The applause dies down, and the lights go up in the concert hall. It’s intermission. What do you do? Stretch your legs? Head for the restroom or the bar?
How about staying in your seat and engaging in conversation with the composer of the piece that the orchestra just played?
That’s par for the course at the New West Symphony (NWS), Ventura County’s professional orchestra, where Michael Christie instituted the practice when he became music director five years ago. Christie’s contract was recently renewed for five more years, so “Intermission Insights” will continue to be one of the orchestra’s distinguishing features.
“Back around 2005, I remember being asked to do a postconcert chat [following a guest-conducting gig],” Christie said in a recent sit-down interview. “I was happy to do it, but there were 10 people there. The manager told me, ‘I’m so sorry.’
“At the time, I was music director of the Colorado Music Festival in Boulder. I thought, ‘I’m going to try this at intermission.’ It was so successful that we did it for the next 10 years. Then I took the idea here.
“Without fail, more than half the audience stays and listens. If we don’t have a guest soloist, I may introduce a new member of the orchestra or chat with the concertmaster.
“[The chat] always includes an opportunity for people to ask questions, things like, ‘I saw you and the conductor smile at each other at one point. What happened there?’ I don’t know [any other organization] that is doing this, but audience surveys suggest it’s very popular.”
Creative initiatives like this have become standard during Christie’s tenure at NWS, which begins its 30th season in January 2025. He is unafraid to mix styles and eras on a program and to collaborate with other area arts organizations. Just look at the orchestra’s upcoming concerts, Nov. 2–3, which add visuals and narration to Antonín Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony.
This innovative spirit can also be found in Christie’s work outside of Southern California as a well-known conductor of new operas. He led the world premiere of composer Mason Bates’s The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs in Santa Fe, its Grammy Award-winning recording, and its subsequent staging in San Francisco. In November, he will conduct the world premiere of Bates’s newest opera, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, at Indiana University.
Christie, who lives in Minneapolis with his family, has previously served as music director of the Phoenix Symphony, Brooklyn Philharmonic, and Minnesota Opera. Charismatic but approachable, he shared his thoughts on conducting and the role of the modern music director over a recent lunch. Our conversation has been edited slightly for concision and clarity.
Let’s start with your opera work. How did you become Mason Bates’s go-to conductor?
I think we met as far back as 2005 in Brooklyn. He [had studied] at Juilliard. I remember doing a performance with the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and he was the DJ at the after-party. So we’ve known each other for a long time.
When The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs came up in 2016, I had already done a lot of new opera [in Minnesota], including operas by Kevin Puts and Ricky Ian Gordon. Santa Fe Opera contacted me and said they were commissioning Bates’s first opera. They were assembling a team that could serve as dramaturgs in a sense — people who had done this before and could give him good feedback.
We had so much fun talking about [setting music to] the English language. English is tricky to sing, and it’s tricky to set. I think we came to trust each other.
The Metropolitan Opera is going to do The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay next year. I had a similar chat with a guy there named Paul Cremo. He said, “We want somebody to facilitate Mason’s vision.” We workshopped that project in December [2023].
Los Angeles Opera was originally supposed to premiere Kavalier and Clay, which is adapted from a beloved Michael Chabon novel, but the company backed out due to financial issues.
At that point, Indiana University entered the picture. They had already been making overtures to producers of new opera. Their stage is actually the same map as the Met stage, as is the backstage area. So it’s perfectly set up as a Met footprint. [In Indiana] we’ll use two student casts and a student orchestra. They are committed to being the “off-Broadway” for a lot of opera projects.
Do you expect you will conduct at the Met?
No. I’m sure Yannick [Nézet-Séguin] will do it. He conducts all the premieres, and I applaud him for that. He has changed the complexion of that company with all that new music.
Now the biggest challenge for composers who are writing for the Met is making sure their pieces are accessible for smaller organizations. It’s something Mason and I spoke about. I reminded him, “There aren’t too many opera companies that have triple winds.”
Let’s move on to your other primary responsibility, the New West Symphony. Your programming is extremely eclectic. This is not meant in a disparaging way, but it sometimes feels like the old Ed Sullivan Show in that each concert seems to contain something for everyone. How do you go about programming a concert and a season?
We do six programs a year [of the main concert series]. You have to fit a lot into those six programs. I don’t have the luxury of programming the many weeks of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, so I have taken an umbrella approach. I find a theme and then use that theme to justify how the pieces speak to each other.
