Feature: ‘Simply a Composer’s Advocate’

Photo by Roger Mastroianni

The American technical formal apparel company Coregami has announced Brett Mitchell as a brand ambassador, and journalist Owen Clarke has marked the new partnership with a 2,000-word feature article about the multifaceted conductor, composer, and pianist.

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Simply a Composer’s Advocate

In a profession often defined by tradition and the worship of past masters, conductor and Coregami ambassador Brett Mitchell has a strict rule: never copy the giants.

“I would rather be a first-rate Brett Mitchell than a second-rate Leonard Bernstein,” he told me. “I want everything that I do, for better or worse, to come genuinely from me. That's the only way it'll be new.”

Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, Mitchell was the oldest of three boys. No one else in his family was a musician, and he wasn’t introduced to classical music until high school. As a kid, he was surrounded by the pop artists of his parents’ generation, like the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, Billy Joel, and Elton John. As he grew into his teens, in the early 1990s, his influences changed. “There was no way to escape grunge in Seattle at that time,” he joked. “If you go look at my 8th grade yearbook, our jazz band photo, we’re all in flannels and ripped jeans,” he said. “Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, those bands were huge for me back then.”

As he entered high school, however, he became more interested in classical music. In particular, he loved the soundtracks of popular films at the time, movies like Superman, Indiana Jones, E.T., and Star Wars—all scored by John Williams. “I wouldn’t have had a career if it weren’t for falling in love with John’s music,” Mitchell said. 

Mitchell knew he loved music, but he wasn’t sure how he wanted to approach it. For a time he thought he might want to be a pianist, or perhaps a film composer. So he started writing bigger and bigger pieces, and his high school band director eventually said, “Why don’t you conduct this piece that you wrote?”

And in October of 1995, exactly thirty years ago, a 16-year-old Mitchell conducted his first piece of music. “Was I terrified? Yes, absolutely,” he said, laughing. “But it was that night in October ‘95 that I really decided, ‘Okay, I think this is the direction I want to go in life.’” After high school, he earned an undergraduate degree in music composition from Western Washington University, and then a master’s and doctorate in orchestral conducting from the University of Texas. By age 26, Mitchell was teaching at Northern Illinois University, and later that same year, he landed his first professional job as an assistant conductor for Orchestre National de France in Paris. From there, he was off to the races. 

(Readers can read Mitchell’s full biography on his website. Currently, he is the music director of the Pasadena Symphony, and the artistic director and conductor for Oregon’s Sunriver Music Festival. Just two weeks ago, he was named piano company Steinway & Sons' newest Steinway Artist.)

But Mitchell wasn’t inclined to dwell on his lengthy (and admittedly prestigious) resume, reminiscing on where he’s conducted or directed. “I’ve been doing this for 30 years now,” he told me, early on in our interview. “And when you get to this point, every interview is the same interview.”

Instead, we focused on the philosophy and lifestyle that shape the man behind the baton.

Photo by Roger Mastroianni

Life Above 7,000 Feet

Mitchell has been married to his wife, Angela, for a little over ten years, and together they have two children, a 20-month-old girl, Rose, and a boy, Will, who turns four on Christmas Eve. His family has lived in the foothills outside Denver, Colorado since 2017, when he was named music director of the Colorado Symphony. “We love living here, because we love the outdoors,” he said. 

The family’s home is at 7,300 feet, and backs up to the Bear Creek Highlands. “It's like 880 acres of open green space,” he said. “There are a dozen miles of trails right outside our back door, and it’s sunny 300 days a year, which is a big change, for me, from Seattle.” When the trails are clear, Mitchell and his family are hiking, but when it snows, they strap on snowshoes and hit the trails anyway. “Even in the winter, maybe you get a snowstorm and it dumps a foot of snow on you,” he said, “but the next day is almost invariably a bluebird day, crystal clear, bright blue sky, and we’re out there.”

Beyond the accessibility to pristine nature, there are other advantages, as a performer and conductor, to living in Colorado, Mitchell said. Chiefly, rehearsing at high elevation is a great way to build strong lungs. Mitchell recalled conducting his first concert in Colorado, in 2016. He noticed some oxygen tanks backstage at the concert hall. “I was like, ‘Oh, that’s funny,’” he remarked. “But then I was conducting, I think it was a Tchaikovsky symphony, one that ends big and loud and fast, with lots of energy, and at the end I was really, really winded.” The oxygen tanks weren’t just a gimmick. Players who come to Colorado, he said, will often come a day or two early to acclimate to the elevation. 

“There is a reason we train our Olympic teams in Colorado,” he added. “Working out up here, when I go down to sea level, I feel like Superman.”

This passion for an active lifestyle is also what drew Mitchell to Coregami. “Conductors always look for the most comfortable thing possible to rehearse in, attire that breathes, that lets us move the way we want to move. Then we get to the concert hall and we have to put on, well, the most restrictive clothing imaginable!” He laughed. “Coregami figured out a way to rectify that problem.”

Brett Mitchell leads the Colorado Symphony at Boettcher Concert Hall. Photo by Brandon Marshall

More Than Waving a Stick

As a conductor, Mitchell sees his job as multi-faceted, with responsibilities that go far beyond the music. The books on the shelves in his studio, where he sat when we conducted our interview, reflect this. “There are at least as many books on sports psychology and coaching as there are on conducting,” he said. “I’m looking at Phil Jackson, Eleven Rings. Pat Summitt, Sum It Up. Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power. 
I'm looking at John Wooden, at David Brooks, at books about Kobe [Bryant].”

Why so many books about athletics? Mitchell is blunt. “Coaches of professional athletes have the most insight in terms of how to deal with what I deal with as a conductor, which is elite talent,” Mitchell said. “These people are the best in the world at what they do, and they know it. Your job is to make them better, which isn’t easy. So yes, my role is diplomat. It's politician. It's counselor. It's psychologist.” 

In fact, Mitchell said his job is “as much about understanding people as it is about understanding music,” if not more, and that it’s not about taking charge and making unilateral decisions, but about organically building a consensus. “While I certainly bring my ideas to the podium, I am not the sole proprietor of good ideas,” he admitted. He added that to the layman, a conductor may seem like a shotcaller. That’s not how it is. “You probably think of this guy standing up there on a box, waving a stick in your face saying, ‘My way or the highway!’ Nothing could be further from the truth,” he said.

Mitchell likened his role to being an “arbiter of taste.” He has the final say, of course, but his voice should be the mouthpiece through which the orchestra speaks. “I try to be as open as I possibly can,” he said. “That give and take is what I love about conducting.” 

When I asked Mitchell about some of the quotes or books that have inspired his philosophies on conducting, he was quick to name one by Austrian-born American composer Erich Leinsdorf: The Composer’s Advocate. “This book is great,” Mitchell admitted, “but honestly the title of the book was more revealing to me than anything inside it, because it cuts to the heart of what our job is as conductors. We're advocating on behalf of the composer.” 

Mitchell is also fond of a line from the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Sunday in the Park with George, by Stephen Sondheim, about the work of French painter Georges Seurat. “The line comes at the end of Act II, toward the very end of the show,” Mitchell explained. “Seurat’s in a creative rut, he doesn't know what to do. He doesn't know how to get to the next place. And his muse [Dot] tells him, ‘Anything you do, let it come from you. Then it will be new. Give us more to see.’” 

Mitchell loves the quote so much he had it engraved on a piece of wood and mounted on the wall in his studio. This quote was the genesis for what he told me at the beginning of this piece, and it’s a personal mantra for Mitchell, a reminder that, whatever subconscious influences he may absorb as he goes about his life, he needs to be his own artist, for better or worse. As much as Williams, Bernstein, Sondheim, Tchaikovsky, or any other great composer from days gone by may have inspired him, he’s careful never to fall into the trap of emulating their work. 

“I want to give audiences something new,” he said.

Brett Mitchell leads the New York Philharmonic at David Geffen Hall. Photo by Brandon Patoc

We’re Here to Show the World What Can Be

Much of Mitchell’s work today involves mentoring young people. He served as music director for the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra for four years, and has taught at a number of programs for budding musicians. But in an era of generative artificial intelligence—when youth are encouraged to use generative AI for everything from writing essays to creating imagery—he admits that there’s a lot of pressure for youth to mimic. Convincing kids to “let everything you do come from you” isn’t always easy. 

Mitchell says that if he had anything to say to the young artists of today, growing up in an era of AI, it’s to not get discouraged. “AI will never be able to stumble upon happy accidents the way humans do,” he said. “AI is trained on the past. It’s trained to take the past, and distill into what it thinks is best for the present. But the most interesting, beautiful things are often those that arrive by accident.” Mitchell often plays jazz in his free time, and remarked on the popular joke that “there are no wrong notes in jazz,” because, “if you hit a note that you didn't mean to hit, all you have to do is take that little mistake and then do it again. Do it again and make it a feature, not a bug. This is something only a human brain can do.”

Another piece of advice Mitchell has for budding orchestral players is to remember that synchronization isn’t the goal. “In orchestras, there’s an emphasis placed on playing together,” he said. “If there's a chord on the downbeat, we all play that chord on the downbeat together. But we have to remember, the end goal is not to play with each other. The end goal is to play for each other.”

He gave an example. “If it's the oboe solo, that may mean the violins need to tone it down, and play more transparently. It’s not just about being in the same place at the same time. It's understanding when it's your turn and when it's somebody else's turn. You have to ask yourself, ‘Am I doing everything that I can to support my colleague?’”

This, Mitchell said, is part of what makes playing, conducting, and listening to orchestral music so special. It’s a collaborative effort, it’s many individuals coming together to craft something beautiful. “Anything that you’re gonna accomplish in your life, if it is worthwhile, you will accomplish it with other people,” Mitchell said. 

This is, in part, why he isn’t worried about the future of the arts. Developments in technology like artificial intelligence will take some jobs. That’s only natural. “When’s the last time you saw an elevator operator?” Mitchell joked. But he doesn’t see it ever having a fatal impact on the arts, simply because by nature, AI is retrospective.

“We can't write symphonies with robots. We can't paint pictures with robots,” he said. “Or we can, but the symphonies AI writes, the paintings AI creates, these are just a conglomeration of everything that already has been, they aren’t a lens into things that could be.”

He paused. “We have to remember, that's what artists are here for. We’re here to show the world what could be.”

Brett Mitchell leads The Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom Music Center. Photo by Roger Mastroianni

Feature: ‘From Manilow to Mozart, Sunriver maestro Brett Mitchell is an all-around music fan’

Brett Mitchell leads the Sunriver Music Festival Orchestra (Photo by David Young-Wolff)

BEND, Ore. — The Bulletin has published a feature about the Sunriver Music Festival and its Artistic Director & Conductor, Brett Mitchell, who is about to begin his fourth season at the helm of the nearly-50-year-old festival in Central Oregon.

