PORT ANGELES — Richard Sparks is a big man with an understated style.
When leading the Port Angeles Symphony Orchestra, he lifts his hands as if to coax the music into being, and after it does, he compliments the players in a soft voice.
“Very, very nice,” Sparks said at his first rehearsal Monday night.
The Seattle-bred conductor, who has worked with chorales and orchestras around the world, is here to lead the Symphony’s Christmas concerts: the Saturday morning and evening programs at the Port Angeles High School Performing Arts Center.
Sparks is one of eight candidates for the job of permanent music director. He is the fourth in a series of guest conductors to take up the baton between now and May, after which the Symphony board’s search committee will choose one.
As they do with each applicant, Saturday’s audiences will have the chance to complete a written evaluation form on Sparks.
The people will also be enveloped, Sparks promises, in glorious music, the stuff that gives a body the feeling of Christmas.
He’s mixed the familiar with the unexpected. There’s Leroy Anderson’s “Sleigh Ride” and “Christmas Festival,” both written for the Boston Pops, and to open the second half of the concert, Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite.” Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” arranged for violin, will bring the Symphony’s Kate Powers, 14, forward for a solo performance.
Some may recognize “Skater’s Waltz,” another element of the concert from French composer Emile Waldteufel. But “Winter,” from Alexander Glazunov’s “The Seasons” ballet, isn’t well-known at all, Sparks said, though it is “absolutely fabulous, a wonderful, coloristic piece.”
Sparks has also chosen Mozart’s Symphony No. 29 in A, which is not Christmas music. It’s a challenging piece, the earliest mature symphony from the child prodigy who was Mozart.
Warmed up
Sparks is fully warmed up when he gets to a description of the next piece: Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Polonaise” from the Christmas Eve Suite. The story behind it, according to the conductor: A young man wants to marry his young lady, but she’ll accept him only if he brings her the tsarina’s slipper.
She doesn’t believe he can pull it off. But he does go to meet with the tsar. He asks for the slipper — and brings it back to his beloved.
The “Polonaise” is the music played as our young man enters the tsar’s palace, Sparks says, and it has got to be grand. Rehearsing the piece with the orchestra, he played the dual role of conductor and teacher.
The Port Angeles Symphony is a volunteer orchestra with musicians of various levels. The conductor’s job is to unite them, “to make the best possible music.
“Some are retired, some are working or going to school,” Sparks said, so when the musicians gather for rehearsal on Monday and Thursday nights and then for the performances on Saturday, “it had better be a positive experience.”
Sparks’ own experience ranges from earning two music degrees at the University of Washington, founding the Seattle Pro Musica ensembles while still an undergraduate, eight years as a freelance conductor in the United States, Canada and Sweden, and teaching at Massachusetts’ Mount Holyoke College, Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma and, for the past five years, at the University of North Texas in Denton.
“When you read his resume, you think he must have an ego to match. But he’s totally the opposite,” said Kristin Quigley Brye, the Port Angeles conductor, pianist and Peninsula College music professor.
Also a candidate for conductor of the Port Angeles Symphony, she studied with Sparks at PLU, and calls him an excellent leader of both orchestras and chorales. That’s rare, Quigley Brye said. Perhaps rarer is the conductor who is also a stellar educator — which she said Sparks is.
Saturday’s concerts are auditions for a job Sparks would love to have, in a place he and his wife Kathryn have long enjoyed. They have vacationed here a number of times, and purchased a condominium in Sunland a couple of years ago, with eventual retirement in mind.
Yet Sparks, 64, is focused not so much on the tryout aspect of this visit.
The thing in any situation like this, he said, is to be yourself and “go in and do what you do.”
“You want to come in and enjoy the experience … in and of itself, that is enough.
“My goal is always to enjoy the very moment of making music.”
