BD:    You also conduct the standard repertoire.  From this huge array of pieces, how do you decide which ones you will learn and present to the public and which ones you’ll put aside for a year or two or six or twelve?

JF:    It’s an interesting process that you go through to decide what pieces you would like to add to your repertoire or bring back to your repertoire.  This year, for instance, I’m adding to my repertoire with a number of performances.  Here in Lake Forest I’m adding the Rachmaninoff Symphonic Dances.  It’s a piece that I have known but I’ve never conducted before this season.  It’s very exciting to make that decision to add a piece and then to have the chance to do it several times, because for me that really crystallizes the essence of the piece.   Then this same season I’m bringing back Dvořák’s Symphony Number Eight which I did years and years ago, but now maybe have a different viewpoint about.

BD:    Did you approach it with a clean score?

JF:     No, no.  I always use my old scores, but I don’t always observe my markings.  It’s funny.  My scores sort of look like a history of my conducting training because I’ve got marks in them back from when I was a student at Julliard.  My teacher, Jorge Mester, said, “Never do this, and always do this.”  And there are marks from the various performances that I’ve done.  So it’s kind of a record for me of how the piece has developed, so I keep everything in there and just decide what is right for me now. But it is hard to know what pieces of the repertoire to do, what to let go for a couple of years and what to bring back.  Sometimes I feel my colleagues tend to do the same pieces over and over again, and there is just so much repertoire.  I have done a lot of new music.  I worked for a number of years with the Women’s Philharmonic in San Francisco which was almost all new music at every concert, and that gives you kind of a fresh perspective on the old music, too, because I got so used to approaching scores that had no recordings and no performance tradition.

BD:    Is it easier or harder to teach an orchestra a piece they have not heard as opposed to a piece they have heard many times?

JF:    Actually, it’s harder to teach a piece that they’ve heard many times.  Ideally you’d like to do is approach it with a clean slate, without the kind of traditions that get tacked on over the years or the way that we always hear it on the recordings.  But, for me, having had the experience of coming up with a first-time interpretation for a new piece of music where there is no set interpretation, it’s been helpful to approach older pieces that way, too.  Not to just do it the way it’s always done is actually a big challenge, I think.  You might notice when you listen to recordings today, more and more recordings are starting to sound alike.  It’s very hard to have a fresh perspective on a piece because everyone seems to be doing it the same way.  I don’t know whether that’s because people now have more access to recordings so there is the one way to do it.  I’ve been told that 80 years ago or 100 years ago, to hear a Beethoven Fifth in New York and then a Beethoven Fifth in Boston was a completely different experience because there was no set way. They didn’t have the standard CD that everyone thought was the best one.  You really had conductors, and sometimes there were abuses of the score, too.  There were conductors who would cut out certain bars and other conductors who would rescore them and put trombones in when there were no trombones.  But at least there was a responsibility on the part of the conductor to create something, to have an individual interpretation.  

BD:    Does it take even more guts on your part if you discover something in the score that you know is radically different from the standard interpretation?

JF:    It does, and I think that sometimes it is a risk.  Sometimes people are not ready to hear something a different way.  They’ve got their favorite CD at home.  Sometimes it is the same thing for critics.  They’ve heard it so many times, that to hear it played a different way is sometimes shocking.  But I think that is part of the responsibility of being a conductor. We have to walk a fine line, hopefully honoring the score as the ultimate resource as what the composer wanted.  But you know that the musical notational language is very vague, so there is a great deal of room for personal interpretation.  That’s the whole extra layer of the concert.  In honoring what the composer wants, you still inject a great deal of your own personality.  But it should be your own personality; it shouldn’t be a carbon copy of Leonard Bernstein’s performance.  So it’s a challenge, it’s a challenge. As we hear more and more, progress sort of robs us of individuality sometimes because we don’t have to be individuals, we can hear everybody else’s ideas.

BD:   When you go from one orchestra to another, are you able to infuse all of your ideas into each performance or do you find that you can just go so far and just let it go at that?