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Sunriver Music Festival kicks off Saturday, with four classical concerts, a family concert and the ever-popular, and often sold-out, pops concert over the next week and a half in Bend and Sunriver.

The festival opens at the Tower Theatre with an evening program titled “A French Soiree,” followed by the Pops Concert Sunday night, also in the downtown Bend theater.

Concerts continue apace, through Aug. 11’s Season Finale Classical Concert, “Vienna Waits for You,” with music by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, among the many composers who called the Austrian city home.

But if, like Brett Mitchell, conductor and music director of the seasonal classical festival, you’re a Billy Joel fan, you know that the concert’s title is a pulled directly from the lyrics of “Vienna,” the B-Side to Joel’s 1977 single “Just the Way You Are.”

“I really am a subscriber to Duke Ellington’s great aphorism, which is, ‘There’s only two kinds of music. There’s good music, and there’s bad music,'” Mitchell said.

First came rock

Mitchell’s classical bona fides include his service as current music director of the Pasadena Symphony, and previous stints as music director of the Colorado Symphony, associate conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra and assistant conductor of both the Houston Symphony and Orchestre National de France. In May, Mitchell stepped in for conductor Juanjo Mena and made his subscription debut with the New York Philharmonic with less the 24 hours’ notice, receiving wide praise in reviews of his work.

But Mitchell is also a rock and pop aficionado. The array of autographs on the wall of his home studio attests to his wide and varied musical influences and tastes:

“I’m in my studio right now, and I’ve got to my left what I call my autograph wall, and I’ll tell you who’s autographs are on this wall,” Mitchell said. “The autographs are Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein, John Williams, Billy Joel, Barry Manilow, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel and Tony Bennett.”

If there are any aesthetes turning a nose up at the very notion of this diverse group sharing space on Mitchell’s wall or playlists, know this: He grew up in a non-musical family, and from a young age, rock and pop were his entry points into what he does professionally now.

We mean very young.

In the early ’80s, when he was 3 years old, he heard a song on the radio and asked his mom, who was getting ready for work, if they had it on vinyl.

“She said, ‘We do have a record of it.'”

Mitchell told his mom he wanted to take said record and his Fisher-Price record player to his caretaker, Janet’s house. His mom said Janet probably already knew the song. But he was determined to do it his was. His mom gave in on the record, but told him Janet has her own record player.

“I said, ‘No mom, I really want to take our record and my record player.’ And rather than argue with a 3-year-old, which is never a winning proposition — which I can attest to because we have a 3-year-old right now — she said, ‘OK.'”

Oh Mandy

When they arrived at Janet’s, the future conductor stopped his mom from leaving to head to work, he insisted the three of them sit together and listen to it.

The record: “Mandy,” Manilow’s 1975 no. 1 song, in which Mandy came and gave without taking. “The thing I have up on my wall — there was a silver record released for ‘Mandy’s’ 40th anniversary like 10 years ago, that Barry signed however many of.

“It’s funny, because people hear, you know, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, John Williams up on my wall with the silver record of ‘Mandy’ by Barry Manilow, and it’s like, ‘Guys, this is what I’m talking about,'” Mitchell said. “I tell that story all the time because it’s a cute story … but here’s what it really is. I found music that I loved, and I wanted to share it with as many people as I could.

“Now, when I was 3, that was for my mom and my caretaker on a living room floor in Seattle,” he added. “Now I get to do it — I opened the Cleveland Orchestra’s Blossom season (that’s the name of its summer performance venue) for 20,000 people a couple of weekends ago. So when you ask do I listen to pop, I do listen to pop. I listen to jazz. I listen to almost everything but classical to be honest with you, because I’m always working on classical music. That’s what I do all the time.

“The last thing I want to do when I’ve finished a day of studying Mozart is go listen to more Mozart. I’d much rather listen to Dave Brubeck and Bill Evans.”

The early ’90s

Knowing he was 3 in the early ’80s and living in the Pacific Northwest, you can probably guess what genre he got into after the smooth rock of Manilow.

“I was born in 1979 in Seattle,” he said. “By the time I got to middle school in 1991, it was Nirvana, it was Pearl Jam, it was Soundgarden.”

Crack open his middle school yearbook to “whatever page you want, every one of us is in flannels and ripped jeans,” he said, laughing.

He’s chiefly a Nirvana guy: “I thought Nirvana was as good as it got.” He even preferred the raucous, Steve Albini-engineered “In Utero” over the polished, Butch Vig-produced breakthrough “Nevermind.”

For him, there’s a common thread among all the songwriters and composers he’s come to love in his work and his free time that ties it all together.

Because of the way Mitchell had always viewed music, when he began exploring classical at age 15, “It didn’t strike me as any different from Nirvana,” he said. “Here’s a guy dealing with some serious things in his life, and has chosen, as part of the way that he’s going to work through these things, he has chosen to share that with the rest of us, to make the rest of us feel less alone. That’s exactly what Kurt Cobain was doing. That’s exactly what Beethoven was doing.”

“To me, it’s all the same,” he said.

Feature: ‘Falling in love with music: A conversation with Sunriver Music Festival artistic director and conductor Brett Mitchell’

Photo by Roger Mastroianni

BEND, Ore. — Oregon ArtsWatch has published an extensive feature about the Sunriver Music Festival and its Artistic Director & Conductor, Brett Mitchell. The article features a substantial interview with Mr. Mitchell, who is about to begin his fourth season at the helm of the nearly-50-year-old festival in Central Oregon.

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Falling in love with music:
A conversation with Sunriver Music Festival artistic director and conductor Brett Mitchell

Mitchell, now in his fourth season with the Central Oregon summer festival, discusses how his background as a composer informs his approach to conducting, why performing in Sunriver feels like coming home, and the immersive future of classical concerts.

Preparing to interview Brett Mitchell — conductor and artistic director of the Sunriver Music Festival, which starts August 2 and runs through the 13th — a few big questions came to mind. First: what is it that a conductor does, exactly? Beyond the time-keeping arm-waving and expressive emoting we all associate with the job, that is. Second: what goes into planning a seven-concert music festival in a resort town? It’s just the right length to be really difficult, in the sense that planning a single concert is hard but manageable, whereas planning a big long festival (like Chamber Music Northwest or the Oregon Bach Festival, say) is a lot more work by volume but also comes with a certain amount of wiggle room in terms of the longer arc.

Turns out, Mitchell had answers to all of these questions and a lot more…

Born in Seattle, studied with Leonard Slatkin, worked with Kurt Masur and Lorin Maazel, did The Lenny Thing and conducted the New York Philharmonic as a last-minute replacement (read those reviews right here). Basically your standard superstar conductor success story. He now lives in Colorado, where he ran the Colorado Symphony in Denver for five years, and currently leads the Pasadena Symphony. Since 2022 he’s been head honcho of the Sunriver Music Festival.

So much for the conducting credentials. During the pandemic he brushed up his piano chops, started having kids, and renewed his youthful interest in composing–an interest he’d mostly left behind when he had to choose career paths in grad school. Five years later and his YouTube channel has dozens of videos: Bartók, Chopin, Glass; massive amounts of film music (he was all dressed up to record Jaws when we spoke earlier this month); and a few samples of his own original work.

Mitchell’s original music was mostly written (or arranged) for his children, and a few pieces were sung by his wife Angela. Here’s “Love You Forever” (written for the first baby, Will):

And here’s Mitchell’s “Nocturne”:

And here he is playing Billy Joel’s “Nocturne”:

And here’s some Star Wars:

And here he is conducting Petrushka in 2016:

Got it? Good, then let’s go.

The following interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity and flow.

Oregon ArtWatch: Let’s start with your a-ha moment. What switched the light on for you as a musician?

Brett Mitchell: Thank you for leading with such a fun question. I do have an a-ha moment. I have a few of them as you would imagine, but there’s one that I always point to. I was born in 1979, and I was a little, little kid in the early ‘80s. It was just me and my mom at that point, and my mom was getting ready for work one morning and this song came on the radio, and for whatever reason it just grabbed me. I went into my mom’s bathroom where she was getting ready, and I said, “Mom, what is this song?”

And she told me what the song was. And I said, “do we have a record of this song?” And she said, “We do.” And I said, “Okay, here’s what I want to do. I want to take our record of this song and my little Fisher Price record player that you bought me for Christmas, and I want to take it to Janet’s house” (I used to stay with a caretaker named Janet) “and I want to play the song for Janet.” And my mom said, “well, you know, sweetheart, this was a number one song for a long time. I’m sure Janet knows the song.” I said, “yeah, mom, but I really want to play it for her.” And she said, “OK, well, how about this? Let’s take our record. Janet has a record player, we’ll play it on hers.” And I said, “No, mom, I want to take our record and my record player.” And rather than arguing with a three-year-old, which as a parent of a three-year-old right now I can tell you is not a winning proposition, we grabbed the record and the record player and we went to Janet’s house. And my mom said, “okay, sweetheart, I’ll see you tonight.” And I said, “where are you going?” And she said, “well, I have to go to work.” And I said, “no, mom, I want us all to sit here and listen to it.” And so we all sat there in this living room and listened to Barry Manilow’s “Mandy.”

Mitchell: Of all things, that is not where you thought this story was going! For whatever reason, that song really grabbed me. I mean, to the point where I have up on my wall the silver record signed by Mr. Manilow himself. It’s funny because I tell that anecdote a lot, and it’s cute, and it always gets a good laugh, but what it really illustrates is: It’s the exact same thing that I do today, which is find music that I love and then share it with as many people as I can. If that’s two people in a living room in Seattle, great. If it’s 20,000 people at some outdoor venue at a summer festival, great. It doesn’t matter to me.

Certainly it’s a long leap from “I heard a pop song from the ‘70s” to “I want to conduct the New York Philharmonic.” But at the same time, music is music. Falling in love with music is falling in love with music. There’s a lot of different ways that you can fall in love with music, and a lot of different avenues that that love can channel itself through. But for me, that was the moment that I was like, “okay, this is obviously something very special.”

I also remember from right around that same time, we had a piano at our house later but we didn’t have a piano when I was first growing up. But my mom’s aunt and uncle did in Roseburg, Oregon, and we would go visit them, and I remember being around that piano for the first time, and I remember playing the very highest notes on the piano. I was, again, about three or four years old. And because of the “tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,” I thought, “oh, Three Little Pigs, that’s fun.” And then I went down to the low end and I kind of rumbled down there and I thought, “oh, Big Bad Wolf.” So something about the storytelling potential of music got to me really early.

