This Saturday, August 8, the World Youth Symphony Orchestra joins internationally renowned American soprano Renée Fleming for "Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene" at Kresge Auditorium. The concert's repertoire spans the baroque grandeur of Handel to the 21st century contemporary aesthetics of Nico Muhly and allows Fleming to showcase the boundless ranges of her musical talent.
The conductor of Saturday's concert, Robert Moody, visited Classical IPR's Studio A and spoke to Isabel Li about the program and what it's like to work with musical luminaries.
Hear the Studio A interview by clicking the "Listen" button above.
Isabel Li: I'm so curious about your work conducting high profile performers. You've worked with Renée Fleming before, I think. Can you tell us about her and what it's like to work with her?
Robert Moody: Sure. And it's a it's a nice part of the profession that you get to work with these superstars. I feel really lucky. I mean, I've been conducting for well over 30 years now and I've had a chance to conduct — gosh, you name it — Yo-Yo Ma several times, Itzhak Perlman, Van Cliburn, Joshua Bell and Renée more than anyone.
We started working together back in 2009, and I really don't think I know the count anymore of how many times we've worked together. But this concert and especially the first half of this concert, 'Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene,' it's a song cycle. People will see in the program works by several composers, but it's really just one song cycle, like the Richard Strauss four last songs. I had the chance to premiere that with Renée a number of years ago. I think because I did the world premiere of the work with her, we really became even closer and we've had a chance now to do this specific piece in Hong Kong and Toronto and multiple cities in the United States. It's really enjoyable. I guess I'll say finally back to your question: I used to be really star struck when I would meet some of these folks and quite nervous, but after a while, you realize they're just also people, you know, and they're looking to have a good positive musical experience. I think she's going to have a great time. We had our first orchestra this, our first rehearsal this morning. I think she's going to have a great time with this orchestra. The energy is great. And it'll be a lot of fun.
IL: You know, the theme of the concert, 'Voice of Nature,' is very intriguing to me because in addition to the music, there will be video images from National Geographic to showcase planet earth. Can you tell us more about that and how the music and multimedia imagery and the collaboration with Renée Fleming? How does all that invoke nature?
RM: All of this started because during Covid lockdown, Renée started spending more time in her garden. She might mention this to the audience as well, but, you know, Covid happened and everyone was sort of looking for things to do. She sometimes jokes and says, you know, 'making sourdough bread was not really my thing. So instead I, you know, started planting a garden.' It got her very interested. And she was telling colleagues and friends about her growing interest in things connected to nature. During that time, she, from that idea, she worked with Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who's the music director of Philadelphia Orchestra and the Met. And he's also a phenomenal pianist. And that garden came into an idea that the two of them would put together a CD of a collection of songs that were connected to nature, and then it drew on to a little bit of a bigger topic not just a garden, but more nature and climate and the current climate that we have and the perils, if we're not very, very careful of losing this precious earth that we have and water and air and gardens.
So it became a little bit of both climate and crisis and how can we protect nature? They made a CD, it actually won a Grammy. And then National Geographic learned about this and sort of approached Renée and said we could make a National Geographic film that would accompany this, which they did. And then I came in when the final step was that Renée decided that it would be great to do this, not just on recitals with one pianist, but to do it with full orchestra. And so the whole thing was put together. Some pieces needed to be orchestrated. Some new works were written one by Kevin, puts one by Nico Muhly and then the rest, it goes from Handel to Burt Bacharach. I mean, there's a huge variety of music, but everything follows. The theme of this is an amazing planet. We are unique, it seems, in the galaxy of having this kind of life sustaining planet. And let's take good care of it.
IL: It sounds like there's a mix of works that might be familiar to audiences and those that are newer. Tell us about the combination of those works and what that evokes.
RM: This is one thing I think I would say both Renée and I are in full agreement that music is music is music. I think only mostly non-musicians worry about genre, whether it's classical or pop or Broadway or jazz or what have you. Great music is great music. And this really does showcase that. It opens with a tune from Appalachia that's just a very plaintive, plain sung Appalachian work. It goes right from that into a work by Handel, then into this very 21st century work by Nico Muhly. And then in connected to that, there's also a work by Villa-Lobos. There's this amazing Canteloube 'Bailero.' There's a movement [that] comes from 'Lord of the Rings' because Renée actually sang on the 'Lord of the Rings' soundtrack. And there at the very end, there's an amazing piece by Kevin Puts that wraps up this conversation about nature. And after that, there's sort of an epilogue, called 'Red Mountains Sometimes Cry.' And this actually was written by her son-in-law, her daughter's husband. So she's very proud of that song. And then it finishes with 'What the World Needs Now Is Love Sweet Love.' Just a good like, you know, 1970's era pop tune.
