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Boston Globe
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
John Nelson, conductor who championed Berlioz, dies at 83
He served for more than a decade as music director of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, a group he helped elevate through national tours that stopped at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center. He later worked for years in France, recording a complete set of Beethoven's symphonies while leading the Ensemble Orchestral de Paris. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Mr. Nelson was a prolific guest conductor, directing major orchestras worldwide. He also won a Grammy Award for directing the English Chamber Orchestra and star soprano Kathleen Battle in a recording of Handel's 'Semele,' released by Deutsche Grammophon in 1993. Advertisement But he remained best known as an interpreter of Berlioz, whom he described as 'my patron saint in music.' He traced his interest in the French composer back to a conversation he had with his manager, Matthew Epstein, at age 28, when Mr. Nelson was a young Juilliard grad leading New Jersey's Pro Arte Chorale. Advertisement 'John,' he recalled Epstein saying, 'you need to do something to haul yourself out of your choral doldrums - something spicy and interesting that'll make a splash in New York. Why don't you do 'The Trojans?'' Commonly known by its French name, 'Les Troyens,' the opera was Berlioz's most ambitious work, retelling the tragic love story of Dido and Aeneas in a run time that regularly exceeds four hours. (The composer, who died in 1869, didn't live to see it performed in full.) Mr. Nelson told Gramophone magazine that he studied the work by picking up conductor Colin Davis's recently released 1970 recording of the opera - a listening experience he likened to 'being struck by a thunderbolt.' Deciding 'to go for broke,' as he put it, he and Epstein arranged for the Pro Arte Chorale to perform the opera in 1972, in concert at Carnegie Hall. It was one of the work's first full performances in the United States. 'It started around 7 P.M., ended around midnight, and at the end a mighty roar went up,' wrote New York Times classical music critic Harold C. Schonberg, praising the 'extraordinary vitality and understanding' that Mr. Nelson brought to the music. 'Carnegie Hall,' he continued, 'has heard nothing like that yell of approval since the 'Götterdämmerung' performance two seasons ago by Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony.' Decades later, Mr. Nelson dryly noted that in some ways the performance was a disaster for his choral group: 'It cost $50,000, which it took the board 10 years to pay off - and they lost their music director in the process.' Mr. Nelson left the company after directing high-profile concerts, including in 1973 when he made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera, conducting 'Les Troyens' as a last-minute substitute for the group's ailing director, Rafael Kubelík. Advertisement Nearly 45 years later, in 2017, he made an acclaimed four-CD recording of the opera for the classical label Erato. Mr. Nelson said he spent about a year and a half planning the project and assembling the musicians, settling on a lineup that included France's Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg, three choirs, and a 16-person cast led by Joyce DiDonato, Michael Spyres, and Marie-Nicole Lemieux. The album was named Gramophone's record of the year. It won top prizes at the International Opera Awards and France's Victoires de la Musique Classique. 'Nelson never allows the dramatic pace to slacken, which is no mean achievement in itself in a work that even its greatest admirers would admit has occasional longueurs,' music critic Andrew Clements wrote in the Guardian. The record, he added, was 'now unquestionably the version of Berlioz's masterpiece to have at home.' Mr. Nelson led the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 1 with Evgeny Kissin as soloist in 2011. Stu Rosner John Wilton Nelson was born in San José, Costa Rica, on Dec. 6, 1941. His parents were Protestant American missionaries, his mother a nurse and his father a minister. Mr. Nelson said he spent much of his childhood traveling the countryside with his family, at times playing the accordion in a trio with his dad, who played the saxophone, and his brother, who played guitar. He was 6 when his family bought a Steinway piano for $50 and enrolled him in lessons. Mr. Nelson was later sent to the United States to study at a private school in Orlando. He continued at the piano, although he moved away from the instrument - eventually turning to conducting - after losing the tip of his right pinkie in a childhood accident, according to the magazine Christianity Today. Advertisement Mr. Nelson studied music at Wheaton College in Illinois, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1963. He went on to train in conducting at Juilliard, where he studied under Jean Morel, and received a master's degree in 1965. He taught at the school for a few years while launching his career, directing the Greenwich Philharmonia in Connecticut in addition to the Pro Arte Chorale. 'It was clear that I could not have a music directorship in a major city, so I went to the boondocks to settle down, work on repertoire and get my feet wet as a music director,' he told The Boston Globe in 1991, explaining his decision to join the Indianapolis Symphony. Mr. Nelson toured and recorded with the group while taking on additional responsibilities as director of the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis and the Caramoor music center in Katonah, N.Y. But by 1987, he was tired and burned out and decided to leave his main job in Indianapolis. 'I said goodbye to the orchestra at the last stop of our first European tour, in Nuremberg,' he said in a Los Angeles Times interview. 'My wife and I got into the car and drove off into the sunset - to Paris.' Mr. Nelson and his wife, the former Anita Johnsen, married in 1964. She died in 2012. The John and Anita Nelson Center for Sacred Music at Wheaton, where she was also an alum, was later dedicated in their honor. Mr. Nelson leaves two daughters, Kirsten Nelson Hood and Kari Magdalena Chronopoulos; four grandsons; and three great-grandchildren. Advertisement After the success of his 'Les Troyens' recording, Mr. Nelson continued to record major works by Berlioz, reuniting with Erato and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg for well-received versions of 'La Damnation de Faust' (2019), 'Les Nuits d'Eté' and 'Harold en Italie' (both in 2022), and 'Roméo et Juliette' (2023). He also led a 2019 live recording of Berlioz's 'Requiem,' at St. Paul's Cathedral in London, to mark the 150th anniversary of the composer's death. His final recording, with the English Concert & Choir, was of Handel's 'Messiah' (2023), an oratorio he had first conducted as a college sophomore, in a Baptist church with organ accompaniment. This time he led the performance at England's Coventry Cathedral, in a concert that was shaped 'with intelligence and flair,' Lindsay Kemp wrote in Gramophone. 'Just listen,' Kemp added, 'to the way he builds towards the 'Wonderful, Counsellor' outbursts in 'For unto us,' with the cellos at one point contributing joyful spread chords. Or how 'and of his Christ' stands out in the 'Hallelujah,' and the final 'amen' is so carefully unfolded. Nelson gets these kinds of things right time and again.'