JF:    Every performance with a different orchestra is different. I basically have an interpretation of a piece that I’ve worked out and makes sense.  But you learn a great deal from orchestras.  You might work with an orchestra that has a particularly brilliant brass section or a very poetic principal clarinet or a wonderful solo cello, and all of a sudden the piece changes for you because their playing gives you ideas.  They may not even be aware of it, but their interpretation and their personality comes through their playing and it affects everyone in the orchestra.  So every performance is quite different; not that one is better than another, but that’s the flexibility of the notational system that it can happen that way.  Sometimes even one performance to another of the same orchestra is different, or the dress rehearsal and the performance is different because of a different environment.

BD:    Is all your work done in rehearsal or do you leave something for that spark of the performance?

JF:  There always is something in the performance that’s different, and that’s risky, too, because if you rehearse everything to the nth degree so that there’s no room for spontaneity, you rob the performance of a little bit.  The performance is the time when inspiration enters into it.  The rehearsals are hard work, with drilling and making sure everything is well in tune or with good ensemble and correct articulation.  But then in the performance something else has to happen.  A performance where everything was correct could be deadly.  It has to have a kind of spontaneity and risk taking.  Sometimes audiences don’t understand that.  They’re so used to CDs which are now all controlled by electronics.  They’ll hear that harp run in their CD that is never possible in an orchestra.  They’ll hear a perfect performance with never a little glitch here and there, and they’ll come to a live performance and it’s different.  You don’t hear everything quite the same way, and things happen sometimes.  But the true music lover, I think, relishes that; he relishes the idea that anything could happen in the performance.  It will be different on Friday night than it will be on Saturday night, and this performance will be different from the one we heard three years ago.  It will definitely be different from the CD.  We don’t know what’s going to happen; we really don’t know, and I think that is what makes it so incredibly special.  

BD:    What is your advice for audiences who come to live performances?

JF:    Try and be as open-minded as possible.  I give people this advice, “When you come to a live performance, don’t listen to music that day.”  Maybe that’s sort of a silly thing, but I find that sometimes people have had the radio on all day long and they put the car radio on and then they run into the concert two minutes before it begins, and they don’t have time to read the program notes and they wonder why they can’t listen, or why the music doesn’t have an impact on them.  It’s because they’re tired out.  They’ve been listening all day long, and they don’t even allow themselves time to rest to prepare to listen.

BD:    Rest themselves and their ears!

JF:    Absolutely.  Rest themselves and their ears.  In the past, when music was not so accessible, concerts were much more valued experiences because that was the only way you heard music.  You really looked forward to it.  You concentrated intently while you were there, and then you remembered it because you didn’t have any other opportunity to hear music for awhile.  So in a way, music is so accessible now that we don’t value it as being special.  We very often relegate it to a background, which it shouldn’t be.  Sadly, we may be losing our ability to listen without doing something else.  Listening by itself is really an art form that is dying.

BD:   Virgil Thomson once told me all this creates a sort of lack of attention.

JF:    Yes, it does, it does.  Musicians rely on the audience’s attention because music it is an art form where you can’t go back and say, “Wait!  What was that?  Can I hear that again?” or, “I missed two minutes because I was daydreaming and I really don’t know why, so what’s happening?”  We can’t go back.  It’s not like a painting on the wall where you look at it and look back again and think about it at your own time and your own pace.  If you don’t follow a thread of a piece of music, it’s hard to really get a feeling that it makes sense, that it builds up to something and then comes away and ends in a spot that feels right.  You need to have the attention to follow that all the way through.

BD:    I asked about advice for audiences.  What advice do you have for younger conductors coming along?