I grew up in Seattle and when I was at those really peak formative years of middle school that’s when grunge hit. Go back and look at my middle school yearbook from the early 1990s every one of us is in flannels. I really didn’t get to Beethoven until a few years later in high school, but the really nice thing about viewing music the way I’ve always viewed music is that I heard Nirvana and now I’m hearing Beethoven and they don’t sound super different to me. What it sounds like in both of these particular cases is a guy going through some really challenging times, really challenging things, and trying to work it out through his art, through his music. And by doing that, the rest of us that have had those experiences feel less alone, because somebody else is giving voice to the things that we’re experiencing. The crux of music, the whole purpose of music is communication. And composers in particular are only trying to communicate. They’re only trying to feel, to get us to feel what it is that they are feeling at that moment.

That’s the infinite power of music: it doesn’t really matter. Duke Ellington said there’s only two kinds of music, good music and bad music. That’s it. It doesn’t matter whether you call it symphonic or jazz or pop or emo or ska or whatever. Good music is good music. And that’s all we’re looking for.

OAW: Could you describe the nuts and bolts of what a conductor and artistic director does? We all know that it’s more than the arm waving, but what really goes into the work?

Mitchell: Well, the first thing I would say is that there’s the conducting part of the job, and then there’s the music directing part of the job, or the artistic directing part of the job. My title with Sunriver is “artistic director and conductor,” which implies two different things, and in fact it is two different things. As artistic director or music director, depending upon the organization, you’re in charge of the artistic direction of the organization. That means that I decide what the repertoire is that we’re going to play, what the music is that we’re going to play every season. I decide who the soloists are going to be, who are we going to bring in for some of the concertos that we do, the solo pieces with orchestra. I handle a decent amount of the administrative things that go along with any position.

As for the conducting part of things, what I’m essentially there to do is to help all of these highly trained professional musicians–who are looking in any given rehearsal or performance only at their part–to help them understand how their part fits in with everybody else’s part. You see the first flutist is looking at music that says “Flute 1,” and it has all of the music for the first flute. Same for the second flutist, same for the first oboist, the clarinetist, the bassoons, the horns, the violins, they’re all just looking at their own music. They don’t know what the horn player has in that bar because it’s not provided for them. I mean, if everybody had all of the music all of the time, the music would have to stop every 10 seconds so everyone could turn the page, right? It doesn’t really work like that.

So I have the great luxury of not having to learn how to physically, technically execute all of that music. I have to be able to look at the score, which is the document that I have that has everybody’s parts in it. It’s got the first flute and the second flute and the oboes and the clarinets and the bassoons. And so I’m able to see the context. I’m able to see what the musicians don’t see. Musicians are such good colleagues that we tend to always have our ears open, and when we find somebody else that we’re doing something with we try to mimic them. You’ve got a whole note in this bar, but the person sitting over there has a half note, and you think “if they’re exiting at this moment then I should probably be doing that as well.” And the answer is “no you don’t”–but where does that answer come from if you don’t have somebody at the center of it all that’s aware of the hierarchy at any given moment?

If you think about any pop song, there’s the melody that’s sung by the lead singer, but there’s also the drum track, the bass track, the keys track, the guitars track. All of that has to get blended together in a recording session. That’s the job of the engineer and the producer. I am the engineer and the producer when it comes to the orchestra.

I am what I would also call the arbiter of taste. If the score says “loud,” well, what what does “loud” mean? Does a “loud” in Mozart mean the same thing as a “loud” in Tchaikovsky? If it doesn’t, how are they different? Why are they different? So my job is to decide how loud is loud, how soft is soft, how fast is fast, how slow is slow, how long is long, how short is short, and to make sure that everybody is operating under the same rubric. If we’ve got 50 people on stage performing a Beethoven symphony, we might have 50 different opinions of how Beethoven should go. My job is to say, “for this performance, for the sake of intelligibility to the audience, everybody can’t just do what they want. We all have to be at the same place at the same time in the same way.” And I’m the guy that makes sure that all of those things happen. That’s a very high level look at what I do.

OAW: So then how would you characterize your own specific approach to conducting? What makes you different from any other conductor?

Mitchell: Part of what makes me different from any other conductor is that I’m me. We are all who we are as individuals, and you can’t separate who you are as a person from who you are as an artist. It’s a very physical thing that I do; I also contend with my body. We are all trapped in our own bodies. And even if I wanted to look like another conductor, even if I wanted to make a gesture like another conductor, I can mimic it but that’s his body or her body and it’s gonna look and feel more natural to them than it will to me.

So that’s part of the path of learning conducting: absorbing all of these other influences and then saying, “okay, but I’m my own person and I’m in my own body and this is what I have to work with.” So some of the individuality comes purely by you being an individual, and there’s nothing that we can do about that.

I would say that one of my defining characteristics as a conductor really stems from my background as a composer. My undergraduate degree is in composition from Western Washington University up in Bellingham. And when I started, I did not set out to become a conductor. That was not even on the radar. I started conducting by conducting my own music.

My high school band director commissioned me to write a piece the summer between my sophomore and junior years. And then we got to junior year, I had written the piece, and she said, “well, why don’t you just conduct it?” And I said, “because I don’t know how to conduct.” And she said, “yeah, but you know the most important thing about conducting this piece, which is you know this piece.”

And that’s what you really need. If you think about a word like “authority”–to have authority up on the podium, what does that really mean? Authority does not come from standing up on a box. I really think about the root of the word: If I want to have authority on the podium when I’m working on this piece, that means I have to know this piece so well that I could have authored it. That is what being an authority is. You know the thing so well that you may as well have written it yourself.

And listen, I’m a pianist and I am guilty of this when I am a pianist–as many musicians are–of ignoring markings that exist in the music, because I don’t want to do that at that exact moment. Well, okay, fine, but it’s not really about “want to.” The “want to” has to be serving the composer, because if the composer didn’t write this piece then we don’t have anything to do. The musicians don’t, I don’t, nobody does. So if we’re not there trying to serve the composer’s vision, then what are we there trying to do? What that means for me is that I take composers very seriously. And I take composers at their word. Now that doesn’t mean that I’m a slave to the score, that I don’t bring any imagination or thought. I understand that composers want us to use our imagination within what they have laid out for us. But I’m never casual about if. If a composer says that something should be done at, you know, half note equals 104, that’s the tempo the composer wants. Maybe I’ll be 96, maybe I’ll be 100, maybe I’ll be 108, maybe I’ll be 112. But I’m certainly not going to be 72. And I’m certainly not going to be 138.

And so I think part of what defines my approach is a real respect for and reverence for the composer and taking composers seriously and taking composers at their word.

Shakespeare had a great, very short line, which was “speak the speech.” You know what I mean? Just say it, just say the words. David Mamet, a great playwright and director, had a book about acting. He said, “you have to stop with the funny voices.” He said, “if the speech is good, nothing that you put on top of it will make it better. And if the speech is bad, nothing you put on top of it will make it better.” So, what that tells you is, the speech is the speech. The score is the score. You have to trust that the words in the play are going to connect with the people who hear them. And you have to trust that the notes at the concert are going to connect with the people who hear them. But the only way that you can make sure that the composer’s intention is being met is by doing what the composer asks you to do, even if it sometimes feels wrong, even if it sometimes feels awkward, even if you don’t quite understand why. I think presuming that we know better than the composer is a slippery slope and dangerous territory, and I don’t think I’ve ever gone against a composer’s wishes and felt like, “yeah, I showed him.”

That’s not the job. That’s really not the job. This is not a creative art, what I do. It is a re-creative art. I am taking music that is in printed form in these scores and with my colleagues trying to bring that music to life. But I’m not inventing the music. The players aren’t inventing the music. That’s already been done for us. So maybe that sets me apart from some of my colleagues.

OAW: What led you to then focus on conducting, rather than focusing on composing or playing piano?

Mitchell: My undergrad, as I mentioned, is in composition. I’ve always played the piano. And then I started conducting 30 years ago this fall, in October of ‘95. And it was just a practical thing. It was just my teacher saying, “hey, you should conduct this thing.” Not, “I’m gonna write this piece and finagle my way onto the podium.” That wasn’t the thought at all.

Mitchell: When I got to college, I started writing bigger and bigger pieces, and the bigger the piece you write, the more likely you are to need a conductor. So I started conducting more of my music in college. And then my colleagues in the composition program, my fellow composers, would say to me, “look at that, Brett conducts. Hey, you want to conduct my new piece?” And I’d be like, “yeah, sure, why not?” So I would conduct my friends’ music. And it became clear that I had a natural affinity for helping to shepherd what was going on.

And I knew as I was approaching the end of my undergrad that I was going to have to pick something. If you’re going to go to grad school, you’ve got to major in something. You have to get a master’s in something. You can’t get a master’s in everything.

I think my natural talents are part of what I have to offer: leadership ability. And you really need that as a conductor in a way that as a pianist you do not, and as a composer you do not. It’s also true that being a pianist, you spend hours and hours alone practicing, and you often go on stage alone. As a composer, you spend hours and hours alone writing, and then often you just give the music to other people and you’re not even part of the fun.

And as a conductor, certainly I spend hours and hours alone studying, but the penultimate result is that I get together with my colleagues in the orchestra, and we get to work for a few days on this music that I’ve been studying, and then we get to perform for an audience. I love working with other people, and I love performing for an audience, and given the musical spheres that I was in, it made sense to become a conductor.

And so that was really what I exclusively focused on from the time I was about 22 until I was–well, let’s see, I was 40 when the pandemic started. And when the pandemic started, I was stuck at home, as was everybody. And I was so kind of unmoored, because I couldn’t make music. Conductors, we need an orchestra. Orchestras just shut down because you, I mean, think about what an orchestra is. It’s a bunch of people blowing into their instruments. This is not what we wanted to do during COVID times.

I’ve always had a very clear mission statement, which is to share music I love with as many people as possible. And I was complaining to my wife a few months into the pandemic about how I wasn’t able to make music. And she said, “what does your mission statement say?” And I said, “to make music I love for as many people as possible.” And she said, “and where in there does it say anything about an orchestra? Where does it say anything about an audience? Where does it say anything about conducting?” And I was like, “you’re just constantly right.” She was, she was exactly right.

And so while I had played some piano over the intervening 20 years or so, I really got my chops back up once the pandemic started. I started arranging things. I started arranging film scores, scenes for piano, because that was a thing that I was able to do that nobody else was doing. I have conducted a lot of movies live to picture, so I had access to these scores. I have a composition degree, so I’m able to look at a big orchestral score and reduce that for piano. I am a pianist, so I can play those things on the piano. I understand how it works to try and line music up with picture.

