New director takes the baton at Colonial Symphony
BY WILLA J. CONRAD Star-Ledger Staff
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Dare double-dare you to sit in a room with Paul Hostetter and fail to be energized. The conductor, who officially begins his tenure as the sixth music director of the 55-year-old Colonial Symphony in Morristown on Saturday, is the embodiment of enthusiasm.
Fixing you with his steady, blue-eyed stare, this 41-year-old son of an Air Force pilot and a professional pianist talks so fast, one pities his Montclair State University students who have to take class notes -- or who fail to be as organized as he is.
"My father liked the towels folded exactly the same way, and I guess that sense of order rubbed off," he says.
Luckily for local audiences, his father's repeated obligatory viewings of the movie "Top Gun" did not, though, inspire a life in the military. And so, Hostetter, with words tumbling out in rich counterpoint, can speak and focus on just one thing.
"I love music deep in my heart," says Hostetter, a Juilliard graduate who made his living as a freelance percussionist in Manhattan before forsaking drumsticks for the baton in the late '90s. "I loved it as a percussion player, and now as a conductor. I love to talk. Music needs an advocate in the community, and making music as accessible to as many as possible is part of what motivates me."
The subject of Hostetter's first pre-concert chat this weekend perhaps says it all: It's titled "How a Conductor Builds the Orchestra's Future."
"Every place I go, I'm about growth, including my own," says Hostetter, who, apart from a few master classes and an apprenticeship with James Levine and his assistant, Ken Noda, is essentially self-taught as a conductor.
While he made a good living as a percussionist in recording studios, freelancing on Broadway and doing occasional gigs with groups like the New York Philharmonic and the contemporary ensemble Sequitur, Hostetter felt a conductor has a better chance to communicate directly with the audience and musicians.
He spent four years at the New Jersey Youth Orchestra -- a happy alliance, he says -- and one at the High Mountain Symphony at William Paterson University, a not so happy match, he says, without elaborating.
It was there he met some of the musicians in the Colonial Symphony who play for both orchestras. "I owe it to the musicians I conduct to continue to push myself and my own knowledge and abilities," he says.
Hostetter won the Colonial Symphony post over 30 other candidates including the more experienced and more glamorous Gisele Ben-Dor. He is almost evangelical about his new job. "The Colonial Symphony is a perfect professional fit for me right now," he says, sliding two pieces of paper -- typewritten, single-spaced, crammed full of print -- across the table.
They are lists of all the community outreach events he's attended for the professional orchestra since being appointed last April. There are Rotary Club meetings and mini-music lectures, a Taste of Morristown and private fundraising events.
"I believe in a vision based on community partnerships," he says, rattling off examples like an upcoming collaboration with Morristown's Harmonium Choral Society for Mozart's Requiem (May 6), or asking Eric Hafen, artistic director of Morris Township's Bickford Theatre, to narrate a performance of Jon Deak's "Hyde and Jekyll" on Jan. 28.
"The ability to incorporate new works, to talk with new partners in the area -- it's all about cultural resources I'm trying to tap," says Hostetter.
For the Colonial Symphony, which trimmed its season to just four concerts during two leaderless years, Hostetter's tenure is a way to reinvigorate the old ensemble.
"He fit all the criteria," says Colonial's executive director Suzanne Samson. "We wanted a resident conductor. We also needed someone enthusiastic about audience development and fundraising, and Paul is extraordinary on this; he thrives on it.
"We polled the musicians, and they were totally enthusiastic for him. And we got a lot of positive audience response to his audition concert," says Samson.
Hostetter, who was hired by Montclair State as the music department's director of orchestral studies in 2004, says he is "a happy guy," split between two loves, professional orchestras and students. "It's extraordinarily important to me to work with young musicians," he says. Colonial Symphony, he hopes, will provide another kind of satisfaction.
"They are musicians who want to work hard and are talented," Hostetter says. "They're hungry for this sort of programming."
Four programs don't give a new conductor much real estate to work with, but Hostetter says he "kind of thought of it as if the audience and I were dating. The first concert is about dancing; the second about laughter and humor; the third about romance, and the final about love," he says.
This weekend's program of Respighi, Beethoven, Sibelius and Stravinsky traces dance rhythms and their influence on major composers.
"I want there to be an aural connection between pieces on a program so that it feels well blended," Hostetter says. "The days of programming an overture, concerto and symphony are gone."
There's another reason Hostetter prefers to work in one geographic area. Earlier this year, he married violist Elizabeth Schulze. The couple bought a house in Union, and they expect their first child in May.
"I'm not interested in being a conductor who flies all over the world. I have a child on the way, and they're only young once," he says.
More importantly, he now has a new podium from which to broadcast the gospel of music, according to Paul Hostetter.
"We live in uncertain times," Hostetter says. "People are looking for truth and beauty. Music has that, it's got the goods."
