During high school, Brian Asher Alhadeff had “a bit of a bad boy reputation with my band teacher,” the Templeton resident said, recalling the inciting incident behind his career as a music conductor.
“When you’re in public school and a pianist, they give you a pair of drumsticks and stick you in the back of the band, because there’s no place for a piano. So that’s what they did with me,” said Alhadeff, a trained classical pianist since age 7. “When I was a junior, we had this student teacher who I just didn’t get along with. She was a percussionist, so when she wasn’t conducting the band, she would be in the percussion section sort of coaching the percussion students.”
One day, Alhadeff icily told the student teacher that she didn’t know how to conduct properly.
“She told the band teacher what I said, and he called me into his office and told me to be ready to conduct the band next week,” Alhadeff said. “Over the weekend, I bought a conducting stick and I practiced the Frank Erickson ‘Toccata.’”
Alhadeff remembers the Monday that followed like it was yesterday. When he entered the band room, something seemed off. It appeared as if some of his fellow players had swapped instruments.
“When I put down that downbeat, it sounded like someone dropped a bomb in the zoo,” Alhadeff said with a laugh. “The band teacher had told everyone, ‘No matter what Brian does, you play something else,’ and to make it loud and gross. Literally it sounded like an elephant was screaming out of the trombone; fart sounds were coming out of the tubas.”
One silver lining from the experience Alhadeff vividly remembers was a handful of flute and clarinet players who weren’t in on the joke, and “didn’t know what to do except play what was in front of them, God bless them,” he said.
“I knew at that moment I was going to be a conductor,” Alhadeff said. “It was a bug that infected me instantly.”
The rest is history. Today, Alhadeff conducts for four professional orchestras in different cities across the Central Coast. He is the principal conductor for both Civic Ballet SLO and the State Street Ballet of Santa Barbara and serves as the general and artistic director behind the Opera SLO orchestra and the Lompoc Pops Orchestra. For the latter group, this June marks a special milestone.
Alhadeff has been conducting concerts for the Lompoc Pops Orchestra—usually about four performances a year, with a few gaps due to the pandemic—since 2015. The group’s upcoming concert on June 19 will be Alhadeff’s 25th as the orchestra’s conductor.
The concert will take place at the First United Methodist Church in Lompoc and will feature two special guest soloists: violinist Brynn Albanese and soprano Kaitlyn Chui. The theme of the program is Pops Goes to the Movies, and its set list will include soundtrack highlights from Schindler’s List, Chariots of Fire, Wonder Woman, and other films, along with some show tunes and songs of other genres.
Alhadeff said that one of the reasons he picked the Wonder Woman theme, composed by Hans Zimmer, is because it had never previously been performed by a professional orchestra in Lompoc, or any city along the Central Coast.
“In the time that I’ve been here, I’ve premiered over 100 new pieces that have never before been performed on the Central Coast,” said Alhadeff, who has lived in SLO County since 2010, when he joined Opera SLO as an assistant conductor.
“The big thing that makes the Lompoc Pops unique is it’s the only designated pops orchestra between Long Beach and, I believe, San Francisco,” added Alhadeff, who aims to incorporate popular songs from multiple music genres during each of his seasons with the orchestra. “When I’m curating a concert, I really do try to do a little bit of everything.”
Arts Editor Caleb Wiseblood is a big soundtrack buff. Send a list of your favorite film scores to cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jun 15-25, 2023.