For the November concerts, the umbrella is “American Crossroads.” We have some spirituals. [Pianist] Lara Downes plays some ragtime and a Jessie Montgomery piece. We conclude with the “New World” Symphony. For the opening of our 30th season in January [2025], I went searching online for pieces that are Opus 30. That’s why we’re starting with Also sprach Zarathustra, which is Richard Strauss’s Opus 30.
A few years ago, I wanted to do a Mozart concert, but I didn’t want to be confined to doing three [full-length] pieces. So I took a gamble and picked some of the best music he wrote in various genres — symphony movements, solo sonatas, opera arias, parts of the Requiem — and created a sort of tapas menu. People loved the variety. There was a movement from the Clarinet Concerto and from a string quartet. We’re doing the same thing with Beethoven this coming year.
Is this programming for our age of short attention spans?
My daughter, who is 16, once told me, “It’s not that I have a short attention span. I just have a lot of things I want to listen to.” I took that as a nuanced take on the issue of short attention spans. The breadth of music she listens to is astounding.
On your April 2025 program with NWS, you play movements from J.S. Bach cantatas, which are not often heard on symphony concerts.
Every piece on that program is celebrating an anniversary. That’s the umbrella. Those Bach cantatas were written 300 years ago. [Georges Bizet’s] Carmen and [Bedřich Smetana’s] The Moldau [the other major pieces on the program] were written 150 years ago. The three pop songs at the end, including “Mamma Mia,” are from 50 years ago — 1975. At the top of the concert, I’ll say, “This is what ties these pieces together. Enjoy the musical whiplash.” For our symphony audience — for many audiences — Bach is a stretch.
[Bach’s cantatas] require a smaller choir, which enables me to have the chamber choir from Pepperdine University perform with us. That’s a partnership we value. In fact, every program has a partner we collaborate with — usually an organization but occasionally a person. The recurring ones are the New West Symphony Chorus, Los Robles Children’s Choir, State Street Ballet, and Pacific Festival Ballet. January’s concert partner is the Conejo Chinese Cultural Association. That program will include a world premiere [by Chinese American composer Kui Dong].
Where did the emphasis on partnerships stem from? Is it about reaching out to different elements in the community?
It does seem to be an obvious option. When you’re the music director, you’re the curator, so it’s your judgment [how to make these collaborations work]. So you’re picky about new commissions. Rather than being jarring, you’re corralling the audience in a slightly different direction.
You have to listen to what the partner is telling you and communicate with them — make sure the way the program is coming together is compatible with their needs. I enjoy that collaboration. Our supporters and our community have responded very well to it.
Speaking of audiences, have yours recovered to pre-pandemic levels?
No, but we’re building back up. Single tickets are selling well, and we’re up 15 percent on subscriptions from last year. People definitely got out of the habit of going to the symphony, so we’ve been fighting hard to get back on their calendars.
Let’s talk about your background. You’re from Buffalo, New York.
Born and raised. I did musicals in high school, singing and dancing. I played Harold Hill in The Music Man. I was a trumpet player in public school starting in fourth grade.
When did you first conduct?
I remember it so clearly. I was in middle school. I said to the music director, “How do you make us play together?” He said, “Interesting you should ask.” He then put me in front of the group in a piece called Mountain Celebration. I was so scared, but he let me do the concert. I just fell into it.
How did your studies at the Oberlin Conservatory affect you?
Oberlin’s great because there’s [a limited] graduate program. Usually in a conservatory, the graduate conducting students do the conducting. But there were no such students, so undergrads got to conduct the youth ensemble or conduct an ensemble for someone’s recital. There were three or four of us who did that.
One of my favorite gigs was conducting a church choir in the tiny town of Birmingham, Ohio. I love conducting choruses to this day. There is something so visceral about them. When you take a breath with them and give them an entrance, it’s just awesome, whether it’s 11 people of 111.
The dean of the conservatory brought my attention to the first Sibelius Conductors’ Competition. By a complete fluke, I had recorded a concert I conducted, so I sent the videocassette to the competition, and by some miracle, I got in. Esa-Pekka Salonen and Franz Welser-Möst were on the jury. I got a prize for “outstanding potential.” Welser-Möst brought me with him to the Zurich Opera, where I stayed for four years.
He saw you as a diamond in the rough?
Very rough!
What other conductors have influenced how you work?
When I was an apprentice conductor in Chicago in 1996, I would watch Pierre Boulez’s sessions. He would always have the orchestra play the entire piece in rehearsals without stopping. He said, “They need to know what my big vision is. Then we’ll make out the details.” I took that on. You give them a structure, and then we form it together.