Editing the audio, editing the video–that was a whole new thing. That was a challenging thing. But like many, many, many, many people, I figured out how to do that. As with, you know, virtually everything on the planet, COVID forced a readjustment of priorities. Now I find myself conducting all the time again, thank goodness. But I also do have a good following on YouTube, and I want to keep that going. Not because it makes me so much money, but because the people who are on there, who enjoy what I do on there, really enjoy what I do on there. I appreciate that a lot, and I enjoy doing it as well. I’m going to go record a video right after this interview, for Jaws‘ 50th anniversary.

Mitchell: I’m always suspicious of people who say, you know, “I knew from the time I was eight years old that I wanted to be a conductor.” When you’re eight years old, you don’t you don’t really understand what’s going on up there. You see somebody that’s the center of attention and standing on a box and waving their arms and apparently all-powerful. But that is about 1% the truth of what actually goes on up there. I think it’s much healthier if you sort of backdoor your way into it the way I did.

OAW: Could you talk about your composing life, what you’ve been working on and sharing on YouTube these last few years?

Mitchell: Almost everything that I’m composing now is actually not composing, it’s arranging. I would say that the composing that I’ve done over the past few years, with a couple of exceptions, has really been for our kids. We have an almost three-and-a-half-year old boy–a week from today he’d want me to tell you–who just started preschool last week, who’s very excited about that. And a little girl who just turned one back in April. When they were coming into the world, I thought “well dear God, I’m a musician. I’m a composer, I’m a pianist, I can’t not do something for them.”

So I repurposed a lullaby that I wrote back when I was either 15 or 16 and I called it “Will’s Lullaby.” I’ve actually never written it down anywhere; it exists on the YouTube channel, but I’ve never written it down anywhere.

And because my wife is a soprano, we also wanted to do a song for Will. And I had written a song maybe 20 years before for a colleague of mine who had a baby, and that was “Love You Forever.” And I said, “I want to make it a little bigger and a little more expansive.” And so I sort of rearranged that when Will was born.

Will was born Christmas Eve of 2021. Rose was born in April of ‘24, and her little lullaby was from another piece that I had written back in the year 2000 called “Four Miniatures for Solo Piano.” It was just the second movement of that. Again, I expanded it, changed it around a little bit. But I needed to find a new text, because I had run out of old music to repurpose.

We knew we were going to name her Rose. I’m Brett William, so our son is Will. My wife is Angela Rose, so we knew her name was gonna be Rose once we found out it was a girl. So I went looking around for rose poems and found a great poem by Robert Frost called “The Rose Family.”

Mitchell: I’ll tell you the really interesting thing about all four of those. My wife and I just did a recital together here in Denver last month, and we played all four of those things. I played “Will’s Lullaby,” we sang “Love You Forever,” then I did “Rose’s Lullaby,” and then we did “Rose Family.” And “Will’s Lullaby” was written, as I said, when I was 15 or 16, and “Rose’s Lullaby” was written when I was like 20 and towards the end of my composition degree. And one of our neighbors who came to the recital, a big music fan, she said, “I have to tell you, I really liked ‘Will’s Lullaby’ a lot. I think I liked that more than ‘Rose’s Lullaby.’” And I was like, “that’s very interesting because what you’re saying is that the music of the essentially relatively untrained 15-year-old was more palatable than the music of the trained 20-year-old.”

And I completely understand that. I really do. I totally understand where that’s coming from. When you’re in the middle of getting a composition degree, you want to be taken seriously, you want to explore all the different ways you can create music and sound worlds you can make. When I was writing “Will’s Lullaby” when I was 15, I was just writing a pretty tune, because that was all I was interested in doing then. And as it turns out, people are mostly interested in the pretty tune. I found that really interesting, and I didn’t take offense to it at all.

So most of the composing that I do is really in the guise of arranging for the YouTube channel. But then I’ll also write little things here and there, usually as gifts for people. Leonard Bernstein used to write little pieces for people that he called “anniversaries.” And it was either for an anniversary or a birthday, just little teeny tiny gifts. And then I think after Lenny died, they were all published together in three different sets or something like that. But it was never intended to be that. It was just intended to be, “hey, I love you.” Some people like to cook for other people. I like to write music for other people. It’s no different. It’s a love language coming from me.

OAW: Let’s talk about Sunriver Music Festival. How did you get the job in the first place, and what’s it like putting together a music festival?

Mitchell: I got a phone call, or maybe an email, at the beginning of a pandemic about this festival that was looking for an artistic director and would I be interested in applying. I think somebody may have recommended me for it. And I said, “sure, why not?” And ended up coming out during the summer of 2021. I was one of two candidates that they brought in to lead half of the festival. I led half the festival that year and they offered me the position and I took it. So this will be my fourth season.

The thing about a summer festival is we spend so much of our year working with the same people week in, week out. So there’s something really nice for musicians about going on the road for a couple of weeks, going to a really beautiful place like Sunriver–that’s certainly part of why we’re able to attract the caliber of musicians that we’re able to attract is, because we have a festival in a beautiful place–and to come together and to make a whole bunch of music in a relatively short period of time.

I’m always listening to the audience and what the audience is saying they want to hear, because that’s important. I’m listening to the board, I’m listening to the musicians. What do they want to hear? What do they want to play?

And then I’m really balancing that with the simple truth, the practical reality of how these festivals work. I’ll give you an example. If we have a show on Sunday night, the way that the rehearsal schedule usually works for it is we rehearse Saturday morning, Saturday night, Sunday morning, show on Sunday night. So we start at 10 a.m. on Saturday morning and 36 hours later, 10 p.m., we’re done with the program and we’ve done three rehearsals and the show. That is a tall order for anybody.

Part of what that means, and this aligns nicely with the summer festival, is that the programming has to be a little bit more conservative. You can’t just go totally crazy with these people who don’t play together for most of the year. So part of it is just getting our sea legs in terms of how we listen to each other. But then also being realistic about how much time we have to put this program together. And so I have to be very cognizant of all of those things.

So on our first program this year, there’s a couple of pieces that the orchestra could play, you know, blindfolded backwards in their sleep upside down. The selections from Carmen, I mean dear God, we have all played Carmen thousands of times in our career. No problem. The Ravel Piano Concerto, professional musicians play that all the time and we love it. And then there are a couple of pieces that are slightly more off the beaten path, but nothing that’s gonna cause the musicians any challenges. The Fauré, Pelléas et Mélisande, is one of the most beautiful pieces on the planet. And then the opening fanfare is a piece that doesn’t get played a lot. It’s also not terribly long, but it’s a great way to show off the brass section.

I’m trying to take all of the constituencies that we’re trying to serve. I’m trying to serve the audience. I’m trying to serve the musicians. I’m trying to serve the board for whom I work. I’m trying to serve myself because I have to believe in what we’re doing up there. Making sure that all of those different constituencies are being served and that we’ve got real variety over the course of the season. That’s the other thing that I think is really, really crucial.

That opening program is all French music. The next classical program is a classically oriented program: There’s Mozart, which is pure classical music; there is Tchaikovsky doing his Mozart impersonation; there is Stravinsky doing his Mozart impersonation; and there is Bill Bolcom doing his Mozart impersonation. So all of these pieces go together in a not haphazard way–they go together in a very intentional way to make sure that what you just heard is a little different from what you’re about to hear, but somehow related. That the concert you heard a few days ago is different from what you’re hearing tonight. I mean, how much more different can you get from an all-French program than the way we close with Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven? The height of what we would call the Viennese school, Viennese classicism. And then in the middle of all of that, you’ve got this beautiful trip to Leipzig with Robert Schumann, and Mendelssohn with our concertmaster, and then a couple pieces by Bach.

And we haven’t even touched the family show, we haven’t talked about the pops show. So there’s all sorts of music that occurs over the course of the season with the intent of serving all of us so that we’ve got this great variety as we’re working our way through each of these seasons.

OAW: Having grown up in Seattle and now working all over the place and living in Colorado, does coming back to Bend feel like coming home?

Mitchell: Oh, 100 percent, totally. And it’s not just because I grew up in Seattle. I spent all my summers in Oregon. My mom is from Roseburg. By the time I was growing up, my grandparents had moved about an hour down I-5 to Grants Pass. So Grants Pass is where I used to spend my summers. I mean, if you were to look at my knees today, the vast majority of those scars I got in Grants Pass, falling off dirt bikes.

So I have been coming to Oregon my whole life. My mom’s entire side of the family is from Oregon. It was one of the things that I told the search committee, that it would be wonderful to feel like I’m back home for some time every summer. When I was a kid, my grandparents and I came over to Bend once, in the mid ‘80s. We came into Bend and I was like, “wow, this makes Grants Pass look like the big city.” And then I didn’t go back to Bend until 2021, when I auditioned. And I was like, “what happened?” Now it’s the big metropolis in Central Oregon. So it’s nice to have that lifelong perspective of what Bend was, which I remember so clearly from being a kid, and to see it now and to spend a good portion of my summer every year there.

Yes, it more than feels like coming home. It’s very special to me.

OAW: Our standard last question–what would you ask Brett Mitchell?

Mitchell: Oh my God. You know, very seldom do I get asked a question I’ve never been asked before. I guess I would ask myself, “where do you see the art form going?” The art form has changed a lot even in the course of my career. I’ve been doing this almost 30 years, and I got my doctoral degree 20 years ago, which means that was when I “finished” my training–we’re always training. When I was going to grad school, there was no such thing as, “what if we did the score for Empire Strikes Back live while we showed the movie?” It literally didn’t exist. The technology didn’t exist. They couldn’t have done that back then, even if they had wanted to. I was in academia, so it probably would have been looked down upon anyway. I’m glad to hear that that’s kind of going away, that looking down the nose kind of thing.

What does it look like 30 years from now? I mean, 30 years from now, I’ll be 75, almost 76, just wrapping it up-ish, hopefully. And what does it look like? I mean, I think that the more we can kind of hew to Duke Ellington’s “there are only two kinds of music,” the more successful we will be. I think if we say “dead white European males from the 19th century and everyone else need not apply,” that’s when the field gets in real trouble. Because I have conducted, I believe, over a thousand concerts now in my life. And at those thousands of concerts that I have performed for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people, never once have I seen a dead white European male, ever. Never happened. I’m not saying that they don’t have things to say to us, because they do, and they’re universal messages. But they shouldn’t be heard at the expense of people who have things to say today.

And the more we can successfully look at music as a continuum. Classical music is not a thing that happened. It’s a thing that is happening. It is a genre all its own, and a genre that is doing its level best, I do believe, to break down barriers, to break down walls, both in terms of who’s on stage and who’s in the audience and whose music we’re performing. So I think that the future of music is very bright for organizations that embrace the reality of who we are and when we are and where we are. We are not a museum. We are not there to encase works and to put them on a pedestal and to look at them and say, “oh golly, isn’t that lovely?”

