After many years of happy collaboration with John Farrer, the Santa Maria Philharmonic Society announced a new music director, Maestro Michael Nowak, a few months ago. Nowak is a celebrated conductor who divides his time living and wielding the baton on the Central Coast with conducting scores for television and films in Hollywood.
Nowak discussed the upcoming season’s opening concert with the Sun during a Saturday morning drive home from Burbank, where he was conducting the score for ABC’s Once Upon A Time. The first concert of the season will include some of his favorite symphonic works before moving to a piano concerto in the second half, he said.
“I am excited to get started. We’ve been in the planning stages for months now, and I’m looking very much forward to getting to know these players, starting a new chapter in my life, and a new chapter in theirs as well,” Nowak said. “I’m opening it up with an overture I really love a lot by Berlioz, the ‘Beatrice and Benedict Overture,’ which is a really sparkly piece. To end the first half we are doing the ‘Firebird Suite’ by Stravinsky.”
To close out the show, during the second half the Santa Maria Philharmonic Orchestra and Nowak will accompany guest pianist Robert Thies for Rachmaninoff’s “Piano Concert No. 2,” a powerhouse of a piece in both symphonic and piano repertoire.
Nowak has already conducted the same piece with the same pianist, he said, and so he knows how Thies likes to play it. They’ve also performed Rachmaninoff’s third concerto and other works together.
“He’s got the right attitude and the right feeling with the music,” Nowak said. “He’s got it in his blood.”
Thies is more than a little familiar with Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto. He has been playing the piece since he was 17 years old, Thies told the Sun.
Thies also said the famous concerto is “really a perfect piece,” with “a lot of drama and emotion.” He has performed the piece numerous times throughout his career, but never tries to rest on those laurels, instead approaching the piece seriously whenever he’s asked to perform it, he said.
“All musicians are students, we’re perpetual students of music,” Thies said. “Every time I come back to this one I find something new in it. The quality of this music, the timelessness of this music, sometimes it reaches people just as intensely as 20 years ago.”
The challenge of all great classical musical performance is taking aged music and finding the newness in it again. The kind of timelessness that Thies talks about is felt in the hearts and minds of the audience and the performers.
Thies noted that even though he strives to bring his musicianship to a technical pinnacle with each performance, the creative connection to the audience is always in his sights as well.
“It’s something musicians must remind ourselves to keep ourselves sane, that generally our audiences are not musicians themselves and they just want to enjoy the performance,” Thies said. “They are on our side and they want to enjoy it, they made an effort to be there, and they want to enjoy a musical experience with us.”
And that’s what Nowak understood from the beginning of his stewardship with the Santa Maria Philharmonic Society and Orchestra. That’s why he planned a full orchestra performance for the season’s opening night, he said, to “begin with a bang.”
Bringing such beloved music to the community’s ears is a serious responsibility, Nowak said, but one that he is happy to accomplish in Santa Maria.
“There’s a reason they’ve been played over and over, because they’ve had a powerful influence on people’s lives and they want to hear them played repetitively over their lifetime because it brings them such joy,” Nowak said. “Rachmaninoff’s piano concerto can certainly do that, and this one in particular, people can really identify with it. It’s a real staple in the repertoire, and so is Stravinsky’s ‘Firebird.’ And the Berlioz overture I just think is a little gem.”
Nowak said the upcoming concert is not just an opportunity to show off the Santa Maria Philharmonic as a symphony orchestra on its own. “It’s also an opportunity for us to show off as the perfect accompanist to a pianist.”
Arts Editor Joe Payne can’t wait to see and hear the Philharmonic showing off. Contact him at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Sep 15-22, 2016.
