His life, his music is upbeat
BOSTON — The maestro’s week begins on a Sunday in March, 36,000 feet above the Atlantic.
Grant Llewellyn is between conducting gigs, flying from Paris to Boston, where he is music director of the Handel and Haydn Society. He studies the score to Beethoven’s Third Symphony, which he will conduct the following weekend. Then he flips the score’s booklet and begins rewriting the words to an old rugby song.
This, too, is for a performance. He will sing it to a top donor at the society’s annual fund-raising gala.
The week ahead is grimly busy with rehearsals, performances, auditions, board meetings and the gala. Performances leave him wired, and he will sleep less than five hours a night. After this week and the next, when he conducts the Boston Symphony Orchestra as a guest, his wife and four children will fly in from Wales for Easter. He will not have seen them for three weeks.
This is the life of the man who will become the N.C. Symphony’s music director in July, replacing Gerhardt Zimmermann. The staff and musicians, eager after a three-year search, see Llewellyn as the artistic leader who will make a national name for the orchestra and inspire an avalanche of donations and ticket sales. They want to add 20 musicians to the 64-member orchestra, raise the budget from $9 million to $12 million over the next five years and take full advantage of a new concert hall considered among the country’s finest.
He will keep his permanent address in Wales and, like many modern conductors who juggle more than one job, continue his work for the Handel and Haydn Society, a prestigious period orchestral and choral group in Boston.
By all accounts, the 43-year-old Welshman has the talent, energy and charisma to do all of this. He has an extensive international resume and came close to winning the baton at the Boston Pops. He works hard — and plays just as hard — when on maestro duty. He is handsome and magnetic, a natural storyteller who hugs people he barely knows.
Llewellyn also likes risk. He likes pushing himself to the edge of reason.
On the run
Llewellyn arrives in Boston on Monday afternoon and immediately heads to a board meeting. He spends the next day and most of the night in Melrose, a Boston suburb, rehearsing for the weekend Beethoven performances.
On Wednesday, he’s back in Melrose for a full day and night of rehearsals — Beethoven again and a Vivaldi youth choral concert scheduled for Thursday morning.
Mary Deissler, the society’s executive director, has been trying in vain to talk to Llewellyn about Saturday’s gala at the Four Seasons Hotel. He is either working or never alone. She drives through the thick noonday traffic to find him.
“There is always, always someone around,” she says. “That’s the way it has always been with Grant.”
Deissler has run the Handel and Haydn Society’s finances for more than 20 years. She and its board hired Llewellyn and his predecessor, Christopher Hogwood, who put the society’s orchestra on par with the more celebrated chorus. After Hogwood left, Llewellyn became music director in 2000.
Llewellyn did not have Hogwood’s scholarly demeanor or experience conducting period instruments, but he was a gifted musician and a warm, natural performer. Violist Anne Black and violinist Judy Gerratt noticed how he sensed every instrument, even in the most complicated pieces. Cellist Reinmar Seidler liked how he trusted musicians to take creative risks. French horn player Lowell Greer said the orchestra left the stage feeling that it had accomplished something.
“We saw that he is a trained and focused conductor who disciplines us but also lets us be free,” said Dan Stepner, the concertmaster. “He relates to music very well, and many of us come away thinking we understand the music better than before. The emotional rush that audiences feel when he conducts — we feel it, too.”
The youth rehearsal ends early, and Deissler arrives to find that Llewellyn has left for lunch. He returns just before the Beethoven rehearsals begin at 2:30 p.m. wearing charcoal gray — slacks, T-shirt and sweat shirt — and holding the Beethoven scores. His hands are small, the nails bitten down.
He and Deissler talk a moment — just long enough to arrange a one-hour meeting the next day at Uno’s Pizzeria, a Handel and Haydn watering hole.
Rapport with teens
The next morning, Llewellyn leads a chorus of at least 200 teenagers from city schools through a Vivaldi opera, accompanied by musicians from the Handel and Haydn Society. The concert is part of an educational outreach program — something Llewellyn says he hopes to do in North Carolina.
