Diane Saldick | Peter Rubardt

Biography

Now in his thirteenth season as Music Director of the Pensacola Symphony Orchestra, PETER RUBARDT continues to inspire artistic excellence and to create innovative programs for the Pensacola community. During his tenure with the PSO, Peter Rubardt is credited with significantly raising the orchestra’s artistic level, and with serving the Pensacola community by initiating pops, chamber orchestra, and family concerts. Rubardt’s current season includes guest conducting engagements with the Rogue Valley Symphony in Oregon, as well as a return to Japan’s Hyogo Performing Arts Center Orchestra, where he previously performed for the Imperial Highness Princess Hitachi of Japan.

Prior to his appointment in Pensacola, Peter Rubardt served four seasons as the Associate Conductor of the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra, which followed three seasons as Resident Conductor of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. He conducted numerous subscription and Pops performances, educational programs and regional tours with both orchestras, and led the New Jersey in a highly praised evening of operatic favorites at Ireland’s Adare Festival. He has also conducted the Utah Symphony, Louisiana, Rochester, and Las Vegas Philharmonic Orchestras, The Louisville Orchestra, the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra, The Richmond Symphony, Japan's Hiroshima Symphony Orchestra, Century Orchestra Osaka, Hyogo Performing Arts Center Orchestra and Kansai Philharmonic Orchestra and Nova Filarmonia Portuguese, with which he toured Portugal several times, as well as the orchestras of Acadiana, Anchorage, Annapolis, Bangor, Lubbock, Peoria, Portland, Quad Cities, South Dakota, Southwest Florida, Spokane, and Youngstown. He has also conducted The Nutcracker for Kaleidoscope & Ballet Pensacola and Northwest Florida Ballet. From 1991-1996, he served as Music Director of the Rutgers Symphony; during the 2002-2003 season, he was Principal Guest Conductor of Pensacola Opera.

A native of Berkeley, California, Peter Rubardt holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Orchestral Conducting from The Juilliard School, where he was the recipient of the Bruno Walter fellowship. A Fulbright scholar in 1984, he studied piano and conducting at the Vienna Academy of Music, and pursued further studies at the Tanglewood Music Center and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute. He has participated in the masterclasses of Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa, André Previn and Herbert Blomstedt, and his major teachers have included Otto-Werner Mueller, Sixten Ehrling, Michael Senturia and David Lawton. He is listed in Who’s Who in America. In 2005 he was selected by the American Symphony Orchestra League to perform in the National Conductor Preview with the Jacksonville Symphony.

Peter Rubardt has served on the faculties of The Juilliard School, Rutgers University, and the State University of New York at Purchase. He has received awards and degrees in music from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the University of California at Berkeley. Mr. Rubardt has recorded for Pantheon Records International. He resides in Pensacola with his wife Hedi Salanki, a professor of music at the University of West Florida, and their two children.

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Reviews

Pensacola Symphony
Review 4.18.09
By R.F. Yeager

Last Saturday night the capacity crowd streaming out of the Saenger Theater after the Pensacola Symphony Orchestra’s final Masterworks concert of the 2008-2009 season faced a tough choice: naming the highlight of an evening replete with so many triumphs. Was it the glittering elegance of the restored Saenger itself, and—for an audience of sophisticated music-lovers especially—the newly installed, state-of-the-art acoustical shell that rewarded a two-year-long wander in the ecclesiastical wilderness with a clarity of sound beyond even the most hopeful expectations? Was it the much-anticipated performance of guest soloist Joshua Smith, Principal Flutist of the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, particularly for those fortunate enough to have whetted their appetites at his extraordinary salon concert on April 16 at the Pensacola Museum of Art? Or would it be Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, a work guaranteed to test the new sound capabilities of the Saenger, some thought to the limit?

And just to make deciding the more difficult, Music Director Peter Rubardt rose himself to the challenges presented by his soloist and new home, conducting the full Tchaikovsky score from memory alone. Thrilling to watch as well as hear, Rubardt and the PSO demonstrated to any yet in need of convincing Pensacola’s supreme good fortune in their collective presence here.

And in the end, nobody cared that the decision proved impossible to make. It was a night of joy and celebration, a night of coming home shared by loyal symphony-goers and musicians alike that began when Symphony Board member “Bill” Greenhut, who saw the Saenger project through from vision to finale, ceremonially received the conductor’s baton from Rubardt to preside over a fervent rendition of our national anthem. The audience sang along, as energies held in check during the extended remodeling process were finally released on and off stage. The orchestra’s execution of the program’s first piece, the overture to Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, exploded any worries about the superb new Saenger—or about the capacity of this orchestra to both give and take pleasure in some of the world’s greatest music. The Bernstein overture is brief, but merciless in many ways, a kind of zero-to-sixty rush of muscle and blood. The PSO nailed it. They blew the lid off the house—a splendid set-up to Joshua Smith’s performance that followed.

The Concerto for Flute and Orchestra, Op. 39 by the 48-year-old American composer Lowell Liebermann—a contemporary of Rubardt’s at the Juilliard School of Music—has rapidly become a definitional composition for both the instrument and the flutist. For those whose sense of the flute was fixed in childhood as the voice of Sasha the Bird in the Disney version of Peter and the Wolf, Liebermann’s piece could only have emerged full-flight from Smith’s first golden note as a revelation, if not a redemption. The concerto showcases the full range of what a flute can achieve. A monster at 25 minutes (rare for a wind concerto) and a majesty of variety, color and force, Op. 39 explores territory unsafe for any but the consummately gifted—a slim company among whom Joshua Smith clearly belongs.

