Profile: Guest conductor fell in love with music at early age

By JEFFREY DAY - jday@thestate.com

Adam Flatt first saw a violin player when he was 4. And the first time was a charm.

So his parents signed him up for violin classes, thinking “they were entertaining a stage I was going through,” Flatt recalled recently. “I wasn’t a prodigy, but I had talent, and I worked really hard.”

His parents, a teacher and a state employee in Sacramento, Calif., weren’t immersed in music, although his mother could play the piano along with her young son. Flatt absorbed a daily dose of classical music from the well-regarded public radio station KXPR and was a “classical music nerd” from an early age.

Flatt, who will be in Columbia this week as the sixth of seven finalists for the job of the S.C. Philharmonic’s music director, never entertained doing anything other than making music.

As he grew physically — Flatt is 6 feet 4 inches tall — he switched to viola, which put him between the higher violin and lower cello. This made him feel more a part of a whole and opened his ears to a wide range of sound. So did the first time he played in an orchestra, when he was in seventh grade.

“Making music is a pretty solitary thing, and I remember the physical rush and the ecstasy of playing with the group,” said Flatt, 41.

Feeling a part of something so big got him thinking about conducting, but it took him a long time to declare his intentions.

“It just seemed pretty audacious to want to be a conductor,” Flatt said. “It was like saying you wanted to be an astronaut.”

Flatt last year became music director of the Denver Ballet and the Newport Symphony in Oregon. For the five years prior he was associate music director of the Colorado Symphony and the Denver Young Artists Orchestra. He also guest conducts, most recently with the St. Louis Symphony.

Flatt, who got married last May, studied viola at the University of California at Berkeley and earned his master’s degree in conducting from the Indiana University School of Music.

He’ll lead the orchestra Saturday in a concert heavy on dance.

It opens with “The Chairman Dances: A Fox-trot for Orchestra,” a 1985 outtake from John Adams’ opera “Nixon in China.”

“It’s kind of a romp, but I find it very moving,” Flatt said.

Enrique Graf, a concert pianist and faculty member at the College of Charleston, will be soloist on Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major. It’s a jazzy work from 1930.

The second half of the concert consists of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances, Op. 45,” the composer’s last work and one that many believe sums up his career. The 1940 piece is noted both for its expressive rhythm and lush melodies as well its dark mood.

“It’s a rather deep work and very dark, but also one heck of showpiece,” Flatt said. “It gives every member of the orchestra a chance to shine.”

Reach Day at (803) 771-8518.