 10-piece band by a then-relatively unknown William Bolcom.And it was—it was great. And that was, uh, I want to say April 1978, April/May. I can't remember exactly which month. And, um, it was amazing. So, it launched this sudden—that was actually my first professional engagement, I was a first-year student at Juilliard.

And, and so, they invited me, Nederlander, the production company, invited me to do a bunch of other work, including going out to the Hollywood Bowl—I mean, I'm sorry, the Greek Theatre in L.A., uh, with other New York musicians to do Pierrot Lunaire. And, we did the Danish Ballet, and then, um, the most, uh, I guess, powerful experience was playing, uh, for Natalia Makarova, who started her own dance company in 1980. And there was a six-ballet season at the Gershwin Theatre, it was then called the Uris Theatre. That name change I got. And, uh, three out of the six ballets were me. So I really was busy. I mean, including Gaspard de la nuit, and a whole Chopin set with Cynthia Gregory. So, these were ABT artists, but there wasn't anything, didn't have anything to do with ABT.

Okay.

Well, this is a great—this is a great question because what I wanted to say is after 1980, my conducting career started in, in 1980, and I never did ballet again. I never did ballet as a conductor until 2014, when I got invited to guest conduct Coppélia at New York City Ballet. And, um, and then after that, they, they invited me, I started in 2015, the end of 2015 as, as Music Director.The very first thing I did was, uh, because back in 1980, and I should—this is a little bit of a, of a shaggy dog story, but forgive me. One of the dancers in the Makarova company, uh, had just gotten into New York City Ballet. And I really, like you were just telling your story, fancied her. I mean, it was—I was in love. [Shapiro laughs] You know? And so I went to performances of hers almost every night. You know, my, my fantasy, my, my, um, what, what shall I say? My, my Met experience had been fulfilled by then. I'd been going to the Met all the time. It was ballet time!So, I got to know so many of these Balanchine and Robbins, that are now core repertoire for the company, ballets early on, even when they were relatively new. Um, and, uh, I just loved it. But, and in fact, I learned Ravel G Major piano concerto because I saw Jerome Robbins's ballet. I was the type of pianist who was playing Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff and Brahms, I didn't want, you know, Ravel, come on. I saw the ballet and especially that gorgeous pas de deux second movement and I got—"I got to play this. I got to play this."

So, ballet actually influenced me musically, which is totally cart before the horse or whatever. But what happened is, when I got the Coppélia opportunity, and I've done a lot of opera, but obviously ballet is very different, especially if you don't know dancing.

When you're a musician, we follow sound, we respond to sound. We don't respond to sight. I mean, if an opera singer is in trouble, it's vocally. It's not because, well,

They tripped. I mean, yeah, that could happen too, but it's—it's—it's—it's, it's a very different experience. So, I just—I made them give me three videos, one of which—archival videos—one of which was when Balanchine was still alive. Because I knew already going into this that there was going to be controversy about tempo. Because that's just—that's famous about ballet.

Big time. So, I wanted to make sure I could say to the ballet master or, now they're called repertory directors, um, "What, when they say it's too fast or it's too slow," I said, "This is exactly what Balanchine did in 19—" you know, when he was alive, "in 1981. You want to hear it?" [Shapiro laughs] I mean, it was—it was great. I didn't have to actually ever use this, but it was really fun to have that in my back pocket.

Well, that's very different. First of all, we have two new, I'm doing two new ballets in the season coming up in September.

I'm still waiting for the score to one of them, uh, and that's, you know, I hope they hurry up. And the other one is still kind of being written, although I've seen, you know, mock-ups of what, what it's looking like so far. Um, so, the challenge for me is to learn it really quickly and then start going to rehearsals and work things out with the dancers and the repertory directors. So, we really, the, the tempo is actually decided together.And this is what was missing, because I didn't get to work with Balanchine or Robbins directly. When you have that kind of dialogue with the creative force, you can actually influence it. And, and—

You're part of it. And, and Balanchine was famous for asking Robert Irving when a dancer complained it was too fast, "Robert, is that the right tempo?" And Robert would say, "Absolutely." And Balanchine would look at them and just say, "Guess you better speed up," you know. [Shapiro laughs] So, I, I think what's, what's really been interesting, too, for me, is I take two very different approaches to whatever the repertoires we're doing. Now, in, in City Ballet, most of our repertoire is not story ballet. It's—it's concert pieces that have been choreographed.

And as a concert piece, I kind of know how those go, you know, that—

I've been doing this for almost 40 years. So, I will challenge the dancers to a point, saying, "This really, you know, you're—I know you're trying to get in all the steps, but it's just too slow. Can't we just try?" you know. Or maybe the second performance, "Let me push you here." And usually it works, we have a great relationship, so it's good that we can talk openly like that, but, you know, it's a little bit of negotiating.

Yeah, it's not actually in Siena, though. That's the mis-

It's in the area around Siena. It's actually much closer to Montepulciano, which was a terrible excuse to drink wine. I'm sorry. [Shapiro laughs]

That's correct. And the concert itself was actually in Florence, at the Teatro della Pergola, which is a beautiful 800-seat— it was really fun, it was really—

Well, I, I just, I hope to God you go back. To me, that is, you know, one of the fundamental places of my background because I went to the Chigiana Academy.

Thank you, Michael. Thanks so much for inviting me, it was a pleasure.

Thanks, Michael.