And then there was the Tchaikovsky. His Fifth Symphony is a huge work, variously stately, comical, terrifying and heart-rendingly beautiful. Justly famed for the French horn solo in the second movement (superbly handled by Principal French Horn Jeff Leenhouts), the work is hardly less a platform for the oboe (brilliant execution from Principal Matt Fossa), or indeed for every instrument in the company. To attempt it at all demands everything from an orchestra—walls of sound from massed strings, cannonading percussion, the subtlety of a spring breeze and the deep flow of a Russian river. To capture its richness, as the PSO did on Saturday, promises an enviable 2009-2010 season.

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Press

Reviews:
Peter Rubardt's Stunning Mahler 5
RUBARDT'S PENSACOLA SYMPHONY CELEBRATES THEATRE RENOVATION; Symphony opens its 84th season

Peter Rubardt's Stunning Mahler 5

Pensacola Star Journal
March 8, 2010

On Saturday night, patrons of the Pensacola Symphony Orchestra's Masterworks Series heard the concert they had been waiting for: Music Director Peter Rubardt conducting the massive "Symphony No. 5" of Gustav Mahler (1860-1911).

Rubardt makes no secret of his devotion to the Austrian composer, called by some the last great Romantic, and by others a Modernist pioneer. The orchestra's performance of Mahler's "Das Lied von der Erde" under Rubardt's baton in 2006 is well remembered, and he has openly anticipated an enlarged and acoustically improved Saenger precisely with Mahler's "Fifth" in mind. To attempt it testifies to Rubardt's confidence in the Symphony's new space, in the musicians he has assembled in Pensacola and (not least, perhaps) in his own strength as a conductor.

For Mahler, a symphony should "embrace the whole world." Even spatially, "Symphony No. 5" presents a world of challenges. It is scored for an enlarged orchestra, and on Saturday it filled every foot of the renovated Saenger stage: four flutes, three oboes, three clarinets, three bassoons, six horns (Rubardt included seven), four trumpets, three trombones, a tuba, timpani, bass drum snare drum, cymbals, triangle, tam-tam, harp, two violin sections, violas, violoncellos, double basses and one of the "unusual instruments" for which Mahler was known — a glockenspiel (but not the buggy whip in Mahler's original).

Yet musically, it is more demanding still. It is long — about 70 minutes — and has primary key changes in each of its five movements (C-sharp minor, A minor, D major, F major, D major). The first movement is a funeral march ("Trauermarsch") opening with an unexpected, but by now famous, trumpet line. The "Adagietto" comprising the fourth movement, which Mahler directed should be played "sehr langsam" ("very slowly"), but didn't specify how slowly, is a proving-ground for great conductors: von Karajan; Inbal; Abbado; and Leonard Bernstein, who performed it at Robert Kennedy's funeral mass, have all put their stamp on it. Even the rock guitarist Jeff Beck has recorded an interpretation. Triumph — or hubris — rides on every note.

As a standing-ovation audience that demanded three encores powerfully registered, it was triumph at the Saenger on Saturday night. The huge orchestra rocked the building, and never missed a note. Rubardt's "Adagietto" went 10:22 — not the cinematic 12 to 15 minutes now common, and seemed clean and perfectly conceived at that length. Masterful performances were turned in by Dale Riegle, principal trumpet; Kim Wooley on bassoon (standing in for principal Jeff Keesecker); and Jeff Leehouts, principal horn.

The evening's pairing was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's "Serenade No. 13 for strings in G major (K.525)," best known and much beloved as "Eine kleine Nachtmusik." Seemingly an odd choice, but on further consideration, altogether right: a relatively undemanding warm-up for the strings, an audience favorite and with quirky Mahler connections. His "Symphony No. 7" has two sections named "Nachtmusik" and his last word, according to his wife, was "Mozartl" ("dear little Mozart").

Especially appreciated was Rubardt's tempo: a quick, light, classical version, courageously free of Romantic overlay so often (and so unfortunately) the norm for Mozart performed today.

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RUBARDT'S PENSACOLA SYMPHONY CELEBRATES THEATRE RENOVATION; Symphony opens its 84th season

R.F. Yeager

The Pensacola Symphony Orchestra opened its 84th year Saturday with a "Homecoming Masterworks" concert.

The performance marked the return of the PSO to the new, improved Saenger Theatre for a full season after a two-year, construction-driven exile. On stage and in the near-capacity house, the mood was ebullient - a repsonse the selection of pieces served to enhance and heighten. The star was internationally acclaimed pianist Jon Nakamatsu, a 1997 Van Cliburn Gold Medalist, also making a homecoming of sorts: He first performed as guest artist with the PSO in the "old" Saenger in 2002.

Unusually for a soloist of his caliber, Nakamatsu played two pieces, Sergei Rachmaninov's "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Opus 43," and after intermission, George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue."

With the final notes of Rhapsody in Blue shimmering in the air, the audience rose en masse for a standing ovation lasting several minutes - a tribute due the soloist but also in proud recognition of the fine supportive achievement of Rubardt and Pensacola's own symphony orchestra.

Richard Wagner's "Prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnburg" and Richard Strauss' "Til Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, Opus 28," completed the program - in more ways than one. Both are energetically gleeful, light yet weighty enough to be called triumphant - no mean achievement, particularly by Strauss, whose program piece sketches the biography of Eulenspiegel, a real-life medieval peasant and infamous jokester who must be hanged in the end.

Beginning and closing the concert, these two pieces were splendid - and surprising - complements to Nakamatsu's rhapsodies and superbly chosen to open a new musical season.

Along with the soloist, some of the PSO's best found shining moments of their own in the night's program (Richard Jernigan on clarinet received his own ovation, deservedly), but finally it was the unexpected complementarity of these four works - in so many ways uncharacteristic of the composers' better-known repertoires - that stood out, highlighting once again director Rubardt's near-clairvoyant grasp of his medium.

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