JF:    For younger conductors I think that the only way one can really consider being a conductor is if this is really all you want in life.  Like any career in music, it’s the kind of thing where you don’t choose to be a musician; it chooses you and you know you have no other option.  Conducting is something that for me is an unbelievable privilege to be on the podium.  I feel that every time in a rehearsal or in a performance. Sometimes I can’t believe that I’m lucky enough to be standing on the podium in the middle of an orchestra like the Lake Forest Symphony and working with them because it’s an extraordinary pleasure to be involved with art on that level.  But it also requires tremendous dedication.  That’s the only way you can get the most out of it.  You have to be willing to think of it as a lifelong study.  It really is.  It’s not something that you say, “Well, now I’m a conductor.”  No.  You never really know the piece well enough.  I think most conductors feel this way; I would hope so.  You never know it well enough.  As much as you study it, there’s always more that you see in it.  Sometimes I’ll do a piece again three or four years later and say, “Why didn’t realize that?” or “How could I have missed that?”  Yet at the time I wasn’t ready to see it, I suppose.  André Previn said a thing that I thought was particularly beautiful.  He said, “Every time we conduct a piece we get a little closer to what it means, but we never find the center of it.  We just get closer.”  So the idea that all of your life you’re changing and developing and reassessing yourself, reevaluating what you’re doing, constantly studying, is something that you have to love.  You have to love that idea of constantly developing and working.  I can’t imagine doing anything else, because for me it is the most tremendous source of joy to be able to work with an orchestra and to hear things develop and get better and come out with an interpretation that hopefully communicates this unbelievable music to the audience.

BD:    Are you getting tired of occasionally being the first woman to conduct this orchestra or the first woman to do this or that?

JF:    When I decided to become a conductor I was only about 11, and I was very naïve.  I never realized that women weren’t conductors.  I’d never seen a woman do it, but it just never dawned on me that it might be anything other than chance.

BD:    So your philosophy is, “Why not?”

JF:    Well, yes.  I never set out to prove that women could conduct because I didn’t realize that they weren’t conducting.  I’m glad about that because I never think of myself as a woman conductor; I just think of myself as a conductor.  In many situations I am the first woman to conduct, especially in Europe where it’s still relatively rare.  I try not to get too involved in it really, because to work as a conductor you really can’t be aware of potential prejudices or how people feel about it, and that’s been very helpful for me.  If the idea that I as a woman am the first woman conducting that orchestra helps people to think, “Well, this is fine, and there’s no reason why a woman can’t compose or can’t play a violin or can’t conduct an orchestra,” then I’m very happy about it.  And I think that in a way that’s happened.  The classical music world is very conservative, but it’s changing slowly and we’re seeing more and more incredible women composers who are being performed all over.  And now there are more than just a handful of women conductors and women concertmasters, which 50 years ago would have been unheard of.  So things are changing and they’re changing from inside, I think.

BD:    At the beginning, did you perhaps stay away from the woman composer because you didn’t want to be thought of as the woman conductor who brings the woman composer along?

JF:    No, actually I didn’t, and maybe it was a big mistake.  I was actually working with the Milwaukee Symphony as Associate Conductor when I got a call from the Women’s Philharmonic in San Francisco asking if I would like to come out and conduct a concert and see what I thought about them.  They were looking for a music director.  

BD:  Are they a full-size orchestra or a chamber group?  

JF:    It is a full-size orchestra.  I’m embarrassed to say that I asked what sort of repertoire they were doing, and they said, “We only do music by women composers,” and I said, “What women composers?”  Can you imagine how ignorant I sounded?  Because my music training had been absolutely traditional, I had just worked on Brahms, Beethoven, Stravinsky, etc.  I’m so embarrassed about it now, but then I truly didn’t know any women composers.  But I went out there, saw their library and the kind of dedication they had to bringing new pieces by women to the public.  I learned a tremendous amount.  In the nine years I worked with them, I learned so much about new music and about women composers.  I shouldn’t say

what’s the purpose of music?  

JF:    [Pondering a moment]  The purpose of music...  No one has ever asked the question quite that way.  It’s hard to express, but for me it simply is one of greatest expressions of what a human being can do.  We read about the terrible things that human beings are capable of and how depressing sometimes life can be.  On the other hand, we have this legacy of the best of what people are capable of.  For me, the best thing that music can do is make me proud, in a way, to be a human being, because if human beings can create something so extraordinary, with all their flaws and all their problems and all their difficulties and vices, if they can create something so extraordinarily moving and powerful and emotional, that says a great deal about what the human spirit is capable of.  So I feel lucky because as a conductor, as a musician, I’m involved always with the very best that humans have to offer.  We can just revel in it.

