MUSIC MAESTRA!

CONDUCTOR ANDREA QUINN TAKES CHARGE IN THE PIT OF NEW YORK CITY BALLET 

The dancers didn't know she was pregnant when Andrea Quinn first bounced onto the New York State Theater's stage last season. The New York City Ballet's future music director, trim, short-haired, and energetic, would run out for her bows, recalled principal dancer Jenifer Ringer, a touch of wonder still in her voice, and the dancers would say, "Take it easy. You can walk. We can wait."

And they did. Quinn, a 35-year-old Briton, was supposed to take charge of the New York City Ballet orchestra during the winter season just passed. But, although she conducted a full schedule of works, the official appointment was put on hold until after the birth of her third child, Alfred, on April 30. Instead, Quinn stayed on tour with The Royal Ballet, her former company, until it finished a run in Boston, and then moved to the City Ballet for the Saratoga, New York, summer season.

As for the conductor herself, combining pregnancy with the physicality required on the podium and coordinating the music with a full company of dancers were of no great consequence. "I don't notice it, to be honest," she said, relaxing for a moment in colleague Hugo Fiorato's dressing room after performances on January 13 of The Four Temperaments and Scotch Symphony. Pregnancy had made no difference to her career while she was carrying Katie, now 8, and Lucy, 6. "When i'm working, I don't even think about it."

Of greater moment, as far as both Andrea Quinn and the New York City Ballet are concerned, is the question of how this new music director--the first on-staff woman conductor of the NYCB orchestra--will interact with the company that Balanchine built.

So far, the results are all positive.

"Vivacity," "energy," "enthusiasm": Members of the company responded to her with almost the same language. "What is most striking to me," Ringer said, "is her vivacity, not only as a person, but as a conductor. She has so much energy and enthusiasm for what she does."

"She has a vibrant energy, in personality and in her conducting," said principal dancer Peter Boal. "That was the first impression, and then it was reiterated when we were onstage doing a piece."

In looking for someone to take charge of the orchestra on the retirement of Gordon Boelzner, Ballet Master in Chief Peter Martins had to consider factors other than enthusiasm and energy. Yet he, too, could feel the spark radiating from the company's ultimate choice. "We like her, the ballet staff likes her very much, the dancers like her," Martins said. "Perhaps more important, the orchestra likes her. It's very inspired by her leadership."

A ballet company looks for three things in a music director, he explained. First and foremost, "Innate conducting talent and skills. Before you even think in terms of ballet, you want a wonderful musician up there.

"Secondly, you want somebody who has an understanding, an appreciation for ballet." This might seem to go without saying, but it's not always the case. Boelzner, who has spent forty-one years with the company and will remain as music adviser, said that he did not particularly like the art when he first began with City Ballet. "I rather resented dance applied to music," he said. "I got to see there was a point there."

Finally, Martins concluded, "As any collaborative effort requires--in this case we are dealing with music and dance at the same time--you need someone flexible. There is always going to be a give-and-take situation."

And in Andrea Quinn's case, "She fit the three points ... like a glove," he said. "We probably had, over the last two or three years, more than fifteen conductors in here. There were maybe three or four top candidates. She emerged as the favorite."

Quinn's own route to ballet came about partly by accident. Born in London but raised in the town of Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, she studied conducting at the Royal Academy of Music, and in 1993 won a dance-conducting competition run by The Royal Ballet. Dance was not something she had focused on in college, and she knew nothing about ballet conducting. In addition, she said, "It is seen to be a lesser side of the conducting profession," because in a dance company the `person with the baton is not the focus of all eyes, as in orchestral performance.

Nevertheless, as she began working with The Royal Ballet at Covent Garden and on tour, she became more and more fascinated by dance: "The repertoire is fantastic and I love working with theater."

Quinn became music director of The Royal Ballet in 1998, leading that company both at Covent Garden and on tour in many of the full-length classics: Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet, The Nutcracker, and Cinderella, among others. There have been significant orchestral engagements, as well, with the London Symphony and London Philharmonic and a slew of other European ensembles.

But she began seeking broader horizons, in part because The Royal Ballet's orchestra is also the orchestra of the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, an internationally renowned ensemble whose music director is the august Bernard Haitink (whom Quinn describes as one of her musical mentors and "truly a servant of the music"). At City Ballet, it's her orchestra. "As music director, you have a say in what happens over commissioning, what happens over programming," Quinn said. She also hopes to begin giving the orchestra its own spotlight, with individual concerts and chamber music performances, somewhat the way James Levine has done with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, though necessarily on a smaller scale.

That will undoubtedly help raise the morale of the ballet orchestra, which had a monthlong strike in 1999 and had drawn complaints of inconsistent performance. The week before the season opens, the orchestra has five or six rehearsal sessions to work on new scores or difficult pieces that have come back into repertory, with two to four weekly rehearsals during the season. Quinn shares the workload with Fiorato (the principal conductor) and staff conductors Maurice Kaplow and Richard Moredock.

Already, the musicians appear to be invigorated by their new young music director, standing and applauding for her during rehearsals and curtain calls alike.

The importance of the relationship between musicians and dancers cannot be overstated, especially in this company built by Balanchine, a choreographer who was a musician first. "Music was what made that man function," Martins said. "All the music he choreographed to was first-rate, and ... he did everything possible to pay respect to the composer's intentions ... whether it was Tchaikovsky or Stravinsky or Brahms."

Boelzner agreed: "Mr. Balanchine was interested in ballet and music being an organic happening. He did not care for a solidified, robotic response to music. He used to call it `Mickey Mouse dancing.' ... That's what made it very enriching to work with a man like that, who was so thoroughly grounded in music and knew what music could produce."

As a result, the City Ballet's repertoire is based on magnificent--and often quite difficult--music, with constantly changing programs. The inclusion of concertos and other works that emphasize solo playing means there must be a high degree of individual virtuosity.

But that's all in the pit. The most critical relationship for the ballet conductor is with the dancers, to know what they can or cannot do, to feel the movement breathing with the music. "Nothing could be more difficult," Boelzner said, "than an old ballet encrusted with tradition, ritards, and accelerandos for certain ballerinas because of the stuff that has accumulated over the years.... You want to accommodate the dancers, but you don't want to insult the music. It's not the easiest thing in the world."

Peter Boal explained the problem from the dancer's point of view, citing moments in The Four Temperaments, the first work the company performed with Quinn in the pit. "I have done it for about twelve years," he said, "and have become accustomed to certain silences between the notes that you rely on for a piece like that; part of it is working out where I needed a little extra breathing room."

And Quinn found that extra room. On the other hand, Quinn's own interpretations have sometimes surprised and challenged the dancers. "We had some incredible performances where we as a company never thought we could dance as fast as she had us dancing," Boal said. "Which is actually great."

Ultimately, this enthusiasm all flows off the stage and out of the pit into the theater. Finally, it is the audience response that carries the most weight. Here, too, Quinn is having an effect. "Her energy," Boal said, "coupled with the piece, was fantastic. You could feel the energy coming back to you from the audience, and their excitement.

"She's the youngest conductor we've got. Even if she were 70, she would still be young. It's not a birthday thing."

Peter Goodman, author of Morton Gould: American Salute (Amadeus, 2000), was classical music critic at Newsday for twenty years. He currently writes on cultural affairs and radio for the newspaper.