It takes a good 30 minutes to calm the teenagers and the auditorium full of their parents and friends. Llewellyn looks fatigued, his eyes puffy, but he sprints from student to student and jokes with them. Djanikah Elysee, 17, likes that Llewellyn is always excited: Even though he has gray hair, he’s like a really smart kid with a great accent, she says. He doesn’t lose his temper when the group gets giggly and distracted, though he does give them hard looks that remind Djanikah to focus.
“He makes you feel comfortable even when you mess up,” she says. “We mess up a lot.”
Successful conductors such as Llewellyn create what Boston Conservatory President Richard Ortner calls a “beautifully constructed edifice that makes architectural, musical and, finally, emotional sense.” They must be believable representatives of composers.
Ortner was the administrator at the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox, Mass., when he met Llewellyn in 1985. The young conductor, who studied at Cambridge University and the Royal College of Music in London, won a fellowship to the summer music school associated with the Boston Symphony. The next year, he would win the prestigious Leeds Conductors’ Competition in England.
Llewellyn established himself quickly in Boston, Ortner says. In 1990, Seiji Ozawa, then the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s music director, hired him as an assistant conductor. When the Boston Pops sought a replacement for conductor John Williams, Llewellyn was a strong candidate for the job that went to Keith Lockhart in 1995.
“He’s an exceptional musician, and he has fabulous ears,” Ortner said. “He hears everything that’s going on. If there are 20 instruments playing all at the same time, he doesn’t just hear a massive sound. He hears each of them.”
Bostonians also appreciated Llewellyn’s style of play. He liked to drink, yell at football games, play soccer and tell raunchy stories. Ortner remembers Llewellyn showing up at Tanglewood the night before school started, when the dormitories were closed, and pitching a tent on someone’s woodsy property because he did not want to spend money renting a hotel room.
Llewellyn tells the same story after Thursday night’s rehearsal, while he and about 10 of the orchestra musicians are unwinding at Uno’s. The woods smelled fresh and great, and he slept peacefully in his tent. In the morning, he was awakened by an angry man in a giant truck who threatened him and chased him away.
“And I told him, ’But I’m a conducting fellow at Tanglewood!’” Llewellyn proclaimed to the musicians, cracking them up. “I don’t think he cared.”
The conversation speeds through falconry, hunting woodcocks in Wales, Elizabethan culture on Roanoke Island, the Appalachian Trail — which Llewellyn says the musicians and those who play for the N.C. Symphony should hike.
“You can’t be serious,” says violist Anne Black. “That’s going to take forever!”
“Let’s do it!” Llewellyn says.
It’s getting late, and he needs to get back to Newton, the Boston suburb where he rents the top level of the house where Bette Davis grew up. His ride home, Michael Jendrysik, the Handel and Haydn Society’s artistic services manager, is getting tired.
Llewellyn doesn’t own a car in Boston. He rents one sometimes or gets rides from colleagues and friends. When the weather is good, he cycles.
“One more drink?” he says.
“Just one,” Jendrysik says, smiling wearily.
At the podium
Friday morning, Llewellyn wakes at 4:13 a.m. He dresses in a rugby shirt and gray slacks for a morning meeting and the afternoon violin auditions and packs his dark suit and tails. He will spend the weekend in the conductor’s suite of the Colonnade Hotel.
By 8 p.m., he changes clothes at Symphony Hall. He jokes with the audience, even getting on his knees to ask for new subscribers. Then he turns to face the orchestra. A few seconds of silence pass. He raises his arms over his head, and the musicians dive into the first furious notes of Beethoven’s “Emperor“ Concerto. Llewellyn conducts with his entire body. He moves gracefully and athletically, and his face tenses and softens with the music’s drama. The orchestra watches each ripple and expression for cues on the music.
The concert is remarkable. A man in the front row weeps after the piano concerto, and the crowd cheers after the second piece, Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony. Richard Dyer of the Boston Globe, the city’s most revered and feared classical music critic, writes a glowing review for Saturday’s edition.
If Llewellyn were clinically dispassionate about the evening’s performance, he could find a thousand mistakes. Hardly anyone will notice this because music is not a perfect science, he says. An artist is always walking a tightrope between too much tension and concentration and not enough.
