James Gaffigan brings “Cavalleria” to SLSO
By Daniel Durchholz
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
November 7, 2023
Early in his career, James Gffigan didn’t necessarily think he would wind up as an opera conductor. Yet here he is occupying not one, but two significant opera posts. He’s in his third season as music director of the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía in Valencia, Spain. He is about to embark upon his first season as the general music director of Komische Opera Berlin.
“It’s funny the way life works out,” Gaffigan says by phone from Pittsburgh, where last weekend he led the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and violin soloist Bomsori in a program of Mozart, Tchaikovsky and Ravel. “When I started conducting, it was purely symphonic.”
At age 28, however, he served as an emergency substitute for a conductor in a Zurich production of La Boheme, and it turned him around. “I got the opera bug,” he says.
Gaffigan’s current posts offer him what he regards as a perfect balance of approaches to opera. Valencia specializes in more traditional fare, such as Tristan and Isolde and Wozzeck. In Berlin, he’s able to think outside the box a bit more. Next February, for example, Gaffigan is presenting a program that matches works by Anton Bruckner with music from David Bowie’s Berlin-recorded Heroes album. It will be performed in a renovated brewery.
And then, of course, he also conducts elsewhere as he has done for the past month, doing a brief American tour that brought him to Chicago, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and now St. Louis, where he will conduct a concert version of Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana.
The piece is new to Gaffigan, he says, “But it’s something that I grew up loving.”
“Cavalleria” is often performed paired with Ruggero Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci,” but for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra performance, it will stand alone.
“It’s a beautiful thing,” Gaffigan says. “Normally, you’re forced to do a double bill and it’s a lot more pressure, a lot more preparation. But I think it’s a masterpiece (on its own). It sums up Italian opera in about 70 minutes of music.”
Not every opera works well as a concert presentation, he says. “A lot of bel canto operas are a complete bore if you don’t have the plot if you’re not watching the drama unfold onstage.”
“Cavalleria,” however, “works perfectly. It’s a wonderful opportunity for the audience members to just focus on the music.”
Previously, Gaffigan was Principal Guest Conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra (a post currently held by SLSO Music Director Stéphane Denève) and the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra & Opera. He was the chief conductor of the Luzerner Sinfonieorchester for a decade, and early in his career served as associate conductor of the San Francisco Symphony and assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra.
Growing up on Staten Island, he attended public schools and played clarinet and bassoon in the school band. He took up the latter instrument which is not particularly popular among young players as a means of helping him get a music school scholarship. It worked: He attended the New England Conservatory of Music and later, Rice’s Shepherd School of Music.
“I used that time at the conservatory to try to become a conductor unsocially,” he says. “I kind of had that secret plan from the age of 18.”
Having long ago made it officially, Gaffigan says the reason he loves conducting is “I love composers, and I love the way they think. I love unlocking the secrets of what makes things sound interesting. Before I started studying, I never really knew, why that part made me feel funny. Why does my heart jump at that part?”
“Once he started reading the scores, he adds, “I figured out the tricks of Mahler, Debussy, Ravel, Wagner. But for me, the biggest mystery is the ones you can’t figure out. Like Schubert: You look at it on a page and there’s nothing special. It’s like a 16-year-old composer wrote it. But for some reason, it kills you or makes you so happy or so sad. So for me, that’s fascinating, that’s like playing Sherlock Holmes.”
Gaffigan’s nonmusician dad gave him relatable advice: that being a conductor is like being the coach of a baseball or football team. “Like, you’ve got all this talent in front of you, but they’re crazy individuals with egos, but you somehow need them to work together,” he says. “That, for me, that’s so fun.
“Because the bigger thing for me is bringing people together. I think it was Leonard Bernstein who said, ‘I don’t know what I like more, people or music.’ And I feel the same way. Being around talented people and working with them, somehow fixing and organizing things, it’s such a pleasure to me.”
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