The Verde Valley Sinfonietta recently appointed Janna Hymes as its new conductor after a year-long, nationwide search that elicited almost a hundred applications.
Hymes, who is also artistic director of the Carmel Symphony Orchestra in Carmel, Ind., has signed a two-year contract with the Sinfonietta and will lead her first regular-season concert this fall.
‘You Have the Talent’
Hymes grew up in New York City, where her mother was a public relations director for American Ballet Theatre and her father was a lighting designer for NBC, working on “Saturday Night Live” and “The Tonight Show.” She attended the High School of Music and Art, where she studied piano and cello.
“The first time I conducted in high school was by default,” Hymes recalled. “The conductor wasn’t there, and I jumped on the podium and started conducting Beethoven’s First Symphony. I was in 10th grade. I just remember the orchestra was playing and I was conducting. I had no idea what I was doing. I think I was mimicking what I remembered the conductor doing, and that was the day I decided to be a conductor. I think I was about 15.”
“A lot of people sort of fall into it by funny circumstances like I did,” Hymes mused.
Hymes spent her early career searching out opportunities to learn from top conductors, including the noted pedagogues Gustav Meier and Otto-Werner Mueller and the legendary Leonard Bernstein.
“I just had this incredible thirst for studying everybody and learning as much as I could,” Hymes noted.
“I really enjoyed him,” Hymes said of Meier, with whom she worked at the Tanglewood music festival for several years. “He gave some really good basics. Otto-Werner Mueller was probably my greatest teacher. I was quite young, and he took me under his wing. He was really an extraordinary teacher.”
“Leonard Berstein — that was one of the greatest pinnacles of my career,” Hymes continued. “When I conducted [for him], it was a Brahms symphony, he didn’t stop me, and I just kept conducting and I was really into it. And then I started to worry about why he didn’t stop me. I got concerned about that, but then I got back into the music. When I was done with the section I was to conduct, he came up and he kissed me, right on the lips, and took my face in his hands, and he goes, ‘You’re going to do this. You have the talent to do this.’”
“That whole summer, I was by his side, and he just talked to me about all kinds of things, music and life,” Hymes said. “He was amazing.”
Europe Beckons
In 1998, Hymes participated in the International Besancon Competition for Young Conductors in Besancon, France.
“I was about to take my Fulbright [scholarship] year, and I was going to work at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo to study opera, and I decided to do this competition before I went,” Hymes said. “The whole town was involved in this. It’s a beautiful town in France, they had speakers all over the town, and they were playing the music we were conducting.”
“I just kept advancing,” Hymes added. “There was one of the rounds where they gave us music — it turned out it was Ravel’s ‘Mother Goose’ — I don’t think any of us knew it … they gave us this music, they blocked a lot of stuff out so we didn’t know who wrote it, it was a section of a movement and we had to study it. And what they did in the orchestra was they put wrong notes in and wrong rhythms, so we had to get in front of the group and fix those things. And mind you, everything’s in French, right, and my French was a little broken. I was so happy when I got through that round.”
Hymes became one of the first Americans to win a prize at Besancon, “so I went to my Fulbright feeling fantastic.”
Palermo presented challenges of its own.
“I’m going to just be honest, the Mafia was pretty prominent in Sicily,” Hymes said. “I saw people coming into stores sometimes and kind of getting paid off, and I thought, this is weird. I didn’t feel unsafe although I had to walk home late at night.”
‘Great Potential’
Last year, Hymes spotted the advertisement for the Verde Valley Sinfonietta position on the League of American Orchestras website.
“I thought, well, this is a chamber orchestra, which I love,” Hymes said. “I love the repertoire. I love chamber orchestra and I sort of miss it. Now I’m doing all big repertoire.”
She felt that Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony would be the perfect piece for her audition. So did all three of the other finalists; Hymes was ultimately the Sinfonietta’s choice.
