Robert Moody, the newly appointed music director of the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra, lost his beloved husband five months ago to a sudden heart attack. That devastating loss is changing everything about how the acclaimed conductor approaches his art form.
This fall Moody, 57, will become just the third music director in the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra’s history. His selection to head the 40-year-old cultural institution culminated a yearlong, international search that attracted 130 applicants from nine countries and 41 states.
“I can’t remember how many times I’ve told an audience from the podium that music heals, that music brings people together,” Moody said. “But I didn’t realize how incredibly true that is — and how much I didn’t understand what I was saying until now.”
Trustee Kim Golden said in a news release that Moody was selected unanimously by the search committee. The orchestra’s board voted to offer Moody a three-year contract following a sizzling May 9 concert that he guest-conducted, and that paired two modern works by Adolphus Hailstork and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich with an 1806 masterpiece — Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4.
“The strong connection between Robert and our musicians was undeniable,” Golden said.
Moody will be helming a cultural organization that is packed with talent, but like other arts groups nationwide, is still regaining its footing following the COVID-19 pandemic.
The chamber orchestra performs five concerts a year and has an annual budget that hovers around $300,000. But for the past two years, the group has run a deficit, according to public tax documents, following five straight years of modest profits.
Maestro Robert Moody.
The “chamber” in the title refers to the ensemble’s relatively small — in orchestral terms — size. The 30 members on the roster are professional musicians from the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Zéphyros Winds quartet, the Poulenc Trio, Towson University and other highly respected cultural organizations.
Moody has some ideas about how he can help stabilize the chamber group, based on some of the things he has tried over the past seven seasons as music director of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, his main job. During Moody’s tenure, he said the Tennessee symphony added $25 million to what essentially had been a nonexistent endowment.
Moody also is in his 18th season as director of Arizona Musicfest, and his resume includes stints guest-conducting gigs at some of the world’s most prestigious orchestras, from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, as well as symphonies in Austria, Colombia, Germany and South Africa.
“I want to find out how the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra can be the most relevant music organization it can be in the 21st century,” Moody said. “Some organizations in this country are holding onto a 19th century model of what an orchestra should be. They either have already died or are faltering. I am obsessed with melding and mingling genres.”
In Memphis, home of the blues, Moody paired a performance of “The Soldier’s Tale” by Igor Stravinsky with music by the pioneering bluesman Robert Johnson, who according to an old and oft-repeated legend, is said to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his mastery on the guitar.
“That’s the kind of programming to look out for in Baltimore,” Moody said.
He added that he is interested in “growing” the Chamber Orchestra, perhaps by programming more new concerts or adding performances of existing concerts, perhaps by extending the orchestra’s reach outside its performing home in Goucher College’s 973-seat Kraushaar Auditorium, and perhaps by forging “unexpected collaborations” with choral organizations and dance troupes.
He has worked in the past with such celebrated artists as the cellist Yo-Yo Ma (Moody began his musical training on the cello), and with composers Kevin Puts and Mason Bates. But his closest collaboration is with the famed soprano Renee Fleming, who he met in the early 1990s, when he was was working temporarily as an assistant Chorus Master at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, and she was at the very beginning of her career.
“It feels odd to me to say that Renee Fleming is my friend,” Moody said. “I still have to pinch myself. But, we’ve worked together seven or eight times over the years, and we will work together three more times this coming season.
The soprano was especially close to Moody’s husband, Jimmy Jones, a gifted organ player, pianist and singer. The two men had been married for 18 years when Jones suffered a fatal heart attack in February at age 41. One of the first condolence messages that Moody received was from Fleming.
“Jimmy was the real thing,” said Moody, who now dedicates all of his concerts to his late spouse.
“I’m not being demure when I say that he was more talented than I am. He was on his way to becoming one of the most prominent organists in the U.S., Europe and Africa.”
And while it will never be adequate compensation for losing his husband, Moody said that the five months since Jones’ death have deepened his conducting skills.
“There is something about the rawness of death that has aided me in becoming a more authentic musician,” he said. “The older you get, and the more life happens, the easier it gets to start stripping away all that is unnecessary.”
The loss of Jones has given him a new clarity about where his focus should be, he said — in his work as well as in his personal life.
“If conductors have an Achilles’ heel,” Moody said, “it’s that we insert ourselves into the music. The process becomes much more about the human waving his arms than it should be.
“But I’m finding that now, I’m much more able to step out of the way of the music than I was able to do before.”