There’s a lot of chatter about the 13 languages on this album—Ukrainian, Sicilian, Arabic, Mandarin—but your work as the conductor relies on a very different type of communication. How do you “speak” to the orchestra?
What people see of composing—the hand gestures—is like a sign language. Certain movements have certain meanings, like when you beat down, that’s the downbeat. Depending on if the music is in two or three or four, there are different patterns that the conductor does. The first job of the conductor is to keep time in that way. But then there’s a whole interpretive aspect of it where you work with musicians, you talk about what you’re doing. You talk about the sound, how you want to shape it, how you want to phrase it. There is a sort of interpretive dance going on as well, because the conductor is interpreting what they want in the music through their movement. That is the goal. Conducting an orchestra is a complicated and interesting thing to do, because there is a lot happening at once.
Is it a universal language?
The physical thing is universal, like, downbeat is always down in every part of the world. There are certain ways of working that are different based on the culture. Orchestras may respond better to certain dynamics in certain parts of the whole. But, you know, just like the written sheet music is universal, the movements are also kind of universal as well.
You’ve worked across many genres. Can you tell us about global influences and musical traditions that appear on this album?
A large part of the album goes into traditional music from Portugal or Spain, like fado or flamenco, which is not where I come from. So I can’t speak to that with any authority, although I enjoyed taking part in it. There are other things that I think are more familiar to me, for example, in “Mio Cristo piange diamanti,” which is written as an aria. When you know Italian opera, you can really hear that this is an aria, in the way it’s written. The form is really interesting. It’s not like any pop song in the way it’s built, but much more like a scene in an opera. I think that’s maybe my favorite song on the album. It’s just so wonderful and so beautiful, both the lyrics and the way she sings it.