No one will ever accuse Jonathan McPhee of resting on his laurels. Boston Ballet’s music director (he was also the company’s interim artistic director in between Maina Gielgud and Mikko Nissinen) should have had his hands full preparing the orchestra for the company’s current production of Stanton Welch’s Madame Butterfly. (Our review begins on the cover of the Arts section.) Yet this Saturday evening, having entrusted the Boston Ballet baton to his redoubtable assistant, Mark Churchill, he’ll be back on the podium at Jordan Hall, where back in December of 1999 he led the Longwood Symphony Orchestra in a creditable performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The program for this Saturday is similarly ambitious: just a month after Seiji Ozawa and the BSO did Hector Berlioz’s epic Symphonie fantastique, McPhee and the LSO will try to match them. And whereas the BSO program back on April 13 had one piece for two pianos and orchestra, the Bartók concerto, the LSO evening will offer two: Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra in E-flat and the Boston premiere of McPhee’s own Fantasy for Two Pianos and Orchestra, both with the husband-and-wife duo of Randall Hodgkinson and Leslie Amper.
Measuring yourself against Mozart and your orchestra against the BSO is no mean endeavor, but McPhee shouldn’t be out of his league, either as a composer or as a conductor. The Copland Trust and Boosey & Hawkes commissioned from him the revised arrangement of Copland’s Rodeo that got a bang-up performance at Boston Ballet in March; last year he also did a new edition of Stravinsky’s Firebird for B&H. The Fantasy, he says, was commissioned by Rivers Music School in Weston for its 2001 Contemporary Music Festival. And his composing background? " I studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music and then at Juilliard. I never really pushed the composing front — to me that was part of the edification of being a conductor. But at some point in New York, I started feeling, ‘I really do have a voice here, I have a vocabulary, I have a sensibility.’ The Fantasy is a very short piece, seven and a half or eight minutes, that was part of the commission. But I think there could be another couple of movements if I come back to it. "
As a conductor, McPhee has led New York City Ballet, the Royal Ballet, Martha Graham Dance Company, the Joffrey, and American Ballet Theatre, not to mention the San Francisco Symphony and the BBC Scottish Symphony. The Longwood however, represents a special challenge, since it’s an all-amateur orchestra made up of all doctors and anesthesiologists and medical students, and rehearsal time is scarce. So why the difficult, if gorgeous, Symphonie fantastique? " It’s not a safe piece, " he acknowledges. " But I love it. It’s actually the first piece I ever conducted. " He’s referring to the end of his first year at the Royal Academy, when as one of three 16-year-olds there (one of the other two was Simon Rattle) he applied for the conducting program and for his audition piece chose the Fantastique’s fourth movement, the March to the Scaffold.
This weekend’s Longwood performance will, however, will be his first complete Fantastique. " Hopefully, we’ll pour our hearts out and make everyone live the dream, " he concludes. It remains only to remind you that Jordan Hall, with its warm concentrated acoustic, is a wonderful place to hear this work, that tickets are only $20, and that the proceeds will go to the New England Hemophilia Association.
Jonathan McPhee conducts the Longwood Symphony Orchestra at 8 p.m. this Saturday, May 11, at Jordan Hall, 30 Gainsborough Street. Tickets are $20, half price for seniors and students; call the LSO at (617) 332-7011 or the Jordan Hall box office at (617) 536-2412.
