Daniel Alfred Wachs has Palm Beach sojourn with Stravinsky and Leno

A lavish benefit gala at the legendary Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla. featured Chapman University’s own Daniel Alfred Wachs, music director of the university orchestras, at the helm of the acclaimed Palm Beach Symphony. Wachs was joined at the Dec. 1 event by Jay Leno, host of NBC’s Tonight Show, who kept the glittering crowd in stitches while the orchestra wowed them with sweet melodies. The event benefited the American Humane Association.

Wachs – who, in addition to serving as director of instrumental studies at Chapman, also is music director and conductor of the Orange County Youth Symphony Orchestra (OCYSO) – was in Florida to conduct the Palm Beach Symphony in a youth program built around Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, a ballet piece written in 1919 that has become one of the composer’s most popular scores. It was the first time the Palm Beach orchestra had presented a youth concert since its founding in 1974. Wachs wrote the script for the show and adapted the original Pulcinella scenario for presentation to the young audience.

Wachs talked with the Palm Beach Post about why Stravinsky – rather than some other great composers – was highly appropriate for a youth audience. “I would be very wary of doing a program of Mozart or Beethoven for fourth- and fifth-graders,” he told classical music reporter Greg Stepanich. “That’s the conventional wisdom – ‘oh, they’ll appreciate Mozart and Beethoven’ – and I actually think that’s dead wrong.”

It makes more sense, he said, to present 20th- and 21st-century music to young audiences, because they can relate to it better. “That’s not to say that if they hear Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, they’re not going to react and really get into it.  They will.  At the same time, what makes Stravinsky and these other guys so interesting? Well, kids are always drawn to rhythm … and anything kids hear these days is pop-driven or rhythm-driven. Stravinsky and John Adams and Mason Bates … these kinds of things, kids will relate to more; it’s cool, it’s interesting.”

Wachs’ Palm Beach Symphony program was presented to an audience of nearly 600 schoolchildren from nine county public schools.  On his return to California, he conducted the OC Youth Symphony Orchestra – the official youth orchestra of Orange County – to a packed house in Memorial Hall on Dec. 9, performing Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade in a special narrated version that Wachs first produced when he served on the faculty at Swarthmore College.  Wachs will lead the OCYSO  on a concert tour of England next summer, including performances in London.