Michael Repper
Valentina Peleggi
Michael Repper
// A Boy with Great Reach
Valentina Peleggi
// A Conductor in Overdrive
Valentina Peleggi met Marin Alsop in 2014 when, a student at the Royal Academy in London, she was invited to participate in the Inverno Campos do Jordao Festival in Brazil, an event Peleggi describes as“ the Tanglewood of South America.”
“ I was stunned,” says Peleggi, a native of Italy.“ I had heard about her but never met her.” At that first encounter, the young conductor recalls,“ I asked her so many questions I think she thought I was crazy. She said don’ t rebound. I asked what that was, and she explained it, and I asked why, why, why? I was so interested in learning from her.”
Knowing that her time with Alsop was limited, Peleggi stayed up nearly all night practicing to keep her movements aligned with the music, to not recoil or disconnect from the sound. The next day, Alsop expressed amazement at her progress, Peleggi says.
For her part, Peleggi felt that she had found the teacher she’ d sought. " I finally felt that I had a teacher. I’ d finally found someone who wanted to give me something important. I felt supported and understood as never before,” she says.
As it turned out, their time was anything but limited. Peleggi won the opportunity to conduct with the São Paulo Orchestra( OSESP), where Alsop is music director. Peleggi opened that program by conducting Joan Tower’ s Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman.
As Peleggi was preparing to head back to London, the artistic director approached her and asked her to stay on.“ The next conductor had a complication with a visa,” Peleggi says.“ I had to learn the program for three subscription concerts in one day!”
In 2016, Peleggi was invited to be assistant conductor of OSESP. At the same time, she became a Taki Concordia fellow, working closely with Alsop. She conducted Capriccio espagnol by Rimsky-Korsakov with the BSO in January.
Peleggi recalls her first time standing in front of the BSO.“ It was like WOW. It was like driving a Ferrari,” she says. Though Peleggi concedes that she’ s never actually driven the iconic sports car from her homeland, she now knows just what it would feel like.
Michael Repper met Marin Alsop when he was participating in the pilot of a TV show for HBO about young musicians. The producer, Leslie Stifelman, told him that her friend, Marin Alsop, was conducting Bernstein’ s Mass at the Hollywood Bowl,“ and I think you should go and meet her,” Stifelman told him. Repper, a 14-year-old student at a Los Angeles arts academy who was interested in becoming a conductor, went with his grandmother to see Alsop conduct at a rehearsal, and then visited her backstage.“ She invited us into her dressing room,” Repper says.
Alsop also invited him to observe a conducting workshop she was leading at the Cabrillo Festival.
He remembers watching Alsop work with a conducting student there.“ She was trying to get the student to do something,” says Repper. Finally, she stepped up to the podium to demonstrate.“ The exact same musicians, the same room, the same music,” Repper marvels.“ Four seconds later, it was an entirely different sound.” What made it different?“ It was more unified. The phrasing was much more calculated; it was just more musical,” he recalls.
At the end of the conducting session, the young observer was given the chance to stand in front of the orchestra himself, and Alsop seemed to like what she saw.“ She came over and said she wanted to work with me,” says Repper, who now, a dozen years later, seems to remain astonished by this turn of events.
Since then, Repper has studied at Peabody with Gustav Meier and Alsop, and was the Peabody-BSO Conducting Fellow for two seasons. He is currently assistant conductor for Concert Artists of Baltimore and music director of Virginia’ s Northern Neck Orchestra. In 2017, he becomes music director of the New York Youth Symphony, whose alumni include Alsop, a violinist with the group in the 1970s.
Alsop’ s tutelage inspired Repper to“ pay it forward,” by working with young people, he says.“ It’ s her mission to support the next generation of musicians and conductors.”
As a mentor, Alsop counsels the six-foot tall 26-year-old to“ do only what I need to do, no more, no less,” says Repper.“ She’ s always telling me that I’ m conducting too much.” He observes that his mentor“ uses her body very efficiently; every movement is extremely calculated,” while Repper with his self-described“ giant wingspan” has to work to tighten his form.
Repper remains friends with Stifelman, a conductor herself, who is currently musical director of Chicago on Broadway. The HBO program morphed into a documentary called“ The Music in Me,” which aired in 2006, but Repper did not appear in the final cut. By then, he says,“ I’ d grown a foot and my voice had dropped.”
March – APRIL 2017 | Overture 11