The steady climb of Hugh Wolff is proud testimony to the fact that, for American musicians, sometimes the system actually does work.
At only 38, he has moved into a high-profile position among conductors of his generation and done so with feet firmly planted on American soil. He has built a major career on the strength of talent, hard work and opportunity, all the while refusing to have his head turned by critical and popular praise.
”You make choices. To plan more than that is impossible. I have found myself in places I wanted to be and turned down a few opportunities I thought wouldn`t be as interesting. You gain a little bit more control of your choices as you get older,” says Wolff, surveying the distant Hudson River from a window of his Upper West Side, New York, apartment, which he shares with wife Judy, a lawyer and author, and their two young sons.
For the immediate future, the place where Wolff insists he most wants to be is St. Paul, Minn., home of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, of which he has served as principal conductor for the past three seasons. In September he will begin a three-year tenure as the music director of that ensemble, the nation`s only fulltime professional chamber orchestra.
Wolff, who will bring his St. Paul Chamber Orchestra to Orchestra Hall on Sunday afternoon in the first of two Chicago concerts this season (their second engagement is March 22), appreciates the advantages his ongoing relationship with the orchestra has given him.
”We have done more than 100 concerts together since I first conducted them in 1987, so the orchestra and I know each other very well. There isn`t this attitude among the players, `They have hired this guy, but what if we don`t end up liking what he does?` At least I`m a known quantity, whether they like me personally or not.”
Wolff currently directs the orchestra as one-third of an artistic triumvirate that has included conductor Christopher Hogwood and composers John Adams and John Harbison. This division of labor has allowed Wolff to maintain the music directorship of the New Jersey Symphony (since 1986) and to pursue guest conducting engagements with such big orchestras as Chicago, New York and Boston.
Having Adams and Harbison in residence has stepped up the St. Paul`s commitment to American music: The orchestra now ranks as among the nation`s most active commissioners of new American works, averaging five or six scores every season. One of the latest products of that initiative is a new work Wolff and the orchestra are bringing to Chicago, Aaron J. Kernis` ”Symphony in Waves.”
”The Kernis work shows what we are about,” he declares of the neo-Romantic symphony, which is scored precisely for the instrumentation of the St. Paul orchestra, 34 players. ”Although it is harmonically tonal in the way Adams` and Harbison`s music can be considered tonal, rhythmically it is maybe the most difficult piece I have ever looked at.” So difficult, in fact, that only three of the five movements could be prepared for the St. Paul performances last year. Chicago will hear it complete on a program that also holds Mozart`s Symphony No. 26 and Piano Concerto No. 20, with Mitsuko Uchida as soloist.
The challenge in St. Paul, as Wolff sees it, is multifaceted. He is expanding the orchestra`s touring schedule, leading them on his first European tour as music director in 1993. With the signing of a multiyear recording contract with Teldec, the orchestra stands to be a major force on the world market. Already released are discs of Copland works, two of Haydn`s ”Paris” symphonies and the Dvorak serenades.
Wolf also plans to enlarge the ensemble`s repertory and seize on and actually exploit the orchestra`s ”limitations.”
”I would like to make sure we have a baroque repertory that is stylistically represented, even though we play modern instruments,” Wolff says. ”At the other end of the spectrum, the orchestra will continue to commission a lot of new music. That has been a big part of the orchestra`s life since (music director) Dennis Russell Davies, and I want that to continue.”
A true chamber orchestra, Wolff points out, creates its own special dynamic of preparing music.
”It`s not like you have the Chicago Symphony cut down to 34 players. A lot of what`s important to them is the feeling of personal involvement, that sense of everybody being part of the process. The atmosphere sometimes can border on the Tower of Babel; that`s why our rehearsals can be slower than normal. We will spend a 2 1/2-hour rehearsal on a Haydn symphony and still not have answered everybody`s needs. Sometimes I have to say, `Enough; we`re doing it this way.` ”
Born in Paris of parents who were in the American foreign service, Wolff grew up in Washington where he studied piano with Leon Fleisher and composition with George Crumb. He got his first baton experience conducting student orchestras at Harvard and as music director of the Northeastern Pennsylvania Philharmonic, a regional orchestra, before becoming assistant, later associate, to Mstislav Rostropovich at the National Symphony in Washington.
Wolff`s seven-year tenure with the New Jersey Symphony is credited with improving that fiscally beleaguered orchestra`s technical discipline and broadening its repertory. There was one glaring problem, however, that not even a resourceful music director could solve: The New Jersey remains an orchestra without a fixed address, performing in auditoriums ranging in size from 700 to 3,000 seats, with acoustics that run from adequate to miserable.
Wolff confesses he ”learned a lot” because of the constant adjustments each hall forced on him and the orchestra.
”Programming-wise we did some nice things, even though the public may have liked our programs less than the critics. Perhaps I pushed too far with unusual repertory instead of just playing Beethoven and Tchaikovsky and putting the money in the bank. But I felt this helped to create an identity for that orchestra,” explains Wolff, who will stay on next season as principal guest conductor.
Which brings him back to reflecting on his made-in-America career.
”Without congratulating myself, I would like people to think of what I have done over the last 10 years as a paradigm for the young American conductor. My career shows it`s possible for a conductor to move up in a very traditional, stepwise way from a metropolitan to a regional to a big-city orchestra. Not so many of my own colleagues, even the ones who are my age, are doing that.”