That’s not what composers are trying to do. Composers are trying to communicate with immediacy. This is part of the challenge of doing something like Beethoven 5. Imagine how paradigm-shattering and mind-blowing it would have been to hear that piece for the first time. And yet that piece is now over 200 years old, and we’ve all heard it many times. So how do you recapture that immediacy? Beethoven wants to grab you. So how do we grab the audience?

The thing about music that’s really well known is it loses its power. It loses its impact. And I’ll give you two perfect examples from the world of film. The first is the shower scene from Psycho. The second is anytime you hear the shark theme from Jaws. Back in 1960, when Psycho came out and Janet Leigh was getting hacked to death in the shower, and Bernard Herrmann has those screeching strings–that must have been truly terrifying in the theater. If you think about Jaws and those two notes, how terrifying. I mean, John Williams won the Oscar for that score. And I have done Psycho in performance, and I have done Jaws in performance. And you get to those scenes, and people laugh. Not because it’s funny, but because it’s like, “oh, right, there’s the wee, wee, wee,” or “there’s the doom, doom, doom, doom, doom.” So it loses its power.

Mitchell: Beethoven 5 loses its power with overexposure. This is why we try not to repeat ourselves too much, so that when the time does come for immediacy, it can really land.

I think the ability to take an audience on a journey that really is a clear conversation, so that the way you hear the first piece impacts the way you hear the second piece and the way you heard those first two pieces impacts the way you heard you hear the third piece. We have all sorts of visual possibilities now. I don’t see anything wrong with incorporating visual elements in concerts. We have eyes as well as ears, and there’s nothing wrong with trying to engage more than one sense at a time.

I think the organizations that are the nimblest, that are willing to zig and zag, rather than, “we are an ocean liner, we are classical music, this is the direction we are headed.” It’s like, “yes, but it’s an iceberg, don’t you see the iceberg?” You’ve got to be able to, you know, take the schooner this way.

So what do concerts look like in 30 years? Gosh, I don’t know. Immersive, I think. I think all of the senses will be engaged somehow.

I don’t believe for one second–maybe eight years ago, I would have believed this–but after COVID, I don’t believe for one second that people are only going to stay at home and listen to music. I have seen it myself. As we all got back into the concert hall, people wanted to be in the hall. People needed to be in the hall. People need the communal experience. And particularly today, where we’ve got so many blips and bings and pings and alerts and dings–for all of us to come together, shut up, shut off the devices, and let the composer or composers take us on the journey that they’re trying to take us on.

For anybody that’s ever been to a concert, it’s one thing to have a big loud end to a concert and then everybody leaps to their feet and screams. That’s wonderful, that’s lovely and it’s a nice thing to have happen. But I will tell you that I never ever feel more connected to an audience than I do when we end a piece quietly and we all hold the quiet. Now, I’m holding the quiet. I’m the one that’s not moving, and nobody’s going to clap until I move, and I know that. But I literally just got goosebumps, because you can feel 2,000 people wrapping you in that silence. And then when we release it and we can all exhale–that’s never going to go away.

So it’s like the Mark Twain quote, right? “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” Reports of classical music’s death have been greatly exaggerated. There’s a great Time Magazine article that goes around all the time about, “oh man, the audiences are getting older and look at all that white hair in the audiences and what are we ever gonna do?” And then you look at the date and it’s 1954. It’s like we have been saying classical music is dying since classical music was born. It’s not going anywhere. We just need to be constantly flexible and imaginative in terms of how we are presenting this music that we love to other people so that they might have an opportunity to love it too.

Feature: ‘Brett Mitchell Pays Tribute to Leonard Nimoy and Star Trek with Emotional Piano Performance’

‘Brett Mitchell Pays Tribute to Leonard Nimoy and Star Trek with Emotional Piano Performance’

Italian Star Trek news magazine ExtraTrek has published an extensive feature about Brett Mitchell’s film music covers on his YouTube channel. The following excerpts are translated from the original Italian:

* * * * *

BRETT MITCHELL PAYS TRIBUTE TO LEONARD NIMOY AND STAR TREK WITH EMOTIONAL PIANO PERFORMANCE
Brett Mitchell's YouTube channel features piano-based reinterpretations of famous film scores, celebrating iconic characters and creating an immersive musical experience

Brett Mitchell, a renowned conductor and pianist, has developed a special relationship with film and television music over the years, combining his interpretative sensitivity with his passion for soundtracks. On his YouTube channel, active since 2006, Mitchell offers original arrangements ranging from orchestral classics to the most iconic soundtracks in pop culture.

One of his most touching tributes is the video Horner: Spock (Brett Mitchell, piano), in which he performs on the piano an arrangement of James Horner ’s Spock theme, taken from the soundtrack of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. This song, full of emotion and depth, is a perfect tribute to the figure of Leonard Nimoy and his iconic character, remembered for his wisdom, his stoicism and his famous motto: Live long and prosper. A few days ago Mitchell offered this piece on the day in which the actor, interpreter of the most famous Vulcan of the franchise, would have turned 94.

A tribute full of meaning

Mitchell's performance is notable for the delicacy with which he manages to render the emotional nuances of Horner's piece. The arrangement, entirely for piano, captures the melancholy and grandeur of Spock, evoking the most touching scenes of the film. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is a fundamental chapter of the saga, made immortal by the dramatic scene of Spock 's death, accompanied by Horner's music.

This tribute goes beyond a simple musical performance: it is a gesture of love towards a character who has marked generations of fans and who continues to be one of the most beloved figures of the Star Trek franchise.

Music and Cinema: The Perfect Combination on Brett Mitchell's Channel

Mitchell's work doesn't stop with Spock . His channel is a veritable archive of great soundtracks reinterpreted with sensitivity and mastery. Staying on the subject of Star Trek, we can't help but mention another example of his talent: the piano arrangement of A Good Start, a piece composed by Jerry Goldsmith for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. This piece, which accompanies the iconic final sequence of the film, is a hymn to the wonder of space exploration and the sense of adventure that has always characterized the saga.

The artist doesn't just play music: in his videos he often synchronizes the music with the original scenes, offering an immersive experience that fuses the power of the soundtrack with the visual narrative.

In addition to the two videos mentioned, Mitchell's channel features other highly valuable performances, such as:

• Angelo Badalamenti: Twin Peaks Theme (Piano Cover) (Brett Mitchell, piano), a touching reinterpretation of the famous theme from the Twin Peaks series, characterized by dreamlike and melancholic atmospheres.

• John Williams: AI Artificial Intelligence (Brett Mitchell, piano), an intense and emotionally charged performance of Williams’s score for Steven Spielberg’s film, which perfectly captures the film’s sense of wonder and melancholy.

A journey through music and memory

Visit his YouTube channel and subscribe to not miss all his new reinterpretations and to enjoy many other songs already published. For those who love cinema, soundtracks and classical music, his YouTube channel is a must-see, where every note tells a timeless story.

Feature: Pasadena Symphony Helps Community Grieve and Give After Fires

Pasadena Symphony music director Brett Mitchell stands in front of the orchestra’s home, the Ambassador Auditorium, which was undamaged during the recent wildfires in Southern California. (Photo by Tim Sullens)

PASADENA — Violinist.com has published a story about the Pasadena Symphony’s recent subscription concerts—led by music director Brett Mitchell—in the wake of the destructive wildfires that ravaged the community. Half a dozen Pasadena Symphony musicians and two board members lost their homes in the blaze.

The concert was about to begin last Saturday, and I looked across the stage at my colleague Irina Voloshina, sitting right by the audience in the first violins. I could see she was having a hard time holding back the tears.

Pasadena Symphony conductor Brett Mitchell was finishing his opening words, acknowledging that it had been a very difficult few weeks in the community of Pasadena and Altadena, California, where the Eaton Canyon fire had reduced a huge portion of the area to rubble and ash over the course of one night.

Irina's home had burned to the ground during the fire…

Back on stage - Brett was telling the audience that we were about to play one of the most heart-wrenching pieces of music ever written, Barber's "Adagio for Strings." The piece had been added to the program at the last minute, in acknowledgment of the community's devastating losses.

Irina was looking away from the audience, trying to keep it together to play this gut-wrenching music. I confess that I questioned this choice, earlier in the week. How on Earth could we play this music? How could anyone listen to it? To me it felt like too much - too sad for people who have lost too much.

But during the week, Brett did explain the choice: "I never program this piece for a regular concert. It is only when something like this happens," he told us. He gently encouraged us to play the Barber in certain ways - at the beginning, just sneak in, let the sound come from absolutely nothing. Toward the end of the piece is an immense apotheosis, he told us to use as many bows as we wanted, and he would hold that note for as long as he possibly dared. And after that note - a silence, followed by the quietest pianissimo we could manage. Stillness and grief. "I've studied this music for years, put notes in the score," he said during rehearsal. "In this place, I wrote...," he hesitated a little, "'Ashen.' Just devastated."

"Ashen" - ? Part of me was thinking, "Why would you say this to us? How could you even GO THERE?" Three musicians in the orchestra had lost their homes to the fire. Other musicians had been evacuated and displaced. Any of us living in the area were grieving - for our beautiful Altadena and the people who made it that way, now bearing unthinkable hardship.

Then again...wasn't this exactly what this music was saying? How can we NOT go there? Ashen. I had to fight my own tears as we continued to rehearse that day.

As Brett continued his spoken introduction at the concert, Irina was looking away from the audience, she was in fact looking straight in my direction. I felt desperate to send her a sign - I put hand over my heart. I think we were all trying to send strength to her, and to Carrie Kennedy, sitting next to her, and to Joel Pargman, married violinists who also had lost their homes to the fire.

And so we played Barber's Adagio for Strings - we traveled together through that music's numb emptiness and through its wailing grief, back to something still and quiet, a glimmer of hope. The audience seemed to travel with us.

The rest of the program was actually quite upbeat - Jessie Montgomery's "Starburst," Florence Price's jubilant Piano Concerto in One Movement, and Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony. I had wondered about that, too. Was this music too happy for the occasion? Brett had originally programed it to "give everyone a boost" during the dark days of January. "I had no idea, what a boost we would all need," he said at the concert.

It was actually just perfect. Jessie's piece was a burst of energy after the Barber. Florence Price's concerto was so joyful, with pianist Inon Barnatan as our affable and sure-handed soloist. More than a few of us were singing its catchy "juba" dance tune as we exited the stage for intermission. And closing with the Mozart - it's a symphony that feels like a rescue mission for the soul, an infusion of beauty, where spirit triumphs over the dark shadows, every time. I had the sense that we were simply enjoying its humor, cleverness and bright energy. Mozart was familiar territory, in the face of a world that felt so changed.

