Her Next Overture

JoAnn Falletta stands onstage at the Terrace Theater in Long Beach with a hand-held mike, the navy sequined cuffs of her suit jacket glinting in the house lights. In a voice subtly shaded with her New York roots, the petite, 45-year-old conductor warms up the crowded theater with a little musical gossip about Prokofiev, Brahms and Korean American composer Byong-kon Kim, featured acts in the evening’s program.

The patrons of the Long Beach Symphony have learned to look forward to these preconcert chats. Falletta quotes Prokofiev’s thoughts on “Cinderella” and Brahms’ letters to various girlfriends. She talks to the audience like old friends, and they listen intently, nod their heads, laugh at her pleasantries.

Her average ticket buyer, she will say later, is intelligent and educated, but not necessarily about classical music. It’s her job to satisfy their “hunger,” to get them to connect emotionally with the concert.

Backstage afterward, Falletta has a smile for everyone as she buzzes around, greeting colleagues and settling last-minute concert details. But she pauses just beyond the open stage door before walking out to work her audience again, this time with a baton in her hand, conducting excerpts from Prokofiev’s “Cinderella” Ballet Suites. She closes her eyes and bows her head for a long moment. It’s a ritual, she says, that helps her make her own connection--”with whatever being it is that makes human beings capable of writing music like that.”

Critics have called Falletta highly gifted and “one of the finest conductors of her generation.” She assumed the music directorship of the Long Beach orchestra in 1989, five years after money problems closed it down and the community resurrected it. Since then, Falletta has won applause for nudging the audience toward contemporary music and still selling enough tickets to maintain a balanced budget; for helping to grow the organization; and for attracting the next generation of audiences.

As of this fall, those talents will propel her out of Long Beach and onto a bigger stage. In September, she takes over as music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, with its 35-week-per-year schedule, its occasional New York City appearances and its reputation as a stepping stone for such conductors as Lukas Foss and Michael Tilson Thomas.

Southern California audiences will have a chance to watch Falletta conduct the Long Beach orchestra in three more concerts this season, and she will conduct twice during the 2000-2001 season, during which time she has agreed to stay on to help find her successor.

“I came to Long Beach at a time that it was just cautiously opening up again after going through a terrible trauma,” she says. “I feel sad about leaving, but I feel good about the situation that they’re in. [Experiencing] somebody very different from me [is] the next step in their development.”

Similarly, she says, “Buffalo is at a point where it’s gone through some difficult financial challenges, and it’s ready to step forward.”

Kurt Wiedenhaupt, who headed the Buffalo search committee, believes Falletta is the person to make that happen. “We felt very strongly we needed someone with a human touch, someone who would really put their heart into it,” he says. “To build the audience there you need somebody with charisma. The conductor does not only need to have a back, but a face into the community.”

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When she started studying music, Falletta had no idea that being a conductor would require building a parallel career as a savvy PR person.

“You go to school and you learn how to study scores and you get your job as music director and all of a sudden you’re speaking to the Rotary, you’re helping to write grant proposals, you’re walking into a fourth-grade class and telling them what a conductor does, going to Boeing to get people to support the orchestra,” she says a few days after the Brahms-Prokofiev-Kim concert, in the lobby of her apartment complex, a few steps away from the Terrace Theater. “How do you learn that? You have to learn on the job.”

Falletta now seems to be on a first-name basis with everyone from board members to musicians. “I think we’ve created a much more comfortable environment by recognizing that American audiences want contact with the artists,” Falletta says. “We don’t believe in this hierarchical European tradition of the great maestro.”

The only drawback is time. “I have to keep a very careful balance between how much I do extra-musical and how much time I have for the music,” she says. “But I’ve seen the more time you invest in a community, the more the community forms a partnership with the orchestra.”

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Falletta began playing classical guitar as a child growing up in Queens, N.Y., but it was the more all-encompassing role of conductor that ultimately captured her imagination, after attending a concert with her parents at age 11. She admired Seiji Ozawa and Leonard Bernstein. “I never saw a woman conductor until I saw Sarah Caldwell conducting the New York Philharmonic in my late teens,” she says. “Sometimes, I feel very guilty, because people tell me, ‘Oh, you’re such a pioneer. There were pioneers, Sarah Caldwell and Antonia Brico, who were really conscious that they were in a man’s world and fighting against it. I never started out to make that point.”

She did, however, face the gender issue while studying at Manhattan’s Mannes School of Music, Queens College and later at Juilliard, where she was politely discouraged from conducting but allowed to proceed. It was after graduating with a doctorate in orchestral conducting in 1989 that she was named music director at Long Beach. While working toward her doctorate, she had held posts at smaller orchestras, including the Denver Chamber Orchestra, the Milwaukee Symphony and the Women’s Philharmonic in San Francisco.

“She didn’t start out at a very young age pegged as having extraordinary talent like James Levine or Leonard Bernstein,” says Jesse Rosen of the American Symphony Orchestra League in Washington, D.C. “[So] her career is conventional in the sense that she made a series of long-term commitments to smaller orchestras and, having achieved success, moved up the ladder.”

Falletta says her career has followed a steady learning curve. “Maybe my career has been slower than others,” she says, “but the steps I’ve taken have been very appropriate to where I was as a conductor. A lot of conductors stay too long in a situation that doesn’t challenge them or that is beyond their experience.”

