Great expectations

Editor’s Note: This summer, we are taking a look at people who help make the arts a reality in our town. This week: budding conductor Keitaro Harada.

Tanglewood?

Keitaro Harada has been there.

This summer, the UA conducting graduate fellow decided to try for something really spectacular.

So he applied for chance to work alongside one of the world’s pre-eminent conductors at what promises to become a historic program.

Late this month, Harada will go to Virginia to spend three weeks as an associate conductor in former New York Philharmonic conductor Lorin Maazel’s inaugural Castleton Festival. The festival, July 4-19 on Maazel’s sprawling 550-acre property in Castleton, Va., is an expansion of Maazel’s 12-year-old Châteauville Foundation, which he and his wife formed to nurture young people and the arts.

“I’m excited. It’s the New York Phil conductor; what more can I ask? It’s Maazel,” Harada says.

“This is a very important opportunity for Kei. . . . Maazel is one of the world’s great conductors, and the opportunity to see him work, pick his brain and learn by observing a true master for a couple weeks will be a great gift to Kei’s growth,” says Thomas Cockrell, who heads the two-year-old University of Arizona School of Music’s James E. Rogers Institute for Orchestral and Opera Conducting.

“Being able to say he studied with Lorin Maazel is a big (plus) on your résumé,” adds Arizona Opera artistic director Joel Revzen, who worked with Harada and the institute’s other fellow, Jackson Warren, last season.

Landing at Châteauville is the latest coup for the 24-year-old Tokyo native, whose foray into music goes back to the color blue.

Harada was in the seventh grade and seemed destined to follow a long tradition of family cooks that included his grandmother.

But then he spotted the brilliantly blue CD cover in a Tokyo music store. The music didn’t matter much; he was more interested in the colorful cover.

His mother bought the disc and popped it into the car player. What came out of the speakers — classical saxophone, breathtakingly beautiful and arresting — upended young Harada’s world.

“I listened to it, and from the first track I had goose bumps I can’t possibly describe,” he recalls. “I told my mom that’s what I want to do.”

Harada’s mom, who was raising him alone, bought him a saxophone and a couple of instruction books. He read the books and listened to the CD as he taught himself to play mostly by mimicking the recording. He got more CDs and learned more repertoire. It never dawned on him, he says more than a decade later, that he could get sheet music.

His childhood fascination turned into obsession, which led him in 2002, his junior year of high school, to apply to the prestigious Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan. He had never taken a formal music lesson and couldn’t read music, he says, which should have been deterrents to Interlochen’s strict admissions standards. But he managed to pass the audition by buying recordings of all the repertoire he was required to know and learning it by ear.

“I had horrible technique, but my teacher thought I had a good sound,” he says.

His first year at Interlochen was a test of wills and perseverance. He was ranked last in his class, so he locked himself in a rehearsal hall from 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. every day “because I sucked. I really was horrible.”

By the end of that first year, Harada had ironed out all the kinks and was maturing into a fine musician. By his senior year, he was plucked by NPR’s classical music program “From the Top” to perform with piano virtuoso Christopher O’Riley.

At Interlochen, Harada also found a girlfriend, a Korean student whose mother was a pianist in Korea.

As he explains it, the interracial matchup didn’t sit well with the mother. Making matters worse: He was studying saxophone. The mother told Harada he would never be able to make a living as a saxophonist. Violinist, maybe, but never saxophone. He should consider conducting, she offered.

“If I do, can I date your daughter?” he countered.

She didn’t say no, so Harada turned his attention to conducting. “I did it all for a girl,” he says.

He and the girl dated through graduation in 2004 and into the first year of college at the University of Illinois. But the relationship seemed to have run its course soon after, and Harada discovered his true love was standing behind a podium making music.

In what seemed like a gust of wind, Harada went from conducting student to professional conductor.

In his second year at college, he participated in international conducting workshops, including at the prestigious St. Petersburg Conservatory in Russia, and got a shot at conducting the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. He returned to the Moscow in 2006 and ’07.

“When you see them conduct, you can hear a bubble sound,” Harada says of Russian conductors he admires, including Valery Gergiev. “They feel the music in a completely different way. They move the orchestra. They are not just beating them with the baton; they show everything with their face and their body gesture. It’s so much more musical.”

Harada’s experiences in Russia led to his first professional podium position, as assistant conductor of the Macon Symphony Orchestra and the Mercer/Macon Symphony Youth Orchestra in Georgia. He was halfway into his sophomore year of college, so he transferred to Mercer College, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

He spent 2 1/2 years in Macon, slipping off to Russia for private conducting lessons when he could.

When he learned about the fledgling Rogers Institute at the UA, he applied. Only two fellows were accepted into the institute, which sets itself apart from other U.S. conducting programs through its ties to the Tucson Symphony Orchestra and Arizona Opera. Fellows get conducting time with the professional musicians, in addition to leading UA student ensembles.

“These two Rogers fellows seem to always have their batons in their hands,” Cockrell says.

Arizona Opera’s Revzen says he has thrown Harada challenging tasks “and he’s met every one.”

“He has excellent hands,” Revzen says. “He’s very comfortable with his physical gestures; they are not awkward in any way. . . . His conducting technique is solid.”

Harada’s connection with the musicians transcends into the audience. While leading the TSO during last month’s “Celebrate the Future” concert, Harada bubbled with controlled energy and confidence. He exhibited an impressive sense of timing that led to one of the evening’s finest moments.

Harada calls his emerging podium style a marriage of American and Russian techniques.

“I think the end result is great. The music-making happens, the orchestra really likes me, and the audience likes it,” he says.

Did you know

The James E. Rogers Institute for Orchestral and Opera Conducting at the University of Arizona just completed its first year. Inaugural fellows Jackson Warren and Keitaro Harada conduct UA ensembles in rehearsals and performances, and lead rehearsals for Arizona Opera and the Tucson Symphony Orchestra.

The institute was blessed in spring 2007 with $1.8 million from its namesake benefactor, who also endowed the university’s law school. The money, to be spread over 10 years, covers the fellows’ tuition and health-insurance expenses and provides them with a modest school-year salary.

The program is limited to two or three fellows at a time, and the fellowship runs three years. It is led by Thomas Cockrell, the UA School of Music’s director of orchestral activities who holds the school’s Nelson Riddle Endowed Chair in Music.

“I could not have imagined that the collaborations with Arizona Opera and the Tucson Symphony Orchestra would be as rich for Jackson and Kei as they have been. This is due to the strong convictions and commitment of (Arizona Opera artistic director Joel) Revzen and (Tucson Symphony Orchestra music director George) Hanson. They really know what it takes to shape a conductor and are marvelous partners with the Rogers Institute,” Cockrell said in an e-mail interview. He is spending the summer conducting in Romania.

In its first year, Cockrell said, the institute is proving to be as challenging as he envisioned it would be.

“The Rogers Institute offers an incomparable amount of podium time; the quantity and quality of experience in front of two orchestras, opera casts, repertory ensembles and professional groups is truly unique,” Cockrell said.

~link to the article~