To read the complete story, please click here.

Cover Story: ‘New Beginnings: Pasadena Symphony launches 97th season’

PASADENA — Pasadena Weekly has published an extensive interview and profile of Brett Mitchell as he continues in his first season as Music Director of the Pasadena Symphony:

New Pasadena Symphony Music Director Brett Mitchell is fully aware that many people are exposed to classical music through cartoons or film. Whether it’s Bugs Bunny’s “Rabbit of Seville” or “What’s Opera Doc?” or “The Emperor’s Theme,” the songs resonate still.

That’s what drew him in as well.

“The first orchestra music I ever heard was the music that was coming through our TV set speakers,” he said. “When we got to see a movie, it was the music coming out of the speaker. It really was a gateway to classical music.”

“When I grew up in 1979, I grew up with ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Superman.’ I got my undergrad in composition because I wanted to write film music. I moved to conducting because I have the utmost respect for musicians. They were a formative part of my childhood. The opportunity to make music with them is truly a genuine treat.”

Mitchell continues his debut season with a program comprising four works with distinctive and colorful themes that play off Southern California’s adjacency to the Pacific Ocean and the tech industry.

The “Rhapsody in Blue” performances are scheduled for 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 16. Mitchell opens the program with Mason Bates’ computer motherboard-inspired “Sea-Blue Circuitry,” an all-acoustic work.

“The grooves of ‘Sea-Blue Circuitry’ hiccup from measure to measure as rapidly as data quietly flashing on the silicon innards of a computer, yet the piece is entirely unplugged. It explores ways of recreating the precision of electronica through the instruments alone.”

For the next piece, featured guest pianist Stewart Goodyear joins Mitchell and the orchestra to interpret George Gershwin’s iconic “Rhapsody in Blue,” as part of the 2024 global celebration of the work’s centenary.

Mitchell is thrilled in his position. He said he feels it was made for him — but he doesn’t take it for granted.

“Any job is great,” he said. “We’re all happy to have any job in 2024. In addition to having the utmost respect for the orchestra, we hit it off right away. We had great chemistry. I equate it to dating: it takes the right guy and the right girl. The lack of chemistry is not indicative of the orchestra.”

He also has served as artistic director and conductor of Oregon’s Sunriver Music Festival since August 2022.

From 2017 to 2021, Mitchell served as music director of the Colorado Symphony in Denver; he previously served as music director designate during the 2016-17 season.

During his five-season tenure, he is credited with deepening the orchestra’s engagement with its audience via in-depth demonstrations from both the podium and the piano.

He also expanded the orchestra’s commitment to contemporary American repertoire — with a particular focus on the music of Mason Bates, Missy Mazzoli, and Kevin Puts — through world premieres, recording projects, and commissions.

In addition, Mitchell spearheaded collaborations with local partners as Colorado Ballet, Denver Young Artists Orchestra, and El Sistema Colorado.

From 2013 to 2017, Mitchell served on the conducting staff of The Cleveland Orchestra. He joined the orchestra as assistant conductor in 2013, and was promoted to associate conductor in 2015, becoming the first person to hold that title in over three decades and only the fifth in the orchestra’s 100-year history. In these roles, he led the orchestra in several dozen concerts each season at Severance Hall, Blossom Music Center, and on tour.

From 2007 to 2011, Mitchell led over 100 performances as Assistant Conductor of the Houston Symphony. He also held Assistant Conductor posts with the Orchestre National de France, where he worked under Kurt Masur from 2006 to 2009, and the Castleton Festival, where he worked under Lorin Maazel in 2009 and 2010.

In 2015, Mitchell completed a highly successful five-year appointment as music director of the Saginaw Bay Symphony Orchestra, where an increased focus on locally relevant programming and community collaborations resulted in record attendance throughout his tenure.

In addition to his work with professional orchestras, Mitchell is also well known for his affinity for working with and mentoring young musicians aspiring to be professional orchestral players.

His tenure as music director of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra from 2013 to 2017 was highly praised and included a four-city tour of China in June 2015, marking the orchestra’s second international tour and its first to Asia. Mitchell is regularly invited to work with the talented young musicians at this country’s high-level training programs, such as the Cleveland Institute of Music, the National Repertory Orchestra, Texas Music Festival, Sarasota Music Festival and Interlochen Center for the Arts. He has also served on the faculties of the schools of music at Northern Illinois University (2005-07), the University of Houston (2012-13) and the University of Denver (2019). During the 2022-23 academic year, Mitchell will again serve as adjunct professor of music at the University of Denver, acting as interim director of orchestras and professor of conducting.

Born in Seattle in 1979, Mitchell earned degrees in conducting from the University of Texas at Austin and composition from Western Washington University, which selected him as its Young Alumnus of the Year in 2014. He also studied with Leonard Slatkin at the National Conducting Institut and was selected by Kurt Masur as a recipient of the inaugural American Friends of the Mendelssohn Foundation Scholarship in 2008. Mitchell was also one of five recipients of the League of American Orchestras’ American Conducting Fellowship from 2007 to 2010.

To read the complete story, please click here, or read the full digital edition here.

Feature: ‘Brett Mitchell Is Listening’

PASADENA — Local News Pasadena has published a feature about Brett Mitchell following his appointment as Music Director of the Pasadena Symphony. Mr. Mitchell spoke extensively with veteran journalist Victoria Thomas for this piece, excerpted here in part:

Smells like teen spirit

[Mitchell] describes his new role [as Music Director of the Pasadena Symphony] this way: “My job is to serve the music, the musicians, and the community.”

A Seattle native who grew up down the street from Kurt Cobain and now a resident of Denver, Colorado, Mitchell grew up loving grunge as well as John Williams’ iconic “Star Wars” and “Superman” scores. He cites Barry Manilow as a musical guilty pleasure “…because Manilow is a consummate entertainer and showman. He genuinely connects with everyone in the audience. It’s real, and the people know it’s real, and my passion is to do the same with classical music as well as other genres,” Desi Arnaz-Copacabana ruffles optional. He recounts an evening in 2018 in Denver’s spectacular open-air Red Rocks amphitheater where he shared the stage with Yo-Yo Ma, saying, “He held those 9,000 people rapt. They were as attentive and silent 90 minutes into the program as they were 90 seconds in. Don’t ever underestimate the power of music.”

“The great thing about the Pasadena Symphony is that we’re working with the world’s A-grade, first-call studio musicians who can play everything and anything. They’re professional chameleons, so a specific focus of mine is to showcase the breadth of the team,” says Mitchell.

“This is one of the key differences between pop and classical performance. Pop music is the domain of an individual persona. Billy Joel always sounds like Billy Joel and people love the brand. But classical players need to be at ease in many different costumes. Debussy should not sound like Beethoven.”

On the subject of ego, he makes the distinction between hubris and authority. “Yes, it absolutely takes confidence to take the podium and lead. Without ego, we’d never get off the couch, much less get from the couch to the podium. But if a person’s surety arises from some innate sense of superiority or entitlement or ‘deserving to be here,’ there will be problems. In my case, I feel confident because I know I’ve done the work and that I continue to do it with passion and fervor. I am always gobbling up information, and I learn as much or maybe even more than I teach. Doing the work in this sense begins with respect for the audience, as well as the virtuosity of the musicians, and consists essentially of listening – active listening – seeing how the artists and the audience respond to certain things.”

So Wolfie, Ludvig Van and Antonio V. walk into a bar…

As he moves into position to lead the 2024-2025 season, Mitchell recounts receiving invaluable advice from none other than Ara Guzelimian, current Artistic Director of the Ojai Music Festival and former Dean and Provost of The Julliard School, who previously served as Artistic Advisor and Senior Director for Carnegie Hall.

“On the subject of programming and how to build a compelling program that will bring the folks to the hall, Ara told me to picture three pieces of music as entities sidling up to a bar. Would the three have anything to say to each other? If the pieces are too similar, there isn’t much excitement, although you’d have something very harmonious. If the pieces are radically different, that can be interesting, but it might be difficult to find common ground.”  For the approaching season, Mitchell promises a “varied diet” of music, pulling from a broad spectrum and a broadening palette.

In addition to overseeing all artistic aspects of the Pasadena Symphony, Mitchell will collaborate on the orchestra’s highly regarded community and education programs, including the Pasadena Youth Symphony Orchestras, which encompass eleven award-winning ensembles serving students of all musical abilities in grades 5-12.      

On the subject of relating to kids, he says, “I grew up listening to the pop music of my parents’ generation, then I listened to Nirvana and Pearl Jam, and then I listened to Beethoven. That’s when I began to understand what music actually is. It’s all emotion. In listening to Beethoven, I felt that the artist was someone having a hard time with something. As an artist, he was able to articulate it without words, and hearing that makes the rest of us feel less alone.”

Brett Mitchell will lead the majority of his concerts as Music Director of the Pasadena Symphony at the orchestra’s home of the Ambassador Auditorium, often referred to as the “Carnegie Hall of the West.”

Orchestrating a Graceful Future

Andrew Brown accepted the role of Chief Executive Officer of the Pasadena Symphony and POPS. He manages the Pasadena Symphony, the Pasadena POPS, under the direction of Principal Pops Conductor Michael Feinstein, and the Pasadena Youth Symphony Orchestras (PYSO), serving over 800 students in the San Gabriel Valley.

We spoke with Brown this week, who commented, “After a few years without a music director, we are honored and delighted to welcome Brett as our partner in building out our ensemble. His resume is superb, but beyond that, he’s both creative and pragmatic, and he brings planning, leadership, and organizational intelligence to the role in addition to his impeccable musical credentials.”

Brown says that Mitchell’s arrival brings with it a new sense of opportunity, as well as challenge. “We’ve relied for so long on the subscription model, but all of that was disrupted by the pandemic. There’s no denying the fact that thanks to digital technology, we can all enjoy incredible music while sitting at home in our pajamas, and of course, people got comfortable doing that for a few years of COVID-19. But now we’re inviting people to come back out into the world for an immersive musical experience, even if it’s only a couple of times a year. In the presence of live performance before a live audience, there’s a momentum, those goosebumps that you really can’t replicate any other way.”

To read the complete feature, ‘Brett Mitchell Is Listening,’ please click here.

Brett Mitchell marks milestone anniversary of conducting debut with multimedia release

Brett Mitchell with the combined bands at Lynnwood High School after his conducting debut on October 12, 1995.

LYNNWOOD, Wash. - Brett Mitchell made his conducting debut 25 years ago today on October 12, 1995.

