Troy Peters conducts
Community orchestras are about love of music-making, not just playing concerts
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Troy Peters, pictured rehearsing the Montpelier Chamber Orchestra on Monday, is one of two finalists vying to take over the community orchestra. Stefan Hard/Times Argus |
Toolbox
By Jim Lowe Times Argus Staff - Published: October 27, 2006
For conductor Troy Peters, community orchestras – made up of serious amateurs as well as local professionals – have one distinct advantage over their professional counterparts.
"One of the great things about a community orchestra is that every single person on stage is there because it's what they want to do with their time," Peters said. "This is not always true with younger students, and it's definitely not always true with professionals.
"It's very common in professional orchestras for you to have players who view the job as something like factory work. They do it very well – but there's a different energy than this roomful of people who gave up their free time to come and do this as a social activity. It's very meaningful, and it's very gratifying as a conductor to work in that environment."
Peters will conduct the Montpelier Chamber Orchestra in two concerts, Saturday and Sunday, Nov. 4 and 5, at Vermont College's College Hall Chapel in Montpelier. Peters, as one of two finalists for the position of music director of the central Vermont community orchestra, has designed a program including Beethoven's Sixth Symphony ("Pastoral"), selections from Canteloube's "Songs of the Auvergne" with soprano Shyla Nelson, and Gwyneth Walker's "About Leaves."
The Montpelier Chamber Orchestra Society, its formal title, is the second-oldest of central Vermont's three community orchestras. When longtime Music Director Catherine Orr stepped down two seasons ago, the position was advertised and more than 50 conductors responded from around the world.
After interviewing five finalists, two were chosen to compete by conducting the orchestra. Sandra Dackow, a conductor and violinist from Kitridge, N.J., and music director of the Hershey (Pa.) Symphony Orchestra since 1991, conducted her concert in March. The new music director will be chosen after Peters' concert.
Peters, a professional violist as well as conductor, is best known as music director of the Vermont Youth Orchestra, a position he has held since 1995. More recently, Peters became conductor of the Middlebury College Orchestra. He has also guest-conducted professional orchestras including the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, as well as community groups including the Montpelier orchestra and the Vermont Philharmonic.
He has also conducted orchestras on tour with Trey Anastasio, formerly of the rock band Phish, gaining international attention. A graduate of Philadelphia's Curtis Institute, Peters was formerly assistant conductor of the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra and artistic director of the Pacific Chamber Soloists.
Peters is also a composer whose honors include the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and grants from Meet the Composer and the Rockefeller Foundation. Among those that have commissioned his music are the VSO, St. Michael's College, Social Band and the Cascadian Chorale. He was born in Greenock, Scotland, of American parents, and lives in Colchester with his wife, Anne, and daughter, Sophie.
Because Peters regularly conducts professional ensembles and spends most of his time teaching and conducting youth, he feels that the Montpelier Chamber Orchestra offers him a somewhat different experience.
"One of my real interests is trying to work with musicians from a wide variety of backgrounds and a wide variety of levels," Peters said in an interview after Monday's rehearsal at the orchestra's new home at Vermont College.
"The Montpelier Chamber Orchestra, being a community orchestra, is a great outlet for a kind of music-making that still has teaching involved with it," he said, "but is less teaching of basic musicianship, more about taking the tools that are in the room and teaching something about my experiences as a professional musician – something about how to shape a piece, something about how to make a phrase. There's a different kind of teaching than I do most of the time."
For example, unlike members of the youth orchestra, most of the Montpelier orchestra players already knew Beethoven's Sixth to some degree at the first rehearsal.
"Coming out of the gate, they have the wisdom and experience to know how a symphony goes," Peters said. "I've always enjoyed working with musicians like that, musicians who maybe don't practice as much as they did when they were younger, their fingers aren't as fast as they once were, but they can play, they know the repertoire to a degree – and they really want to get together and make beautiful things happen."
For Peters, the joy of working with an orchestra is more about process – the rehearsals – than the final performance.
"I got into this field because I fell in love with the process of making an orchestra sound great," he said. "First, as an orchestra player as a kid, I was hearing the way an orchestra's performance was put together. And then, when I went to school at Curtis, the thing that always fascinated me the most was the way in which something was built, seeing the way a great conductor could make a performance come together."
But, particularly for volunteer orchestras, the rehearsal process must be more than work, but a joy.
"It's not drudgery, it's not a struggle that is justified by the end product," Peters said. "It is actually the point to me. That journey is what the most gratifying part of music-making is. So, when the audience shows up, that's just the culmination of the process."
Don't get him wrong, the concert is important.
"I'm very focused on a high-level performance," Peters said. "I want the performances to be phenomenal – and there's an energy there that's special. But, when I think of my great musical memories, more than half of them were rehearsals, not concerts."
The process always begins with the programming, and Peters chose his for the Montpelier Chamber Orchestra carefully.
"I listened to the orchestra and asked myself what major work would be possible, but a stretch," he said. "So, I thought about wanting to program a big serious piece that was just barely within the capabilities of the group, but would challenge them to hear things I wasn't hearing them doing in the concerts that I had heard."
Beethoven's Sixth, one of the most popular works in the repertoire, came immediately to mind.
"It is a piece that was playable, but full of things to work on to improve the skills of the orchestra," Peters said. "When I realized I wanted to build a program around the Beethoven 'Pastoral' Symphony, the easy, obvious way to do that is to think nature."
Peters also wanted to include a Vermont composer and a Vermont soloist – long a Montpelier Chamber Orchestra tradition.
"So Gwyneth Walker's piece is Vermont naturalism with Robert Frost poetry," he said. "And Shyla Nelson is a soprano who I always enjoyed working with on several things before. It's a perfect match for her voice, and thematically, the Canteloube fits this whole idea of being in the country and this idealized vision of the country life that Beethoven is so concerned with in the 'Pastoral' Symphony."