BD:    Even if it’s a depiction of a terrible subject?

JF:    Oh yes.  Sometimes it’s the most powerful, such as the music composed at the beginning of the Second World War, or at the beginning of the First World War particularly.  At the beginning of the twentieth century, when Europe was undergoing this tremendous upheaval, to the Europeans life seemed to be falling apart.  This was the end of the world; crime and terror was gripping Europe.  Composers who were writing at that time

BD:    You’ve made a number of recordings.  Do you conduct the same for the microphone as you do for a live audience?

JF:    It’s very different making a recording.  It’s a very odd experience because in some cases you are recording after a performance, and that’s very nice because you’ve rehearsed it, you’ve given a performance and you go into the recording studio with basically the same intensity level.  But often you are recording without the benefit of any rehearsal at all, and this is particularly true in London.  You step in front of the London Symphony, which is an incredible orchestra in terms of sight reading; they can really read anything.  But the tape starts rolling from the beginning, and everything that orchestra plays is on that tape.  The final result is kind of a hodgepodge of the editor’s view of what’s the best take of this and that.  Of course the conductor approves it, but…

BD:    You don’t have any input in the final product?  

JF:    You have some input, but it’s a very, very different experience than actually conducting a performance with the intensity and the excitement and drama of that.

BD:    Are you pleased with the recordings that you’ve made so far?

JF:    I am.  I’m especially pleased because a lot of them are unusual repertoire.   The two discs we did with the Women’s Philharmonic really were the first time any of this music had been recorded.  There were names people recognize, such as Clara Schumann and Fannie Mendelssohn, and a couple of recordings have been with American composers, again, whose works have never been recorded.  So that’s been a great deal of fun.  

BD:    Are you going to be nervous when they start asking you for your Beethoven cycle and your Dvořák material?  

JF:    Probably.  The most recent one is actually disc of music with the Ravel Mother Goose, which is a piece that’s often recorded.  I spent a great deal of time on thinking what would be, for me, an interpretation that would sum up the essence of the piece, not listening to anyone else’s interpretation but to come up with something that hopefully is fresh.  And that’s very hard.  As you say, approaching the Beethoven symphonies and the Dvořák symphonies will be very, very difficult.

BD:    It’s got to be fresh, but not fresh just to be different.  

JF:    Absolutely.  It can’t be quirky.  Sometimes people say, “I’ve decided this is the right tempo,” and it doesn’t make any sense.  It was done just for the sake of being different.  Being truly fresh is a very, very hard thing to come up with.  Sometimes I think that some of the early music groups or the original instrument groups have degenerated into the

BD:    Do you like all the travel?  

JF:    I don’t like actually the traveling itself.  When I was very young, I thought, “Oh how glamorous.  You go and stay in a hotel for a week and then get on a plane.”

BD:    It gets real old real fast.

JF:    Oh it does; it’s not glamorous at all.  It’s really very, very tiring.  But what I do like is the opportunity to work with different musicians.  That I find very stimulating.  There have been times when I’ve gotten off the plane and had to go right to rehearsal because of the timing.  I’ve gotten off the plane feeling dreadful, feeling depressed, feeling tired and thinking, “How am I ever going to conduct for two and a half hours?  I’ll never get through this.”  Then ten or fifteen minutes into the rehearsal, I feel fantastic.  Now that’s a tribute to what music does and what the energy of 90 musicians around you can do for you.  At the end of the rehearsal, I am completely reenergized, reinvigorated and I’m feeling thrilled to be there.

BD:     [With a gentle nudge]  You’re just an old firehorse

This interview was recorded in Lake Forest, IL, on September 23, 1996.  Portions (along with recordings) were used on WNIB later that year and  in 1999, and on WNUR in 2005.  This transcription was made and posted on this website in 2009.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here.

Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001.  His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.