Dayton Philharmonic Artistic Director and Conductor Neal Gittleman has retired after 30 years of service. Gittleman came to Dayton in 1995 to take on the role and has since guided the orchestra to higher level of musical excellence, has seen the transition from Memorial Hall to the Schuster Center, and has been a major force in bringing together the Dayton Performing Arts Alliance. After a quarter century, he is ready to pass on the baton to someone else full time.
Gittleman will return in the fall, however, as a guest conductor for a Masterworks concert With Friends, For Friends, returning to the podium to lead two works by local composers, longtime collaborators, and personal friends Austin Jaquith and Steve Winteregg.
Midday Music Host Evan Miller spoke with Gittleman about his years of dedication and love for music.
Interview highlights
Evan Miller: What made you want to become a conductor?
Neal Gittleman: It wasn't really until I was in college that I got interested in exploring the idea of conducting as a career. I went to Yale, and as a freshman I was playing in the Yale Symphony. I had this sort of double realization. One was that I just really loved the sound of the orchestra. I fell in love, not just with the sound of the orchestra and the music, but also the energy of 75 or sometimes more people on stage making music together. And because I was a violinist, you sit there holding the violin in your left hand, and you got the bow in your right hand, and your left ear is like, two inches from where the sound is coming out of the F holes in the instruments. And at the same time, sitting in the orchestra, I'm looking up at the conductor. When I looked at him, this dude was having the time of his life. It was obvious. So I'm thinking, the stuff in my left ear is not fun, and that man is having a lot of fun. Maybe I should think about doing that.
Miller: Is there anything that's a real striking difference between when you started with the DPO and the DPO of today?
Gittleman: The biggest difference is the Schuster Center. When I came here, the orchestra was still playing in Memorial Hall, which at the time was the only place big enough to hold the orchestra, but not a very good place to play from an acoustic standpoint. When I came in 1995, people already recognized the need to have a new hall. Very quickly after I came here there was another effort and fortunately it worked out because as I always used to say, the concert hall is the instrument that an orchestra plays. And the Dayton Philharmonic of 1995 had long since outgrown the instrument it was playing in Memorial Hall.
Miller: Tell me about a memorable moment for you in the early days of you taking the post at DPO.
Gittleman: I don't think there's any one that I can think of simply because there were so many of them. One of the silver linings from the COVID era is literally just a matter of a few weeks after the shutdowns, after COVID stopped all performances, we started airing archival concerts on Discover Classical. And over those five years of curating and producing that show, I've had a chance basically to go back and re-hear lots of performances from the past. It's been a really fun and rewarding experience to do that. And you hear the progression of the orchestra from 30 years ago to now. When I first came here, one of the things that attracted me to it was the fact that the orchestra was playing well. It was a good orchestra, but I had the feeling it could become a very good orchestra if everyone worked at it, and if the community supported it, and all of those things happened. On any given night, if you didn't know it was us, you might think it was someone much bigger, which is a nice feather in the cap for our community to be able to say that.
Miller: Is there a particular kind of performance that you will miss the most from your time at DPO?
Gittleman: I would say that the two things that I miss the most are things that we've lost in the past couple of years during budget cuts. Philharmonster, our Halloween concert, which was always just so much fun to do and just a little bit off the wall. I tell people one of the things that made me think that the Dayton Philharmonic would be a cool place to work was not just that they do a Halloween concert, but they call it Philharmonster. I mean come on, that's a good idea. And the other was New Year's Eve. When I came here, I said,'What about a New Year's Eve concert?' We did it and it was a big success and it ran about 26 or 27 years before we gave it up. There were some people who would come to New Year's Eve every year and that may have been the only concert performance that they came to, but they knew it was gonna be fun and you could have a good time from 8 o'clock to 10:15 or so and if you wanted to go to bed, you could go home and go to bed and if you wanted go party, you could party.
Miller: It's a unique experience that you can't have any other way.
Gittleman: And the other thing that I think was special, that those two things, Philharmonster and New Year's Eve had in common, is that they were fun and they were designed to be fun. There was some serious music making going on there for sure, because you know we're a serious music-making organization, but everybody was having a good time. And you now, that should be one's goal.
Miller: What does it feel like having conducted a piece for over a hundred times?
Gittleman: Well, it's a couple of different things. One is that is you have to understand as a performer that it may be the 400th time you're playing the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. But there's at least one person in the audience who's hearing it for the first time, or certainly hearing it live for the fist time. And you know, your goal as a performer, no matter what field you're in, is you want to knock people's socks off with a performance. You can never be there performing and be thinking,'Oh Jesus, I have to do this again.' You know, it has to have that spark of excitement like it's the very first time. I've always tried to be in that head space whenever I conduct a concert. And I can honestly say, I've never had to artificially put myself in that zone. I think it's who I am as a person, but it's also the training I had, that you have to be absolutely in the moment when you're performing.
Miller: In your career with the DPO, was there a sort of white whale piece that you felt really gratified you were able to bring to the stage?
Gittleman: There are a bunch of them, but one of them that was very special to me was a piece we did, it was in the fall of 2019, a big piece by the 20th century French composer Olivier Messiaen, a piece called Turangalîla-Symphonie. Which I had discovered when I was a freshman in college. It is just this massive, amazing, crazy piece of music that I had always wanted to do. And through a variety of happy circumstances, we were able to do it, and the orchestra just knocked it out of the park. For every one that we did do, there's probably something that we didn't get around to doing during those 30 years. You see those refrigerator magnets and bumper stickers that say,'So many books, so little time.' and It's exactly the same thing in classical music. I'll say,'Hey, let's get in the car and go to Cleveland and see them play this piece. I never got to conduct it, but I can hear them do it.' I mean, that's one thing that I'm looking forward to is hearing more music. When you have a busy and successful career, you don't go to many other people's concerts.