As a 16-year-old junior at Lynnwood High School in a northern suburb of Seattle, Mr. Mitchell created and then conducted the premiere performance of an arrangement of Bruce Healey’s music from Fantasmic!, a nighttime show at Disneyland and Walt Disney World that premiered in 1992.

Watch Lesley Moffat, Director of Bands and Orchestra at Lynnwood High School from 1992 to 2002, introduce Mr. Mitchell’s debut:

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The Performance

For the first time ever, to commemorate this anniversary, Mr. Mitchell is releasing complete footage of his debut:

Capturing the Moment

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Mitchell’s writer’s notebook from 1995-96

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The journal entry describing Mitchell’s conducting debut

Mr. Mitchell captured the experience of his debut several days later in his writer’s notebook:

As all three bands set up together, I waited backstage. After a while, I had to go sit down on the stairs because my knees were shaking so badly! Then Mrs. Moffat introduced me: “Never in 8 years of teaching have I asked a student to conduct, but because your students have done their jobs and Brett is so capable, I’m very proud to turn the baton over to our own arranger, Brett Mitchell.”

When I walked onstage, everybody—even the band—was clapping. WOW! Then I went over to the left side of the podium, just like we rehearsed, and stood there until everybody (the band) was watching. Then I stepped up onto the podium, lifted my arms, and gave the pickup. Everything after that (not to give a cliché) was a blur… I gave the last note and held my arms up. As soon as my arms went down, the whole audience started applauding. I motioned for the band to stand up, and when I turned around to bow, the whole audience was standing!! A standing ovation! Man. Mrs. Moffat was crying and came to give me a hug… I won’t ever forget that.

Interview with Lesley Moffat (2020)

Nearly 30 years after becoming her student in 7th grade band, Mr. Mitchell recently sat down for a Zoom conversation with Mrs. Moffat, who was his band director at both Alderwood Middle School (1991-92) and Lynnwood High School (1993-97). In the conversation below, they discuss Mr. Mitchell’s 1995 conducting debut, Mrs. Moffat’s three-plus decades as an educator, and what music education looks like in times of COVID.

Brett Mitchell interviews Lesley Moffat, his middle and high school band director in the 1990s.

Meeting Bruce Healey

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Bruce Healey and Brett Mitchell in Hollywood, CA (Sep 2019)

Nearly 25 years after arranging Fantasmic!, Mr. Mitchell met composer Bruce Healey—now retired from Disney—while in Southern California for his debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl in September 2019.

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A manuscript folio of Fantasmic! autographed by composer Bruce Healey

Feature: 'Brett Mitchell on Sharing His Passion for New Music with Broad Audiences'

Photo by Jeff Nelson

Brett Mitchell is the featured guest in the latest issue of The Muse in Music, an online interview series about new music hosted by composer Daniel Perttu. Over the course of the interview, Mr. Mitchell discussed his passion for working with living composers, how he brings contemporary music to the Denver audience as Music Director of the Colorado Symphony, and how he serves as an advocate for new music.

On his passion for working with living composers:

I became a conductor of contemporary music because I was a composer before I was a conductor. Actually, my undergraduate degree is in composition, and I started conducting out of necessity because I was writing pieces for larger forces…. It was really my fellow student composers who said, “I've written a bigger piece; now maybe I'll have Brett conduct it,” so I really started by conducting contemporary music, brand-new, fresh world premieres. This was what I did at the beginning of my conducting career, and it wasn't really until I was twenty when I first conducted something that hadn't literally just come out of the printer. I guess I conducted other small things in high school, but it was the Mozart Oboe Concerto that was the first big piece that I ever conducted that wasn't by a living composer. I say all of that to point out that for me, the baseline where I started was conducting contemporary music. It didn't really have anything to do at that point with delving into the past and interpreting the works of these great masters. That certainly came in time, but that's not how I got started in my career….

The joy of bringing music to life for me is to do the composer's music justice. I am really there first and foremost, in my opinion, to serve one person, and that's the composer, and then certainly the orchestra, and then I serve the audience. But, it's really all about the composer because if the composer hadn’t written any of these notes, none of us would have anything to do with our lives. So that's really why I love it as much as I do, and, ultimately, why I do it.

On how he brings contemporary music to the Denver audience:

For me, presenting new music is all about the context in which one presents it. I mean context is key. So, I'll give you a perfect example of my very first subscription concerts, where I saw this back in September 2017. I knew that I wanted to do Beethoven Five on that program because that was the first full symphony that I ever conducted. And then I thought, how do I work some contemporary American music into this program, so that from the very outset I am setting this audience up to know when they come visit us in the concert hall what they're going to get. Yes, of course they will hear the greatest classical masterpieces, but they will also hear music that's being written by our friends and our neighbors, our compatriots, because I think that while those great classic pieces from centuries ago stick around for obvious reasons, and they have, in many ways, universal things to say, composers writing today are writing specifically for today’s audience. In that first contact point that I had with our subscription audience, I wanted to set that expectation up. So, I looked at Beethoven Five, and I thought, what are the two things that make Beethoven Five tick? And one of them, for me, is the journey from darkness into light, starting with the C minor and ending with that glorious celebratory C major. So I thought, what would be a kind of contemporary American corollary to that idea of trial. I'm very good friends with Kevin Puts, and have been, for -- God, it's almost twenty years now, which is terrifying. Kevin has a wonderful piece called Millennium Canons that I've done quite frequently. We opened our concert with this great celebratory fanfare, which is a perfect way to open a concert, and a perfect way, as far as I'm concerned, to start a music directorship. It also shows the audience, because of the kind of language that Kevin uses as he writes, that just because you may not know a name or two of these living composers, I promise, I'm never going to throw anything your way that's going to make you wish that you had stayed home with a glass of wine tonight.

So that was item one. Item two in the Beethoven that makes it tick is that kind of insistent rhythmic drive. Of course, that applies mostly to the first movement, but I was thinking of what contemporary American case might be a good corollary to that. The first thing I think of when I think of contemporary American music even more than John Adams is Mason Bates, because of the amount of electronica that he includes in his pieces. We did a piece that he wrote called The B-Sides for Orchestra and Electronica. We had Mason come out and play the electronica part. So, the audience had some interaction with him, and I came out and I played Millennium Canons with the orchestra and Kevin’s piece. I welcomed the audience and introduced Mason; Mason came out; and we chatted for two or three minutes on stage before we played the piece. So again, as I say, context is key, and I think putting the audience in as direct contact as possible with these composers, seeing that these are real people writing music today, it's not some abstract thing. It works best when you approach it from multiple angles: explaining to the audience that yes, we're playing contemporary music, explaining why are we playing contemporary music, and why did these pieces go together….

So, there has to be some kind of link, and you have to be willing and able to share that link with your audience, so I do an awful lot of speaking from the podium to our audience, and almost always it's to prepare them for the contemporary piece that we're about to hear. I try to give a little bit of context, a little bit of background, a little bit of history in the programmatic piece, what is it actually about. I find it's much more helpful for the audience to hear things like that before a contemporary piece, more than even, you know, an old programmatic work like the Symphonie fantastique or whatever. I mean, not that there's not plenty to talk about with Symphonie fantastique, but it's such a known quantity, I mean it’s now 190 years old.

But that's not the case with contemporary music. So, it's really about letting the audience in and making sure that you're programming intelligently, that you're finding those links, that if they were all to sidle up next to each other at a bar, they'd have something to talk about. And then sharing that with the audience. Honestly, I think that conductors aren’t always good at that. We tend to be good at programming, because that's what we do for a living; we come up with these great programs that have all these great links and intricate interrelationships. We go to all that trouble, but then many of us don't even bother to talk to the audience. We came up with this great idea and then we say, no, we're just going to play these three pieces and not tell them why you would play those pieces together. And I think that's more than half the battle right there.

On how he serves as an advocate for new music:

When you have the priorities that I have, which are: how do you show an audience that the music of Beethoven and the music of Bates are not so different, that it's all part of a continuum, those are the kinds of programs that I enjoy conducting the most. When I'm able to do contemporary music on programs, I always feel like those are the kind of healthiest and most intriguing programs that we do…. I suppose it would be easy to throw your hands up after a while, and it would certainly be easier on my time management if I didn't bother programming contemporary music all the time, and just kept programming Beethoven and Brahms symphonies and all, but I didn't get into conducting because I wanted to conduct Brahms symphonies, I got into conducting because I was conducting contemporary music. I didn't even think of it as contemporary music. I mean, it was just music.

To read the complete interview, please click here.

Feature: Brett Mitchell in Denver Life Magazine's 'On His Radar'

DENVER — Denver Life Magazine has featured Brett Mitchell in its March 2020 issue as the subject of a recurring arts feature called On His Radar, a segment in which prominent Denverites share what they’re reading, seeing, and listening to.

Courtesy Alive Coverage

Music

I did not grow up playing Mozart since I was a fetus. I grew up in Seattle in the ‘90s, with Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden. When Billy Joel, one of my all-time favorites, was at Coors Field last summer, we splurged on fifth-row tickets. We also enjoy going to Dazzle for jazz. Because it’s what I do all day, very seldom do I ever listen to classical music for enjoyment.

Books

I just read The Book of Joy, by the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, which was beautiful. I read a lot of leadership books and have found the best tend to be written by former coaches and players. My latest read was Bill Russell’s Russell Rules. I have coming up Eleven Rings by Phil Jackson and Bill Walsh’s The Score Takes Care of Itself.

Photo by Julieta Cervantes

Theater

I’m the oldest of three boys, and at Christmas the middle brother decided instead of getting presents he wanted to take us to do something. We went to Seattle’s Fifth Avenue theater and saw the out-of-town tryout of Mrs. Doubtfire. In June we’re going to see The Book of Mormon at the Ellie. And we went to Colorado Springs to see The Sound of Music with a friend of ours playing Captain Von Trapp.

TV/Movies

We don’t see too many movies in the theater. I’m a big Star Wars guy, so we did go see The Rise of Skywalker, not once but twice. We finished the new Star Wars TV series on Disney Plus, The Mandalorian, and finally watched Game of Thrones all the way through. We’re now on Stranger Things and the next two on the docket are Arrested Development and The Handmaid’s Tale.

Courtesy Princeton University Art Museum/Art Resource

Art

We saw the big Monet exhibit at the Denver Art Museum. I’m so glad it was a big success. Especially for those of us in the classical music world, we think of Monet as a visual impressionist, but we have impressionism in the music world: Debussy and Ravel are two musical impressionists. For someone spending his days with sonic impressionism, to spend some time with visual impressionism was so cool.