Keeping the upward momentum has meant learning to juggle. Falletta spends one intense week of every month in Long Beach, where the orchestra performs just seven concerts per season. The rest of her professional time is spent in Norfolk, Va., where she has been music director of the Virginia Symphony since 1991, a post she will keep after the move to Buffalo. She took that orchestra to New York for its Carnegie Hall debut in 1997, a performance the New York Times called “remarkable.” And in the eight years that she’s been dividing her time between coasts, she has also made nearly 20 recordings (including Long Beach’s first CD, released last year) and has guest-conducted in the U.S., Europe and China.

Her bicoastal life means that she sees her husband of 12 years, Robert Alemany, about 30% of the time. “We decided at the beginning that we couldn’t wait until it became different,” she says. “It’s a good thing we didn’t wait because it never became different!” A computer analyst for AT&T;, Alemany spends most of his time at their home base in New York’s Westchester County, but he often telecommutes to work from Long Beach and Virginia. Falletta and Alemany met at Queens College. He was a clarinetist, and she conducted the orchestra. “I really rely on his judgment more than anybody’s,” Falletta says, “because he’ll be very honest if he thinks [a performance] didn’t work.”

Falletta says that she would have made sacrifices to fit children into her life. “I was not able to have children, which is a big sorrow in my life,” she says. “I would have loved to have had children.”

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During the last 20 years, Falletta has developed her style both from the podium and as a community leader in a male-dominated profession that has provided few role models.

Music critics describe her as “a solid conductor with a fluid baton technique and sure musical instincts” and “a demonstrative, kinetic conductor.” “I try not to be thinking too much of gestures and more about the music,” she says. “I’m always conscious of trying to portray a rootedness and solidity that enables the musicians to play, rather than disconnected, frantic gestures that look good to the audience.”

In learning to lead an orchestra, Falletta says that it was a challenge to overcome her natural shyness and some unconscious deference she’d learned as a woman. “I see sometimes in other women a kind of built-in attempt to please,” she says. “On the other hand, there are few women who can get away with things that men do naturally. I’ve seen men screaming [at] an orchestra and it’s motivating. When a woman screams, it doesn’t work. She seems out of control .”

Ultimately, she says, she had to learn how to “[use] authority in a way that was comfortable, learning that the orchestra needed that, they wanted that and that was my job.” “I think when she first came she was a little too nice,” says Long Beach assistant principal violinist Carolyn Osborn. “She’s gotten a lot stronger. You have to be, or the orchestra will run over you.”

Falletta has been particularly aggressive in pushing living composers, not always an easy sell. Under her direction, the Long Beach Symphony received its first ASCAP award for adventurous programming of contemporary music, in 1996. Falletta says that she has found the West Coast a particularly fruitful place to take musical risks: “Southern Californians are much more open-minded, more willing to try new things.”

Off the podium, she has paid particular attention to music education, doubling the number of kids reached through the orchestra’s in-school training classes and youth concerts.

“It’s the only way we’re going to keep the audience,” she says. “In the city of Long Beach, there’s a lot of first-generation families [who] can’t think about going to the symphony; they’re basically worried about putting food on the table. So our only hope is to reach them when they’re in school.”

Falletta has reached out to the area’s ethnic communities around Long Beach, commissioning works by Cambodian, Asian, Iranian, Armenian, Cuban and African American composers.

“JoAnn is a miracle worker,” says Long Beach Executive Director Fran Spears, who notes Falletta’s insistence on “artistic excellence” while working within the “stringent controls” of a budget. It’s a hard time for orchestras, Spears acknowledges, and subscription sales are down everywhere. But, she says, single ticket sales are helping to make up the difference in Long Beach, which the orchestra connects with Falletta’s programming, her visibility and her community outreach. “They adore her,” she says, “which gives us some challenge in replacing her.”

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After she leaves Long Beach, Falletta’s juggling act will only intensify. She will divide her time between Buffalo and Virginia, which are both essentially full-time orchestras. “I feel that I can forge something stronger [in Buffalo] with an orchestra that is playing every week,” she says. Falletta says her goals for the orchestra--which despite a proud history has languished in recent years--include helping it develop a stronger “personality and musical identity,” building it up financially, producing exposure-building recordings, resuming a more active touring schedule, starting most likely with Canada and recording regular broadcasts on National Public Radio.

She says she is going to continue to push contemporary composers in a city she perceives to be more conservative than Long Beach.

“People say if we just play Beethoven and Mozart, people will come. But that never works. They need a music director who is going to give them a sense that the symphony is still evolving; it’s not a museum to the 19th century.”

Falletta plans to stay at Buffalo for at least five years. “A lot of people jump around, two years here and there,” she says. “I don’t see how that gives you any personal satisfaction [or] how [you] can get attached to a community. It’s only after four or five years that you really start to feel a partnership.

“Being a music director with all the difficulties and the things that you struggle with, in the end when you leave a city hopefully you feel that you made something happen that might not have happened. You change the culture somewhat.”

Despite her obvious ambition, Falletta insists that she is focused on the task at hand--not on her next career move.

“It’s the kind of profession where you never arrive,” says Falletta, who at 45 is considered young for a conductor. “It’s more that you get closer to what you know about music. A lot of people say you don’t really begin to feel that you can conduct until you’re 50. Because it takes that much experience with musicians, and life experience, to really understand the profession.”*

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JoAnn Falletta conducts the Long Beach Symphony March 27, May 1 and June 12, 8 p.m., Terrace Theater, Long Beach Convention and Entertainment Center, 300 E. Ocean Blvd. $11-$50. (562) 436-3203.