San Francisco Classical Voice: Rapid Testing: Thomas Wilkins Navigates the LA Phil Down Duke Ellington's "River" [Jan. 20 and 21]

Thomas Wilkins

San Francisco Classical Voice

Tom Jacobs on January 15, 2022

Thomas Wilkins has coined a term for his current occupation: “COVID conducting.”

The veteran conductor’s clever coinage refers to making emphatic, unmistakable gestures to an ensemble, some members of which can’t hear one another because they are sitting relatively far apart to minimize the risk of spreading COVID.

“Your shoulders are really tired when the day is over!” he reported. “You’ve been waving your arms so crazily!”

Alas, even COVID conducting can’t salvage all performances during the current Omicron wave of the pandemic. Wilkins was speaking from his home in St. Petersburg, Florida. The day of our conversation, he was supposed to be in New Orleans, conducting that city’s orchestra, but his concerts were canceled after two rehearsals when 10 members of the ensemble tested positive.

With any luck, he won’t meet the same fate in Los Angeles, where he is scheduled to lead the Philharmonic in two programs of the music of Duke Ellington. The concerts of Jan. 20 and 21, featuring pianist Gerald Clayton, will include a suite from The River, a 1970 ballet Ellington wrote for the American Ballet Theatre and choreographer Alvin Ailey. The Jan. 22 and 23 events will feature music from his Sacred Concerts.

The longtime music director of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and a regular guest conductor with the LA Phil, Wilkins is a familiar face to Southern California music lovers. He spoke of his longtime love of Ellington’s music in a relaxed conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.

I was somewhat surprised to discover that these will be the Philharmonic’s first performances of The River and Black, Brown and Beige. After Ellington died in 1974, composer Gunther Schuller wrote an essay arguing his music should now become part of the repertoire. Is that finally happening? If so, what took so long?

I think it is starting to happen. I’ve been doing Ellington for the last five to seven seasons. This new project we are doing in L.A. has prompted publishers to start printing scores [of these works], so we’re getting nice, clean parts now. That may be part of the answer to your question. If the parts aren’t in good shape, people are hesitant to approach the works. Now that publishers are reengraving these parts, I think these pieces have a greater chance of becoming part of the regular canon. 

But there’s another underlying issue I have been railing against forever. Because we in the classical music world operate so often in the Western European tradition, we feared that if we [performed music that drew upon American popular or folk music], people wouldn’t take us seriously. Samuel Barber is played, but he wrote in the European tradition.

Dvořák famously advised American composers to use American folk music in their works, pointing specifically to music of Indigenous peoples and Negro spirituals.

Yes, he said “Your inspiration should come from your own soil.” The irony is composers like Mahler or Dvořák or Tchaikovsky didn’t hesitate to write about their own life experiences in the sound world they grew up in. We hear the Jewishness of Mahler, the Czechness of Dvořák. But for some reason, we are slow to accept anything that approaches “Americanism.” The problem is we rob ourselves of the opportunity of expanding our palate.

Did you propose the LA Phil Ellington concerts, or did the orchestra approach you?

The Philharmonic proposed it. I conducted a Harlem Renaissance program on a subscription concert about three seasons ago that included music of Ellington. I think they knew I feel really comfortable with Ellington, so when the idea came up to dig a little deeper [into his repertory], I was probably the first person who popped into their heads.

How do you define Ellington’s aesthetic, and how do you capture it for a symphony orchestra?

Ellington struts a lot. I often use that word in rehearsal. He doesn’t walk, or meander: He struts. There’s some attitude in there. There’s a great deal of self-awareness and self-assuredness in his music. Being a 55-year-old Black man who grew up during the civil rights movement, it’s a language I have heard all my life. It comes to me naturally. So maybe we can say it’s in my DNA. I look at a measure of an Ellington score and I go, “There’s that lick.” I don’t even have to think about it.

There’s also an elegance to his writing. I think of the “Lake” movement from The River suite. It’s so elegant. We used to come up with fancy ways of describing jazz so people would take it seriously. We don’t have to hyperintellectualize it. We can just call it music.

How do you prepare to conduct an Ellington program? Do you listen to the original recordings? Do you read about when and how the pieces were created?

I don’t go back and do a whole lot of reading, but I do go back and do a lot of listening.

What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of encountering Ellington’s music via these orchestral transcriptions, as opposed to hearing a jazz band play them, or listening to the original recordings?

I think it just gives us more. If you have a good orchestrator/arranger, they know how to make that music sound as if the orchestra was there all along. Every pop artist we’ve had at the Hollywood Bowl — and that’s no exaggeration — was in shock at how much richer their music sounded with the voice of an orchestra underneath it.

If we ignore these orchestral versions, we’re really missing out. If we didn’t have them, it wouldn’t diminish the importance of Duke Ellington, but having them certainly enhances the importance of Duke Ellington.

Do these arrangements allow for any improvisations?

Yes, within a confined amount of time. We have hired extra musicians who can read a set of chord changes and just go.

Does that ever make the orchestral players a little nervous?

No, I think it makes them excited. We all love music, and when you’re in the presence of really good music-making, you’re just pumped.

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Thomas Wilkins conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic in two “Symphonic Ellington” concerts on Jan. 20–21 and 22–23 in Walt Disney Concert Hall. For more information, go to laphil.com.