shiv shankar	08-02-2008
Percussionist Brian Prechtl sat down for an interview with Associate Conductor of the BSO, Andrew Constantine. Here are some of his reflections on what it’s like to be on the conducting staff: B It must be difficult to have nothing to do on the podium and then suddenly being responsible for two programs in one week. What is that like? It is very challenging. It means that I come to work with the best part of 30 scores. I have to think about not only the two programs I am responsible for this week, but next week as well. Besides having a run-out to Wye Mills and some education concerts next week, I have to dash off to Syracuse to do a Messiah at the end of it all. It sounds like you are busy. What else do you have going outside of the BSO as far as conducting? Besides the Messiah in Syracuse next week, I will be going back to England in January for a concert with the Bardi Orchestra. This is an orchestra that I was affiliated with before I came to Baltimore. Ilya Finkelshtyn, the BSO’s Principal Cellist, will accompany me to play the Dvorak Concerto. We’ll also perform Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. While in the UK I will speak to the NESTA foundation, which gave me a fellowship – a pile of money to pursue my conducting career path. At the moment I am using it to commission new works. The speech will be about the business of making music in the US and is aimed at industry specialists that direct conservatories. Can you give us a snapshot of what differences you see between the orchestral music business in the US compared to the UK? Somebody on the outside can’t see the enormity of what goes on in an organization like the BSO. In the US there is more of an “institution” as the norm than in the UK. Here at the BSO we see ourselves as a resident orchestra serving a constituent community that is almost like a congregation if you like – committed and loyal and who have expressed that over many years of support. In the UK there’s very little of a regular audience. They exist in pockets like Manchester or Birmingham but in London you never know who is in the orchestra. In the UK orchestras there is much more of a feeling of a self-run orchestra in terms of management. We don’t have anywhere near the kind of support staff that you have here in the US. There is good and bad in that of course. What part of this job do you find the most challenging? The most challenging aspect is the job of getting everybody to recognize that the role of education in a symphony orchestra is paramount to our future success. Something that has occurred to me is that if you try to pick up an audience after they’ve gone past their formative years the task is enormous compared to what you net. In the US American football is huge, but as a Brit I can’t make heads or tails of it. However, if you put a rugby or a soccer game on I’ll sit there for hours because it was part of my beginnings. It’s just because that seed was planted in me as a small boy and we need to learn from that. We can’t leave the task of planting that seed until too late. What part do you find the most tedious? That would be sitting on my backside not doing anything but ostensibly being ready to jump up in a flash to replace any ailing maestro. What is the most rewarding part of the job? What’s rewarding is to get to the end of a project and find how the orchestra invariably rises to the task of anything put in front of it. This orchestra never settles for playing blandly or presenting anything second rate. Where do you see yourself making the biggest difference, artistically here in the community of Baltimore? Because we are on the crest of a wave after the extremely successful presentation of “The Mystery Express” for the recent Music For Youth concerts, I can’t help but focus on that. If there is any kind of legacy that we (myself and those dedicated to education) will leave, it is that we have furthered the role of education here at the BSO at a time when some might challenge its economic place in the organization. We’ve managed to show that it is possible to generate something from within the orchestra that is valuable and worthy of widespread recognition. This continues the tradition of 80 years of music education in the Baltimore Community.
Speaking Engagement	09-30-2005
Andrew Constantine, BSO Associate Conductor, spoke to a sold out audience at our recent luncheon. Joined by Kathy Snyder of the Maryland Chamber, Terry Neimeyer, Chairman of the Board of the Maryland Chamber, Emily Rothberg of Deloitte, our luncheon sponsor, and Jack Hollerbach, Chairman of the BSO Business Partners and President of HarVest Bank.
Washington Post Interview about the new Music Center at Strathmore	02-08-2005
"Strathmore has been wonderfully tuned and designed by Larry Kirkegaard and his colleagues," says BSO assistant conductor Andrew Constantine, who helmed several "tuning" concerts for those who built Strathmore and their families and has conducted concerts in many European and American halls. "It offers a much more detailed picture for the conductor than many other halls I have been in," says Constantine from a tour stop in England. "Listening on stage is very often the worst place to be for the conductor and the orchestral musician. Many times you get a complaint of one section not being able to hear another, and Strathmore offers the wonderful picture of people being able to hear each other intimately. And we are not drowned by the modern-day tendency of the brass being by design louder than their colleagues in the wind and string section. Here we are able to deal with that problem and create a truer picture of the music we are trying to play, 19th-century symphonies, for instance, that are the mainstay of the orchestral repertoire and are very often heard in a totally different perspective from the one they were intended to be heard in." At rehearsals, Constantine went into the hall to listen at different levels and was impressed with its intimacy. "You could hear absolutely everything at the top of the hall with the same sort of coloration and detail as down at the bottom of the hall," he reports. "You could even hear what the conductor was saying to the orchestra, and I found that incredible."
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