“I’ve always wanted to do that little overture [from ‘Los Esclavos Felices’],” Hymes said. “I think it’s adorable. And he [composer Juan Crisostomo Arriaga] was so young, and Sterling [Elliot] is so young, and I wanted to bring Sterling. I support him, I think he’s absolutely on the way to something great. And he was available, so it all fell into place really nicely.”
There was a catch. Due to illnesses and other issues among the orchestra’s members, the Sinfonietta was down six violins for the occasion.
“It was unexpected,” Hymes said. “And I’m doing Beethoven’s Seventh. It’s a big piece. The ending is really huge. The first rehearsal, I said, ‘If this is what it’s going to be, you’re going to have to play more, and we can pull this off.’ They were good, but I worried a little bit about them technically because I was asking them to play really big sounds.”
“Solidarity — that was my challenge,” Hymes said. “For them to play that Beethoven like they had never played anything so great in their lives. And they did that. They were wiped afterwards. They were exhilarated, but they were spent. And so was I. That’s a good concert … Although, when I think about it, I can’t even believe we pulled it off without those strings players. It was really hard.”
Hymes described herself as very pleased with the Sinfonietta, which she said “has great, great potential.”
“I’m going to have a really nice, well-balanced first season … learn the orchestra more, and maybe do some collaborations,” Hymes predicted. “I’m going to work on stylistic differences with them. I’m so excited to be doing chamber orchestra, I can’t even tell you. I love it so much. Everyone’s important, everybody has an equal part in the music. I was very excited to be offered the position.”
Behind the Baton
“The orchestra is our instrument, so we don’t have an instrument until we stand up in front of them at the first rehearsal,” Hymes explained. “I have to get used to the instrument that’s in front of me, and then I just try to go at it. Sometimes I have to go slower, and sometimes I have to go super fast, and sometimes I don’t even have to say anything, it’s just a look and I know that they’ve got it. It’s understanding people and how people work.”
Hymes said that her sense of facing a challenge when on the podium generally comes in rehearsal rather than in performance: “That’s where I have to do my work, and be listening all the time, and fixing, and by the time I’m walking out on stage, I feel like so much of my work is done. It’s now up to them. I don’t want to struggle at a performance, I want to be able to be free and have them have some freedom as well. I think the greatest challenge in general — you have three different pieces, having them all sound unique to their style, have the audience be engaged, have the soloists happy.”
She stressed the importance of preparation to good conducting. “I do a lot of research, I learn about the pieces. I feel that that’s part of the job. Sometimes there’s really nothing to say, other than, this was written for after-dinner music, it’s light and fluffy. Sometimes there’s not a deep story.”
“Even doing musical theatre, or any kind of collaboration, I always add several weeks because I go to all the rehearsals, whether it’s dancers or choir or singers, so that by the time we get in front of the orchestra I know exactly what people are going to do,” Hymes added.
Sometimes, too, the apparent simplicity of the music can hide subtler tests.
“To play a Mozart symphony, or a Mozart concerto, whatever it happens to be, beautifully, that is one of the hardest things for an orchestra,” Hymes said. “That music is so transparent, it’s so obvious when it’s not right, and to play it with sparkle, to have it be precise but not stodgy and musical without too much rubato … anyone can play the notes, but to really play it, the Mozart will sound very different from the Beethoven.”
“It’s an extraordinary thing to be in front of an orchestra,” Hymes reflected. “You really get lost in the music. Music is that powerful. You transcend where you are at that moment, because you’re not really thinking about anything except the sounds that are coming out of the orchestra. You’re traveling together on this journey through music, and hopefully you’re bringing the audience with you. That’s the ultimate goal. If it’s great music, the audience will feel something at the end.”
At the same time, Hymes added, “you have to do it for the right reasons. Your ego can’t get in front of it, and there’s a lot of that in this field, and it’s just disgusting … I’m doing it to share what it is that I have with people.”
“It’s been a really extraordinary life,” Hymes reflected.
