Diane Saldick | Peter Rubardt

Biography

Now in his fifteenth season as Music Director of the Pensacola Symphony Orchestra, PETER RUBARDT continues to inspire artistic excellence and to create innovative programs for the Pensacola community. During his tenure with the PSO, Peter Rubardt is credited with significantly raising the orchestra's artistic level, and with serving the Pensacola community by initiating pops, chamber orchestra, and family concerts. He played a central role in leading the successful renovation of the historic Pensacola Saenger Theatre, giving the orchestra increased visibility and vitality. Rubardt's current season includes debuts with the El Paso Symphony Orchestra and Japan's Yamagata Orchestra, as well as a return to Japan's Hyogo Performing Arts Center Orchestra, where he previously performed for the Imperial Highness Princess Hitachi of Japan. In addition, this season he will return to the pit of the Saenger Theatre for performances of Verdi's Rigoletto with the Pensacola Opera.

Prior to his appointment in Pensacola, Peter Rubardt served four seasons as the Associate Conductor of the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra, which followed three seasons as Resident Conductor of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. He conducted numerous subscription and Pops performances, educational programs and regional tours with both orchestras, and led the New Jersey in a highly praised evening of operatic favorites at Ireland's Adare Festival. He has also conducted the Utah Symphony, Louisiana, Rochester, and Las Vegas Philharmonic Orchestras, The Louisville Orchestra, the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra, The Richmond Symphony, Japan's Hiroshima Symphony Orchestra, Century Orchestra Osaka, Hyogo Performing Arts Center Orchestra and Kansai Philharmonic Orchestra and Nova Filarmonia Portuguese, with which he toured Portugal several times, as well as the orchestras of Acadiana, Anchorage, Annapolis, Bangor, Lubbock, Peoria, Portland, Quad Cities, Rogue, Valley, South Dakota, Southwest Florida, Spokane, and Youngstown. He has also conducted The Nutcracker for Kaleidoscope & Ballet Pensacola and Northwest Florida Ballet. From 1991-1996, he served as Music Director of the Rutgers Symphony; during the 2002-2003 season, he was Principal Guest Conductor of Pensacola Opera.

A native of Berkeley, California, Peter Rubardt holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Orchestral Conducting from The Juilliard School, where he was the recipient of the Bruno Walter fellowship. A Fulbright scholar in 1984, he studied piano and conducting at the Vienna Academy of Music, and pursued further studies at the Tanglewood Music Center and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute. He has participated in the masterclasses of Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa, André Previn and Herbert Blomstedt, and his major teachers have included Otto-Werner Mueller, Sixten Ehrling, Michael Senturia and David Lawton. He is listed in Who's Who in America. In 2005 he was selected by the American Symphony Orchestra League to perform in the National Conductor Preview with the Jacksonville Symphony.

Peter Rubardt has served on the faculties of The Juilliard School, Rutgers University, and the State University of New York at Purchase. He has received awards and degrees in music from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the University of California at Berkeley. Mr. Rubardt has recorded for Pantheon Records International. He resides in Pensacola with his wife Hedi Salanki, a professor of music at the University of West Florida, and their two children.

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Symphony's Performance of ‘The Planets' is Stellar
R.F. Yeager News Journal correspondent
March 8, 2011

As if intending to bulwark against the after-revel bricolage of discarded beads and broken bangles outside on Palafox Street, on Saturday night, 5 March, the Pensacola Symphony Orchestra filled the Saenger Theatre with a performance exceptionally precise and clear. Audiences expect polished musicianship under the baton of Maestro Peter Rubardt, but this was mono-vocality drawn from an oversized cast of instruments, unusually large in kind and number—an unusual cut above, befitting a program replete with surprises and changes on a singular Mardi Gras night.

Symphony No. 8 in B Minor, D. 759, by Franz Schubert (1797-1828), famous as "The Unfinished," and "The Planets," Op. 32, by Gustav Holst (1874-1934)—only two pieces, no guest soloist—was the uncommon selection. The unannounced replacement of the absent Leonid Yanovskiy by Jenny Gregoire as Concertmaster and first violin was another surprise, and the addition of the University of West Florida Women's Chorus, although anticipated in the score of "The Planets," was a fresh touch as well.