“Tonight we did all right,” he says.
He leaves the stage sweaty and smiling and changes into slacks and a patterned shirt.
Near the symphony gift shop after the show, he autographs copies of a new CD, “Peace: A Choral Album for Our Times.” Llewellyn started his job at the Handel and Haydn Society on Sept. 10, 2001. The next day, a Handel and Haydn Society patron died on American Airlines Flight 11, one of two planes that left Logan Airport and crashed into the World Trade Center. The “Peace” CD began as a musical response to the terrorist attacks.
It’s close to midnight when Llewellyn crosses the street to Uno’s. He sits at the bar and orders a beer. Soon, he is surrounded. He hugs an Irish singer and kisses her cheek. He jokes with a young cellist from Israel.
The bar closes an hour later, and he invites people to his suite at the Colonnade. The suite has its own piano, and a trophy case with photographs of Ozawa and Lockhart. Llewellyn wonders aloud if his baton could unlock the case. Maybe I should put my photo there, he jokes.
Instead, he plays romantic songs on the piano.
“Aren’t we going to stay up all night?” he asks. An hour later, the guests leave and Llewellyn is free to sleep.
Family catches up
When he wakes early the next morning for more violin auditions, Llewellyn realizes he has run out of clean clothes.
“That’s the real challenge of this job,“ he says. “Laundry.”
His wife, Charlotte, calls from Wales, stressed. The family was about to move to a new house in Wales, but the buyers of their old house are pulling out. Her father is ill in London, and their youngest child, 8, has announced that he no longer wants to play the piano.
When he’s home, Llewellyn is devoted to his family, refusing to take business calls. But he travels half the year, leaving his wife to handle the children and the headaches of running a household. Adding 14 to 16 weeks of duties in North Carolina won’t make life less hectic, though he will fly to fewer guest conducting jobs.
“It always feels worst when I’ve been away for a couple of weeks and Charlotte is tearing her hair out,” he says. “On those days, I think, ’What the hell am I doing? My wife needs me, my daughter needs me, and I’m on the other side of the world.’ ”
He walks from the hotel to auditions, rubbing sleep from his eyes. At lunch, he drinks a glass of white wine with his salmon, joking that he needs to get “good and sozzled“ before the gala. He returns to his room and checks the latest sports scores from Wales, text-messaged by his 15-year-old daughter.
Then he runs off to buy a shirt.
He arrives at the Four Seasons by 6 p.m. He looks like a Baroque-era composer in a dark patterned jacket, and he moves through the crowd easily. Guests include doctors, businessmen and a Kennedy — Joe, Bobby’s son. In a silent auction, they bid for vacations in Italy, theater tickets, jewelry and a football autographed by New England Patriots kicker Adam Vinatieri. Also on the auction block: $2,500 for dinner for six with Llewellyn.
The evening honors Bill Achtmeyer, a Boston consultant generous to the Handel and Haydn Society. Llewellyn’s remade rugby song recounts a chilly evening last year when Achtmeyer took Llewellyn to see a Patriots playoff game. The next day, Llewellyn had to lead the chorus in Handel’s “Messiah.“ He still cringes when he recalls the hangover.
He performs the song on the piano and the guests join in: “We drank a whole crate by a quarter to eight.” Even Joe Kennedy sings loudly.
In the middle of the song, Llewellyn rips open his jacket to reveal a Patriots T-shirt. He bought it on his last-minute afternoon shopping trip. The crowd roars.
“Who is that guy?“ one guest asks. “This is the most fun I have ever had at one of these things!”
After the song, a band plays Donna Summer’s “Last Dance.” Llewellyn dances with a young woman with long, tawny hair and with an elderly woman in a tasteful suit.
The band finishes just as he is about to dance with a blond socialite in a long red dress and slightly askew up-do. She looks disappointed. He looks exhausted.
“I’m knackered,” he says.
He gets back to the hotel at about 1 a.m. and stands outside for a bit of fresh air. The week is over, and he finally feels it.
Easter is approaching. Charlotte and the kids will arrive, and he can switch off maestro duty. He can’t wait.
