By TONI MARIE MARCHIONI

Skrowaczewski rehearsing the Juilliard Orchestra in 1982. (Photo by Peter Schaaf)

Once a face that graced the halls of Juilliard on a yearly basis, Maestro Stanislaw Skrowaczewski returns this month after a 15-year hiatus to conduct the Juilliard Orchestra. For nearly two decades in the 1970s and '80s, the maestro worked with Juilliard students frequently, including an extensive tour with the Orchestra to Japan and China (which he recalls as "wonderful"). Though his most recent concert at the School was an emotional night in January of 1991, the evening the Persian Gulf War began, he says that he is thrilled to be returning to Juilliard.

Skrowaczewski's impressive career includes a 20-year tenure as music director of the Minnesota Orchestra, seven years with the Hallé Orchestra in England, and conducting appearances with nearly every major orchestra nationally and abroad. But somewhat surprisingly, he confesses that, at times, he prefers to work with student groups rather than professional orchestras. "It is funny," he said in a recent interview, "but it is a sort of attention and interest in what we are doing—reflecting and yielding a wonderful atmosphere of work, possibility, and improvement. I love to work with fine student musicians who are very well prepared technically and musically, and study very seriously. You can mold this orchestra very well."

Ironically, despite his passion for working with students, Skrowaczewski, who turns 83 this month, has turned down every offer he has received for a teaching position at a major educational institution. While he has been asked many times, he says he has "always refused because it is impossible," due to his dual life as both a conductor and composer. He says that balancing these two factors alone was nearly unmanageable, without the prospect of adding a conservatory faculty position to his plate. While some conductor-composers, such as Pierre Boulez, are able to conduct and compose within the same time periods, Skrowaczewski admits that he lacks that "incredible mental organization. Before or after a rehearsal with orchestra, I am really with the works that I am conducting. I always find new things, new possibilities and points that I like to try, and then I cannot concentrate on composition. It's completely different. Both professions—performing and creating—are absolutely different. They contradict themselves. You have to be an extrovert and an introvert. It is very difficult to do at the same time, because both demand all your attention, work, and time to get more perfect."

Though he can now set aside his entire summers for writing music, the maestro's early and rapidly rising conducting career did not always afford him that luxury. He was so busy conducting, he recalls, that he did not compose for nearly 10 or 12 years. Though he was very successful on the podium, he realized that not composing left "a big emptiness and loss" in his life and that he needed to find a way to do both. He describes his compositional process as "very slow," demanding "a lot of time and trial. I'm trying many things that the next day I'm throwing in the garbage. Then, finally, something comes that I eventually accept. Maybe years later I will think it's nonsense, but at least for the moment I will accept it." Skrowaczewski admits that he discarded nearly every work he composed before 1960, with the exception of two.

Top: Skrowaczewski, violin soloist Midori, and the Juilliard Orhcestra's 1987 Asia Tour. Right: Stanislaw Skrowaczewski conducting the Juilliard Orchestra on its 1987 tour of Asia. (Photos by Henry Grossman)

Perhaps in keeping with his critical attitude towards his own works, Skrowaczewski for many years disliked conducting his own pieces, feeling uncomfortable with what he perceived as a self-promoting exhibition. More recently, now that he is no longer affiliated with just one orchestra, the maestro has reconciled these feelings. Now, when he undertakes his own works on the podium, he says, "I absolutely forget that it is my piece! I see the score with problems, and I try to solve the problems with the musicians as well as I would do with a piece not of mine. I become very excited about ways to do it better, forgetting that it is my piece. Before, I would not ask too much because I was almost—not shy or timid, but I didn't find that, with my own piece, I should ask for everything. Now I think, it is … [simply] a score that has to be performed to the best."

The Juilliard community will be able to witness Skrowaczewski conducting one of his early pieces on the October 5 concert. Music at Night, his short Neo-Classical composition from 1949, will open the concert, followed by the Piano Concerto No. 4 by Camille Saint-Saëns, with student soloist You You Zhang. As the "main dish," Skrowaczewski selected Brahms's milestone Symphony No. 1 in C Minor in order to "prepare something with students from the great literature that they need to know." He says that he wanted to pick a more demanding piece of his own, but that ultimately it was more important to spend a greater amount of time with the Brahms than with learning a difficult piece of his own—"compromise between what the School wants and needs and what I would like to do. If I had more concerts, I would try to introduce things that could be repertoire building for the students. Maybe that will happen in the future."

Looking toward the future, both for himself and others, is something Maestro Skrowaczewski does often. Not only is he working on commissions for premieres several years in advance, but he also thoughtfully offers advice for up-and-coming young conductors. In addition to playing one or two instruments at concert level, he says it is imperative for young conductors to know and play the "enormous" chamber music repertoire of major composers such as Mozart, Haydn, Dvorak, and Brahms, which is "quite different from their symphonic repertoire. To know how to conduct these composers, to have this very large point of view, is very important." Most important, he stresses, is "to study and to know, by heart, the score they are conducting—so that at any moment, when a chord comes, it is possible to say what note the second clarinet is playing." Skrowaczewski feels this deep knowledge is essential to "develop one's own intelligence, to not follow a mold—an intelligence of seeing things, of learning from mistakes. To perform and interpret is very complex. Knowledge is necessary to be well-balanced. To know and to find one's conviction, you must know absolutely everything."

Juilliard Orchestra Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, conductor Peter Jay Sharp Theater Thursday, Oct. 5, 8 p.m. Free; standby admission only. Please see the Calendar of Events for more information.

It is clearly this intensely deep knowledge and desire for more that keeps Skrowaczewski young and fresh with regards to music. His continual goal of seeking out new discoveries in the scores he conducts keeps him, he says, "very much alive, fresh with interpretation. I just cannot accept a routine. It would be terribly boring, and it would kill immediately my pleasure of performing. In art, this is creation. This is re-creation and interpretation. Nothing is stable and perfect to the point of 'this is it.' We always look and seek something that is fresh." With this attitude, Skrowaczewski has something unique to share with the Juilliard community: the wisdom of more than 70 years of conducting and composing, along with the ability to discover new details in the score as if it were his first time on the podium.

Toni Marie Marchioni is a master's degree candidate in oboe.