Unusual too—though less happily—was the pairing of Schubert's Symphony No. 8 with "The Planets." Rubardt regularly combines pieces with an unerring logic, ever enlightening and complimentary, but this conjunction remained inexplicable throughout. The Schubert is an "Allegro moderato" and an "Andante con moto" in search of direction, and (judging from an extant piano scherzo sketched and itself incomplete) what would have been another two movements. Heavily emulative of Beethoven, whom Schubert idolized, "The Unfinished" is famous for being just that—a biographical mystery of sound, fury and occasional beauty, but feckless and muddy as musical composition, an homage of borrowed gestures, as perhaps Schubert realized himself.

"The Planets" however is one of the stand-outs of early 20th-century music, and more than made up for the splendidly performed, if unsatisfying, Schubert. Its seven sections are impressionistic, lyrical portraits of (in order of performance) Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune—the planets important in astrology, in which study Holst was assiduous. One hears in it, not Beethoven, but ballets of Stravinsky, tonal colors of Schonberg, The Sorcerer's Apprentice of Dukas—as did Holst himself—and unavoidably nowadays ("The Planets" being much imitated) the Darth Vadar theme, various Disney films, and certain episodes of Star Trek. This is rich, varietous music, demanding to play well, and complexly moving. Yet when the audience rose to its feet, after the last, ethereal voices of the UWF Women's Chorus faded to silence, to find Rubardt and the Pensacola Symphony Orchestra up to the challenge on a night of many surprises wasn't unusual at all.

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Reviews

Artistic bar is raised for the Pensacola Symphony
SPECIAL TO THE NEWS JOURNAL
By R.F. Yeager
January 10, 2011

On Saturday evening at the Saenger Theatre, the Pensacola Symphony Orchestra offered "Beethoven, Blue Jeans, and the 1812!," the fourth installment in what is becoming a popular annual tradition.

Saturday's concert was evidence of the concept's continuing popularity in Pensacola — the hall was sold out a week in advance — and also of its evolution. The orchestra played six pieces, only the first of which, "Overture to Egmont, Op. 84," was by Beethoven. Based on a work of Goethe's celebrating the expulsion of the tyrannical Spanish by the Dutch people and first performed in 1810, "Egmont" is a paean to national autonomy. Replete with echoes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, it set the tone for an evening built conceptually and musically around liberty variously expressed.

Three dances ("The Great Lover," "Lonely Tow n: Pas de Deux," and "Times Square: 1944") from Leonard Bernstein's "On the Town," vigorously interpreted by members of Ballet Pensacola, transformed political into personal "liberty," portraying three sailors on 24-hour shore leave in the Big Apple during World War II. "Liberty" could also describe Maurice Ravel's "Piano Concerto in G Major" (1932), the jazz-influenced centerpiece of the program performed by guest soloist Adam Golka, who despite a towering cold, played with easy grace and flashes of humor belying the true difficulty of the composition. Ravel's independence from the French musical establishment, evident there in the bluesy winds and syncopated piano in a piece otherwise channeling Mozart, was legendary, and a stroke for freedom too.

Three works followed intermission, continuing the evening's theme. "Run" (1992), by American composer Michael Torke, offered a multi-textured tone painting of a body in free motion, with background chords held long and a foreground splashed with staccato brass riffed so quickly that even usually unflappable first trumpet Dale Riegle and principal horn Jeff Leenhouts seemed occasionally hard-put to keep up with themselves. Next, fellow American Charles Ives' "Putnam's Camp, Redding, Connecticut" (1935), evocative of multiple amateur bands of talented/talentless players at a July Fourth extravaganza outdoors, was the most free-w heeling of all, with intentional wrong notes and contending patriotic anthems delightfully combined.

The final piece returned to the moment and the political sentiment of "Egmont," and was the audience favorite: Pyotry Ilyich Tchaikovsky's "Festival Overture in E-Flat Major, Op. 49," better known as the "1812 Overture." Although Tchaikovsky professed to despise it as "very loud and noisy but without artistic merit," it is his most-played work, and continues to enrich his estate and legacy. Incorporating real church bells and firing cannon (the latter recorded for the Saenger performance using 18th-century guns), the work commemorates the Russian victory at Borodino in 1812 over the imperial Napoleonic army, yet another people's victory over impending tyranny. The rousing finale turns the strings loose — and they took full advantage.

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