And I love the fact that Handel and Muhly and Canteloube and Villa-Lobos and Bacharach are all in one one setting. And it's amazing how well it works, even though you might think that sounds like disparate music, it works so beautifully together.
IL: That's so intriguing. How do you lead and structure rehearsals with high school aged musicians in preparation to accompany a world class soloist like that?
RM: Well, first of all, these guys can play. You know, I've had my first rehearsal and they they are they are phenomenal players. It's my first time to Interlochen. I've heard about Interlochen my entire life. I have a million friends and colleagues who either went here as a camper or who taught here or who teach here currently. I am from the Carolinas originally, so I went to a smaller version of Interlochen called the Brevard Music Center. I'm having a lot of sort of flashback memories from that. I also, for a long time, early in my career conducted a youth orchestra, the Phoenix Symphony Youth Orchestra, for example. So it's not unusual for me to work with college or high school aged students. I think that maybe there is a different way you prepare some things technically or teach some things technically that just need to be learned. But there's an energy that often is greater than, you know, more, more poignant than the adult professional orchestra. And it's just going to be really fun to harness that energy, add some of the technical elements that I think we can teach, for lack of a better word. I think when Renée gets here in a few days, she's going to be mightily impressed.
IL: Did you observe the students' reactions to the range of repertoire for this concert?
RM: Yeah. 'Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene' is the first half of the concert with the video that you mentioned. Then there's intermission. After intermission, she does a couple of her most famous arias. Puccini, 'O mio babbino caro' from 'Gianni Schicchi.' She does some another set of beautiful Handel arias. Everything else is sort of celebrating the American experience. And she's doing that on purpose because it's 2026, the 250th birthday of the Declaration of Independence. And those works, the orchestra is going to complement those works by playing John Williams music from 'The Patriot,' this great movie starring Mel Gibson based on true accounts of the Revolutionary War. And then an amazing piece by Morton Gould called 'American Salute,' which is completely themed around 'When Johnny Comes Marching Home,' there's a big Civil War tune, so you can see there's a great amount of Americana. That's how we started this morning. We started on the American works.
And then you could see the sort of raised eyebrows and the shifts in students' expressions when we went from that, to something like 'The Diva,' which is this very big encore written just for Renée Fleming. And it's very funny. It allows her to sing a lot of high notes. The text, when the audience hears, we'll see. She's kind of making fun of, in a, you know, loving way, fun of the stereotypical operatic diva. I could see some students were like, 'wait, this seems funny. Can I laugh? Can I smile?' And, you know, I was encouraging that.
"You don't always reach the mountaintop in a concert. But you should always strive for the mountaintop."Conductor Robert Moody
IL: Wow. What impact do you hope this experience will have on the young musicians of the World Youth Symphony Orchestra?
RM: Well, I mean, two things come to mind. First of all, someone said this to me when I was a teenager and it has stuck with me for every concert I've done since. You don't always reach the mountaintop in a concert. But you should always strive for the mountaintop. So every single concert at this moment. The next concert is coming up on Saturday night. And this. Let's plan for this to be the most goosebump-inducing, most inspiring concert we've ever put together. So that's the first thing I imagine that students have an inkling of this while they are here, but I can promise them that these experiences will live with them the rest of their life, whether they become a professional musician or not.
I was a cellist, so I went to, to a similar summer festival as a cellist when I was a teenager. And that we, I got to play Tchaikovsky's Second Symphony, Prokofiev Third Piano Concerto. Those are two of my favorite pieces to this day because of having played them when I was 16 years old at a great festival, and I know first-hand that that's how they will connect. This will always be just an anchor to their connection to music.
IL: And finally, what types of feelings and effects do you hope the audience will have from the performance when they hear at Kresge Auditorium on Saturday?
RM: I want the audience to feel that they are part of the journey. For me, that's a really important concept. I may say this to the students' dress rehearsal, that any time we have a concert, that group of players on stage, that soloist, that conductor, that group in the audience, how many of the people that becomes a thousand people or more. That permutation of human beings has never been together in all of human history, and will never be together again in that exact configuration. And that kind of statistic blows me away.
I think this is truly a unique moment that we have to do something special, and I try, in the way that I put together concerts and the way I conduct and the way that I will talk to the audience, the way that I interact. I want the audience to feel like they're not just a bystander, but very much part. So I want them to walk away thinking, 'wow, I was just part of something really amazing.' The world's greatest soprano, you know, a phenomenal orchestra. And I, an audience member, got to be a participant in that.