Feature: "The Colorado Symphony goes all-in on movie scores"

Brett Mitchell leads the Colorado Symphony in John Williams’s score for ‘Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back’ at the 1STBANK Center in Broomfield, CO in March 2019. (Photo by Brandon Marshall)

DENVER — The Denver Post has published a feature about the Colorado Symphony’s ever-expanding slate of live film score offerings, including an interview with Brett Mitchell, who leads several film projects with the orchestra each season:

The Colorado Symphony would have been crazy not to note the trend, if not fully embrace it, said music director Brett Mitchell.

“We have at least a half-dozen films in our 2019-2020 season, which is impressive for a classical-performance genre that didn’t even exist a decade ago,” said Mitchell, who conducted the March 23 “[The] Empire [Strikes Back]” show…

Brett Mitchell leads the Colorado Symphony in John Williams’s score for ‘Jurassic Park’ at Boettcher Concert Hall in Denver, CO in May 2018. (Photo by Brandon Marshall)

“I’ve probably done 20 to 25 films over the course of my career, but it’s totally different than learning a Mahler symphony or a Strauss tone poem,” Mitchell said. “In those projects, you have complete control. With film projects, your hands are tied. If you get a little behind, the movie’s not going to wait for you, so that’s why I spend about a month prepping for it.” …

Mitchell and his other conductors start with digital practice files that allow them to instantly remove dialogue, sound effects and the score as needed during the rehearsal process. The laser blasts, lightsabers and dialogue that the audience hears during a performance must perfectly match the timing of the musical performance, or else the symphony risks shattering the illusion of a cohesive, if obviously hybrid, cinematic experience.

It’s “a staggering amount of new music to learn and play,” as Colorado Symphony associate conductor Christopher Dragon told The Denver Post earlier this year… Mitchell similarly estimated that the score to “Empire” covered 80 percent of the film’s 2-hour, 7-minute runtime. That allows little break for the versatile players, who may be performing a different classical score or pop collaboration the very next day at a venue like Red Rocks Amphitheatre…

Brett Mitchell leads the Colorado Symphony in John Williams’s score for ‘Star Wars: A New Hope’ at the 1STBANK Center in Broomfield, CO in March 2018. (Photo by Brandon Marshall)

The symphony does not collect data on how many movie-score attendees eventually become subscribers. But without any exposure to orchestral music, those people stand no chance of becoming a patron. And the natural marriage of film and music — Mitchell cited movies such as 1940’s “Fantasia” and the 1977 “Star Wars” as formative experiences in his lifelong pursuit of classical music — makes the decision to embrace these hybrids that much easier…

“Scores for series like ‘Star Wars’ are this generation’s Ring Cycle,” Mitchell said, referring to Wagner’s acclaimed, oft-performed orchestral standard. “John Williams has spent literally half of his long life creating music for these films, including the ninth episode coming out in December. They’re grand, romantic, artistic statements. And we’re just getting started here, because we’re moving on to ‘Return of the Jedi’ next.”

To read the complete article, please click here.

Feature: Brett Mitchell discusses Gershwin's Concerto in F

Brett Mitchell is featured in the latest issue of Notes from the Podium, a quarterly online periodical that publishes in-depth interviews with conductors from all over the world and all areas of the profession.

This all-American issue comprises in-depth interviews with three eminent conductors…

Following [Leonard Slatkin] is a conductor he mentored: the brilliant Brett Mitchell, Music Director of the Colorado Symphony. Mitchell suggested discussing Gershwin’s Concerto in F - a piece he knows very well and recently conducted with the soloist Joyce Yang. This is the first concerto that Notes from the Podium has covered, and Mitchell’s vast knowledge and infectious enthusiasm will whet your appetite for this work, one that is certainly underperformed over here in Europe.

To read the complete interview, please click here (subscription required).

Colorado Symphony conductors come together for panel at Brett Mitchell Society breakfast

Colorado Symphony Music Director Brett Mitchell joined with Assistant Conductor Bertie Baigent (L) and Associate Conductor Christopher Dragon (R) for a wide-ranging discussion on life, music, and more. (Photo by Brandon Marshall)

From the Colorado Symphony Blog:

On December 9, 2018, members of the Brett Mitchell Society gathered at Denver’s historic Dazzle Jazz Club for an intimate discussion with Associate Conductor Christopher Dragon, Assistant Conductor Bertie Baigent, and of course, Music Director Brett Mitchell himself.

A wide-ranging conversation ensued covering topics from favorite books to musical idols, what pieces they would most like to conduct, what drew them to conducting, impactful advice they’ve received, and what separates the Colorado Symphony from other orchestras around the world.

“I noticed immediately during my audition that it felt very welcoming and I felt very much at home, there was a real sense of generosity and warmth from this orchestra,” said Baigent.

“This is my fourth season with the Colorado Symphony and leaving family and friends from Australia was difficult, so coming to an orchestra that is so accepting and supportive was incredible. It truly feels like a family here with the Colorado Symphony,” said Dragon.

That culture is fostered by Mitchell, who shared his favorite piece of advice with the assembled crowd.

"No whining, No complaining, No excuses."

When asked where that particular piece of advice came from, the Seattle native quipped, "Seattle Seahawks Head Coach Pete Carroll," providing some good-natured ribbing and one of many lighthearted moments to the proceedings.

To read the complete article, please click here.

Feature: Colorado Symphony Spotlight | Brett Mitchell interview

DENVER — At the outset of his second season as Music Director of the Colorado Symphony, Brett Mitchell sits down to reflect on his first season, and to explore the exciting projects he and the orchestra have planned during their 2018-19 season. Watch the complete video above, or click here to view it on YouTube.

Feature: 'Words of wisdom from Brett Mitchell'

GREELEY, CO — Brett Mitchell addressed the students and faculty of the University of Northern Colorado School of Music to kick off their 2018-19 school year on Monday, August 27. During the Q&A following his leadership talk, Conducting Business: Lessons from the Podium, Mr. Mitchell responded to a question by sharing his thoughts on why he does what he does.

Feature: 'Why Bernstein Still Matters: A Conversation With The Colorado Symphony's Brett Mitchell'

Brett Mitchell visits the Colorado Public Radio studios to discuss the life and music of Leonard Bernstein. (Photo by Nick Dobreff)

DENVER — In advance of Leonard Bernstein's centennial celebrations on Saturday, Brett Mitchell sat down with David Ginder in the Colorado Public Radio Performance Studio to explore some of the highlights of Bernstein's career, and why his music will endure.

"He gave us permission to be American and to love the music that we loved, and to not have to apologize for it. I think that's his great legacy," Mitchell said.

Watch the conversation in the video below, or read the article from Colorado Public Radio: "Why Bernstein Still Matters: A Conversation With The Colorado Symphony's Brett Mitchell."

Brett Mitchell appears with Yo-Yo Ma at Red Rocks

Brett Mitchell, Isaac Slade (lead singer of The Fray), Yo-Yo Ma, and El Sistema Colorado pose for a group photo after a rehearsal at Red Rocks Amphitheater in Morrison, CO. (Photo by Amanda Tipton)

MORRISON, CO — After Yo-Yo Ma's performance of Bach's Cello Suites at Red Rocks Amphitheater on Wednesday, August 1, Brett Mitchell, Isaac Slade (lead singer of The Fray) and the young musicians of El Sistema Colorado joined Mr. Ma onstage for a surprise encore of Bach's Air on a G String.

From Colorado Public Radio:

"And then the encore. In my life outside of radio, I lead the board of a small nonprofit called El Sistema Colorado that provides access to music for kids in underserved communities. Three weeks ago Yo-Yo Ma's office called to invite them to play onstage with him. They played with poise and heart! Brett Mitchell, Colorado Symphony Music Director conducted Bach's Air on a G String. A night to remember indeed."

To read more, please click here. 

Brett Mitchell greets Yo-Yo Ma at Red Rocks Amphitheater in Morrison, CO. (Photo by Amanda Tipton)

Brett Mitchell leads Yo-Yo Ma and El Sistema Colorado in a rehearsal of Bach's Air on a G String at Red Rocks Amphitheater in Morrison, CO. (Photo by Amanda Tipton)

Brett Mitchell leads Yo-Yo Ma and El Sistema Colorado in of Bach's Air on a G String at Red Rocks Amphitheater in Morrison, CO. (Photo by Jose Mena)

Video: 'The Colorado Symphony: A Cultural Catalyst in Denver'

DENVER — Colorado Symphony Music Director Brett Mitchell appears in a new video about the orchestra's longtime role as a cultural catalyst in Denver, contributing to its unique history and culture. Watch the video above.

Feature: 'Drinks with Brett Mitchell, Music Director of the Colorado Symphony'

DENVER — Denver Style Magazine has published an off-the-podium feature about Brett Mitchell during his first season as Music Director of the Colorado Symphony.

Photo by Noah Berg

The Colorado Symphony has been going through a bit of a rebirth recently.... At the helm of this rebirth now is music director Brett Mitchell, who began his tenure in September of 2017. New to Denver, Brett’s led the Cleveland and Houston symphonies prior to heading west and landing in Denver. Brett met us at the new FNG to share more about his off-stage persona.

What’s the one item you regret throwing away or not buying?
I had a little bit of an “Eat Pray Love” moment right after I turned 30 when I decided to take a trip to Japan alone. I’m a big Superman fan, and brought three designs of the S-Shield with the intent of getting it tattooed on my left delt, but never followed through. Would have been a great commemoration of my trip, and I’ve regretted not getting it ever since.

What are you always telling yourself?
Go to bed! I’m a night owl and a workaholic, but I always try to get at least 7 hours of sleep a night. That’s tricky, because I also have a rule that I have to be up at least 3 hours before I’m in front of anyone - anything less than that, and I’m just not quite at 100%.

Photo by Noah Berg

What is your not so secret indulgence?
My dad bought me a watch when I was 7 years old to commemorate a special occasion, and I’ve been a diehard watch guy ever since. As I’ve advanced in my career, I’ve been able to buy increasingly nicer watches, partly because I spend way more time on Hodinkee than I probably should.

What do you wear that makes you feel the most confident?
BWM: There’s something about the ritual of suiting up before a concert and walking onstage wearing all black that I really love. People pay good money to come see the Colorado Symphony, and it’s not enough for us to sound good - we have to look good, too.

If you had more time, what would you do with it?
Three things: 1) Run for office. 2) Act. 3) Read more.

Feature: "The new face of the Colorado Symphony"

DENVER — Next with Kyle Clark, the 6 p.m. newscast from Denver's NBC affiliate, has produced a profile of Brett Mitchell as he continues into the second half of his inaugural season as Music Director of the Colorado Symphony.

To watch the profile as it appeared on the live broadcast, please visit the story on 9NEWS's website: "The new face of the Colorado Symphony".

To watch an extended, unedited clip (12 min.), please click the video below.