Conducting = Teaching
Rhode Island conductor wants to lead the MCO
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Edward Markward, music director of the Rhode Island Civic Chorale and Orchestra, is a candidate for music director of the Montpelier Chamber Orchestra and will conduct the community orchestra in two performances this weekend. STEFAN HARD/TIMES ARGUS |
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By Jim Lowe Times Argus Staff - Published: October 23, 2009
Edward Markward sees conducting as teaching. "I think at heart I am really a teacher, as well as a performer," he said. "The teaching never stops from the podium – I think that's the way (Leonard) Bernstein thought, too."
Markward, the third candidate for the position of music director of the Montpelier Chamber Orchestra, will conduct the community orchestra in music of Mozart, Beethoven and Prokofiev, at Vermont College of the Fine Arts' College Hall Chapel in Montpelier on Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 4 p.m.
The music director position opened up last season when Troy Peters unexpectedly stepped down after only one season. Paul Gambill, music director of the Nashville Chamber Orchestra who recently moved to Montpelier, and Victor Rosenbaum, a well-known Boston concert pianist who also conducts, have already conducted audition programs. As Andrew Massey has withdrawn from consideration, the MCO will make its choice after this weekend's concerts.
"What I find incredible about this place, is the incredible amount of music that goes on around here," Markward said. "I'm staying with a member of the board of directors. He plays in two orchestras, two string quartets, all amateur, but they're all dedicated."
It's that dedication that inspires Markward.
"I look at my job as helping them reach their potential," he said. "That outlook doesn't change whether I'm working here or with a professional orchestra or a college orchestra. It's to find a way to help them play to the best of their abilities."
Markward, who resides in North Providence, R.I., is music director of the Rhode Island Civic Chorale and Orchestra, a position he has held since 1987. On the faculty of Rhode Island College since 1973, he conducts the symphony orchestra, teaches conducting and serves as co-director of the opera workshop.
Before choosing repertoire for his MCO program, Markward listened to recordings of the orchestra.
"I thought that this was something that they could possibly do," he said, referring to the Prokofiev. "And then I tried to find something that they could really latch onto and get their teeth into and feel satisfied about."
The program is truly a challenging one: Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A Major, K. 622 (featuring soloist Ian Greitzer); Beethoven's Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Opus 21; and Prokofiev: Symphony No. 1 in D Major ("Classical"), Opus 25.
"We're really working hard on the Prokofiev – and it's really beginning to sound like Prokofiev – and I think, by the weekend, we're going to have it," Markward said. "The Beethoven, they ate up."
Markward invited as soloist a friend who plays in the Boston Symphony and Pops, and is a colleague at Rhode Island College.
"The second movement of the Mozart concerto is among the most beautiful pieces ever written," Markward said. "I think it's just incredible. I'm biased, but I think no one plays it better that Ian Greitzer."
Should he be chosen the MCO's music director, Markward intends to "continue to make them know what it really takes to make them terrific."
"I think they're already very good," he said. "They have to get over the fear of themselves, we all do. I think they're a fearless group, but they can even be more so. My friends in the Montpelier Chamber Orchestra are what music ought to be about in this country."
Markward began his musical life in Iowa as a trumpeter. As a music student at Drake University though, he discovered opera and changed his major to voice, going on to the University of Michigan for vocal performance. A cold, which left a vocal chord paralyzed, proved a life-changing event.
"I fought through that, so I thought I should find something to do, just in case," he said. "So I got interested in conducting."
It was at that point that he took his present positions at Rhode Island College, but he continued to sing. He was even a soloist at Vermont's New England Bach Festival under Blanche Moyse.
"I finally decided that I wasn't going to sing anymore, so I got serious about conducting," Markward said. "I got hooked up with Gustav Meier."
Markward studied privately with the famed conductor for a many years. For nearly a decade, Meier enabled him to audit conducting classes at Tanglewood, including those with Bernstein.
Guest conducting engagements have included the Vermont Symphony, Philadelphia Oratorio Choir, Newport Music Festival, Rhode Island Philharmonic, Brooklyn Heights Symphony, Festival Ballet Providence, and the Perrysburg (Ohio) Symphony.
"It's been a really terrific life for the last 25 or 30 years," Markward said.