After months of reviewing 130 applicants and a season of concerts conducted by each of four finalists, a new music director has finally been found for the Atlantic Classical Orchestra.
David Amado, 47, conductor of the Delaware Symphony Orchestra for more than a decade, will be commuting starting in July to the tri-city chamber orchestra that began in Vero Beach.
Amado, married to violinist Meredith Amado and the father of 11-year-old twins and a 7-year-old, says they all are “over the moon” about his new job.
“He’s phenomenal,” said Vero’s Michael LaPorta, part of the eight-member search committee and a former president of ACO. “The emails are pouring in from subscribers who are so excited. And the orchestra players are just ecstatic.”
Amado will continue his post with the Delaware Symphony, which performs seven concerts from September to May in Wilmington’s Grand Opera House. With next season’s schedules for both orchestras already in place, Amado says there is only one “direct hit,” a conflict that is being resolved, he says.
While that orchestra’s roster includes more than 75 musicians, ACO as a chamber orchestra has fewer than half that number. For Amado, the smaller size is part of what attracted him in the first place.
”There’s something about having fewer people that encourages an individual energy and buy-in. When you have a giant sea of strings, some people can kind of check out. You won’t if you are one of only eight.
“They’re in each other’s faces all the time and I love that,” he says. “Even with the Delaware Symphony, but especially with ACO, I tell them, look at me if you want, but I’d rather you look at your colleagues. I’d rather you play chamber music with each other. You can’t beat that.”
Included in Amado’s first full season will be another new commission for ACO through the support of the foundation of Jerry Rappaport, a prominent Boston developer who now lives in Stuart.
“What an incredibly generous and visionary thing to do,” said Amado. He said ACO’s commitment to new music was “really compelling and really unusual.”
“I have a deep allegiance to new music,” said Amado, who as a student in New York started a new music group, Sequitur; it is still performing today, though he is not involved.
“It’s part of what our charge is as music directors and musicians. We need to make sure we curate these great masterpieces from the past – no doubt about it. But we’re also responsible for continuing to put new treasure in the collection. Sometimes it’s hard to find those treasures; only time will tell. But we do our best. It’s exciting.”
The Juilliard-trained Amado was raised in Merion, Penn., part of Philadelphia’s Main Line. His mother, Carol Stein Amado, had a string quartet; her mother, David’s grandmother, was Lillian Fuchs, a famous violinist whose students included Isaac Stern and Pinchas Zukerman.
Amado chose to study piano, “a safe place to go” with all those string players in the family, as he once joked to a journalist.
In high school, he studied with the great pianist Susan Starr and attended the pre-college program at Juilliard. Accepted at the University of Pennsylvania, he transferred to Juilliard after his freshman year. There, he soon switched to conducting, and also switched schools, this time to Indiana University for a master’s degree. He eventually returned to Juilliard for post-graduate studies in conducting.
After serving as staff conductor for the St. Louis Orchestra, he began conducting in Wilmington in 2003.
That same year, Atlantic Classical Orchestra began a search for a replacement for conductor Andrew McMullan, who had led the group since founding ACO in 1990. That search led to the hiring of Stewart Robertson, a Scottish-born conductor already well-known in South Florida for his work with Florida Grand Opera.
Robertson, a Grammy nominee who for two decades led the Glimmerglass Orchestra, retired last April due to illness.
LaPorta said Amado, the first of four candidates to guest conduct this season, “set the bar very high” for those that followed.
LaPorta was impressed not only with Amado’s conducting, but with the delivery of his pre-concert lecture and his off-stage persona with patrons. “He could have a radio program, he’s that good,” says LaPorta, adding, “He’s good-enough looking for TV.”
“I just can’t say enough good things about him. We’re just thrilled that we were able to secure him and that he’s going to build on the great legacy of Andy and Stewart.”
Those performances and the buzz surrounding the selection appear to have generated new interest for the orchestra. Renewals for season tickets are higher than usual – “phenomenal,” according to the ACO’s top administrator Alan Hopper.
With the addition of performances in Palm Beach Gardens last year, the musicians are squeezing more out of the same rehearsal time.
“We get to play four concerts – that’s amazing, with only one set of rehearsals,” he says. “What happens to a piece each time you play it is so extraordinary that when you only play something once, it’s hard. You think, if I only had one more chance. The ability to do it that many times is really unparalleled.”
ACO executives, with the input of retiring Maestro Stewart Robertson, had included in the season’s first program – which ultimately turned out to be Handel’s audition – Schubert’s “Symphony No. 9.”
“I was worried about it,” he says. “Schubert Nine is one of my desert island pieces, but it’s really long and everybody’s pretty much playing all the time. But they absolutely played the living daylights out of the piece for every performance. This is one fine orchestra.”
Conducting at Stuart’s Lyric Theatre, there was one point in the performance that Amado had to cave to the competition, when seconds after starting a movement, a nearby train blew its whistle.
Amado had met his match. He simply stopped, and started over. But even that he found refreshing.
“There’s a world out there,” he said. “There’s something really wonderful about that sense of life. We’re inside doing our thing, and there’s a world outside doing its thing. And that’s OK.”
