Nicole Paiement
Nicole Paiement
Between show cancelations, travel restrictions, and venues remaining closed, COVID-19 has been especially unkind to the arts. But some groups, like the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, have found a way to play again, slowly ramping up performances at Will Rogers Memorial Auditorium.
This weekend, the orchestra will welcome guest conductor Nicole Paiement, who'll lead a performance of Copland's suite from "Appalachian Spring" and Stravinsky's Suite from "Pulcinella." Calling from San Francisco, where she serves as artistic director of Opera Parallèle, she chatted with Fort Worth Magazine about COVID-19's impact on live performance.
FW: How many performances have you had since we've all come out of lockdown?
NP: Well, to be honest, very little. My last conducting engagement was with the Montreal opera last February, where I conducted George Benjamin's opera, "Written on Skin," which is an amazing piece.
But since then, when I came back in February with my opera company here in San Francisco, we did a workshop of a new work that we were commissioning in March, and basically after that, everything else, all engagements including my European engagements for the summer, were canceled or postponed. Some of them have been rescheduled for next season.
[Last week], I started to conduct here in San Francisco ... but that was the first time I was really with an ensemble onstage. I did do with my company some recording with live singers, but everyone in different rooms and me in one room conducting and that kind of thing. But in terms of being in a space and rehearsing together onstage, Monday was the first time since I was in Montreal in February.
FW: What have rehearsals been like?
NP: We actually right now have our wind players using a system called Dante, and they're not even onstage. Everyone else is onstage except for winds, which are still in a different space and watching me through a monitor and playing, and we are assuming there is no delay of the sound, so it works.
But it's still a very different thing. The experience is fragile in that we are all concerned about our health. Making music, especially as a conductor, facial expression is very important. So having a mask, there is something that closes a lot of your vocabulary.
I'm a person who looks at the opportunities rather than what is taken away, so I think of it as something that will make us all better musicians. I have to say, normally at the end of a rehearsal I'm very energized, and right now, I'm often quite tired. So there is an emotional strain to deal with that.
FW: With so many artists unable to perform or out of work right now, how have you personally been handling the pandemic, as a conductor?
NP: I do think that I've used this well as a moment of growth ... I think, for me, it has been mostly disappointing because I'm a person who loves to study scores. I prepare very deeply when I go to conduct a concert. So I had so many scores in my brain, I had thousands of pages of music that I was ready to conduct in the next year that I don't even know if I'll ever conduct that because many of these have been just basically canceled, not even rescheduled. So I've learned these, and I do a lot of contemporary works which are very complicated and require a lot of time to learn. So I have all of this, and it's all in my brain, and it's not being used. That has been difficult and disappointing.
I'm concerned about where we will be when this is all over because it's so difficult financially that I think my industry is going to change a lot, and the opportunity that I had for guest conducting might be reduced a great deal just because companies can't afford to bring in guest conductors as much.
I'm feeling fragile about these things, but I'm hopeful that art is a necessity. I don't think it's a luxury. It's at the foundation of who we are. Music especially is so fundamental to everyone's needs. Once we get over this and the difficulties of the last month, I think that we will really be eager just to get music going again, and then things will come back again. But it's definitely been a balancing act, and some days I'm more successful than others.
FW: If you were to convey a message to Fort Worthians through your performance with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, what would that be?
NP: Well, that our music brings diverse communities together ... It is a universal language that brings diverse people together in the same room and that you can all feel together and have that humility to just commune together. So I think that, first of all, Fort Worth is very lucky to be able to experience a live performance, and having been able to figure out a way to give that to the community is a great gift. Actually, the Copland has that scene, "Simple Gifts." In a way, it's kind of a metaphor for what this orchestra is giving to the community. It's not a simple gift; it's a deep gift.
