Frankly Music’s maestro conducts a concluding concert

Frankly Music will complete its ninth season Monday evening, and for the first time founder Frank Almond will leave his violin in the case. Almond is an avid chamber musician; he plays, but not this time. He’s formed the Frankly Music Chamber Orchestra for the occasion and will conduct.

“I somehow convinced some of my MSO colleagues that it would be fun to play this concert, right after the weekend playing for the Florentine Opera and an runout concert in Green Bay,” Almond said, over coffee at Alterra at the Lake Friday. “So they get to rehearse with me Sunday morning and play a three-hour opera in the afternoon. And this will probably be the only time I’ll get to conduct the executive director and president of the Milwaukee Symphony.”

He referred to Mark Niehaus, who left the principal trumpet chair to lead the MSO’s business side in a surprise move last September. Niehaus is coming out of trumpet semi-retirement to play in Haydn’s Symphony No. 92 (“Oxford”) Monday night.

Almond reached outside the MSO to fill out the ranks, especially for the 30-piece Haydn symphony that will fill the second half. The first half is given to string music, Mendelssohn’s Sinfonia in B Minor and Dvořák’s Serenade, Opus 22.

“I’m hoping to do what most good conductors do – not get in the way of a good performance,” he said. “And this is a high-end group, they don’t really need me playing. It’s much more difficult to conduct weak musicians.”

Almond isn’t just hopping onto the podium on a whim.

“About 10 years ago, a tiny orchestra in Michigan called me to conduct,” he said. “I didn’t tell anyone here about it. But it was all strings, music I knew well, and it went pretty well. It’s snowballed a little, in terms of my interest and ability.”

He’s taken the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra Conducting Workshop as an observer a few years ago and, in the summer of 2012, as a participant. He has also sharpened his observation of the conducting and human engineering strategies of the MSO’s guest conductors.

“It’s very different than sitting in that (first) chair,” he said. “But that chair has given me the best possible education. I’ve learned something from the successful and from the less successful conductors. The way conductors get in front of us is still a mystery to me. There’s no rule book and no predicting. Sometimes we get guest conductors who are on the way up with all kinds of publicity behind them, and it just doesn’t work. It can sound fine, but something’s just missing. Sometimes we’ll get someone who seems to not belong there [in terms of credentials and experience] and we’ll connect. When you get up there with limited rehearsal, personalities and chemistry mean a lot.”

Almond expressed admiration for Francesco Lecce-Chong, the MSO’s young assistant conductor, who’s been entrusted with a heavy load and some major concerts this season.

“He’s a very young guy who’s been thrown into a cauldron and done very well,” Almond said. “He’s doing most of these works for the first time. He has a really good relationship with the orchestra, which makes a difference.”

Many conductors – most maybe most of them – are pianists by prior trade. They don’t necessarily know the repertoire from an orchestra player’s point of view. Almond does, and he believes that experience helps, first in practical terms. He’s already marked all the bowings in the string parts for the Monday concert, which saves a great deal of rehearsal time.

“I’ve played virtually everything I would ever conduct,” he said. “I probably know the Brahms symphonies better than some of the young conductors who come in. But that doesn’t mean I could get up there and do it.”

He’s content to stay within his range right now, and he feels very comfortable with Monday’s rep, all of which the Milwaukee Symphony is unlikely to perform. The Mendelssohn, Dvořák and Haydn selections wouldn’t be such great fits for Marcus Center Uihlein Hall, but they’re perfect for the lively acoustic and intimate setting of Schwan Concert Hall at Wisconsin Lutheran College.

“It’s a huge difference to be in a hall where you don’t have to work so hard [just to project the sound] and you can hear one another really well,” Almond said.

As for the rep:

• I discovered the Mendelssohn a few years ago. It’s youthful, from age 14 or 15, and it has some student-composer elements. It wasn’t published until the 1950s, and Mendelssohn seems to have suppressed it during his lifetime. But it’s like student math from Stephen Hawking – way past what you might expect. It’s in two movements, with virtuoso sturm und drang in the Allegro. For most people, it will be the first time playing it.”
• The Serenade is classic Dvořák, a masterpiece. It’s also early, sunny and upbeat. It’s a challenge, and you need musicians with a chamber-music sensibility.
• The symphony has all the elements of Haydn at the absolute apex late in his career. It’s very well crafted, and we have to honor and respect that. But this one happens to be fun to play, and it’s funny and witty. He does such things as displace the beat in the Minuet, writes in six-bar phrases – musical jokes that still sound fresh.

Rarely do orchestra players long ensconced in orchestras turn to conducting full-time. (MSO music director Edo de Waart, former principal oboist of the Concertgebouw, is such a case.) But Niehaus jumped from the trumpet section to business office; first chair to podium is a shorter trip. How far might Almond go with this?

“Well, it’s not as if everything else can stop and I can just conduct,” he said. “Today I’m studying scores, but Monday I’ll be working on the MSO concert coming up at the Basilica next weekend.”

And then there’s his teaching load at Northwestern, Frankly Music, wife and two daughters. Still…

“The honest answer is I don’t know,” he said. “If the opportunity comes along to develop conducting, I might be interested. But I can’t really plan that — I’m not from Finland.”

Concert Information: 7 p.m. Monday, May 13, Wisconsin Lutheran College Schwan Concert Hall, 8815 W. Wisconsin Ave., Wauwatosa. For tickets, order online or call the WLC box office, 414 443-8802.