New York Times
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
John Nelson, Conductor Who Got France to Cherish Berlioz, Dies at 83
John Nelson, a genial American conductor who made France love one of its own underappreciated musical sons, Hector Berlioz, died on March 31 at his home in Chicago. He was 83. His death was confirmed by his daughter, Kari Magdalena Chronopoulos, who did not specify the cause. Mr. Nelson made Berlioz (1803-1869), the wild man of 19th-century French music, his passion, performing and promoting his work ceaselessly during a career that stretched over 50 years on both sides of the Atlantic. As a young conductor, he introduced Berlioz's epic five-act opera 'Les Troyens' ('The Trojans') to New York in a 1972 Carnegie Hall performance deemed 'highly successful' at the time by Raymond Ericson of The New York Times. By the end of his career, Mr. Nelson was so closely identified with Berlioz, one of France's most extravagant musicians, that the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph wrote, 'John Nelson was clearly born with Berlioz in his genes.' That remark came in a 2017 review of Mr. Nelson's much-praised recording of 'Les Troyens' with the Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra and a cast that included the American soprano Joyce DiDonato. Those discs — 'the first great 'French' recording' of the opera, Le Monde called them — won Gramophone magazine's Recording of the Year award in 2018. (For The Sunday Times of London, it was the Recording of the Decade.) In a 1988 interview with Le Monde, Mr. Nelson spoke of 'the care with the smallest details' in the scores of Berlioz, demanding 'articulation in the interior of the phrases.' These qualities are evident in his celebrated recording of 'Les Troyens,' where the composer's mercurial shifts from delicacy to bombast within the same phrase are accomplished effortlessly in a recording that uses all six harps called for by Berlioz. The son of Protestant missionaries whose household had little tolerance for theatrical excesses, Mr. Nelson exuberantly took up the composer who, until Richard Wagner, symbolized excess more than any other in the music of the 19th century. He called Berlioz 'my patron saint in music.' The scores call for enormous forces and overpowering noise. But they also demand attention to what Berlioz called in his memoirs 'sounds independent of the principal melody, and of the accompanimental rhythm, and separated from each other at expanding or contracting distances in proportions impossible to predict.' Here Mr. Nelson excelled. The odd, jagged inflections that often permeate a Berlioz principal melody were never minimized by him. Gramophone, in its review of 'Les Troyens,' said the conductor had set 'a thrilling new benchmark for this epic opera.' Berlioz had always been a problem child in the pantheon of high romantic composers: too bombastic, noisy and rule breaking for his French compatriots, and too quirky and unpredictable for adherents of a more restrained classical canon. 'Berlioz was always the favorite musician of those who do not know much about music,' Claude Debussy wrote in a review in 1903. Nearly 85 years later, when Mr. Nelson suggested that Paris inaugurate its new Opera Bastille hall with 'Les Troyens,' he was told, to his astonishment, that that was 'out of the question.' Mr. Nelson said of Berlioz in a 2019 interview: 'In France, back in those days, he wasn't particularly well respected; he's so out of the ordinary. Berlioz is just a little too far out for them.' He added: 'I think finally he's begun to be recognized in France as one of their greatest.' Mr. Nelson had much to do with that. John Wilton Nelson was born on Dec. 6, 1941, in San José, the capital of Costa Rica, the son of Wilton and Thelma Nelson, who were missionaries with the Protestant Faith Mission. He returned to the United States when he was 11 to attend a private school in Orlando, Fla., where he began studying piano and organ. He graduated from Wheaton College Conservatory of Music in Illinois in 1963 and later studied under the conductor Jean Morel at the Juilliard School in New York, where he received the Irving Berlin conducting prize and earned a master's degree in choral and orchestral conducting in 1965. While still at Juilliard, he began conducting the Greenwich Philharmonia (now the Greenwich Symphony Orchestra) in Connecticut and the New Jersey Pro Arte Orchestra. His agent told him that he needed to 'make a splash in New York,' he recalled, and so it was that in the spring of 1972, Mr. Nelson assembled the necessary forces to introduce the city to 'Les Troyens' at Carnegie Hall. He had listened to a pioneering recording of it made by the British conductor Colin Davis, and 'it lit something up in me,' he said in the 2019 interview. Berlioz's 'musical language is so different from anybody else's.' The following year, 1973, the Metropolitan Opera called on him to replace the ailing Rafael Kubelik in a performance of the same work; Peter G. Davis of The New York Times said in his review that the young conductor 'exercised real authority.' Mr. Nelson's career was launched. A profile in The Times two years later called him 'the bright new hope' of the Met staff. He would go on to conduct the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra from 1976 to 1987; the Opera Theater of St. Louis, with which he was associated from 1985 to 1991; and leading orchestras all over the world, including ones in Boston, Chicago and New York. In 1998, he became music director of the Ensemble Orchestral de Paris (now the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris), where he remained for 10 years. His notable recordings include Berlioz's 'Beatrice et Benedict' and his orchestral oeuvre; Haydn's 'The Creation'; Beethoven's 'Missa Solemnis' and symphonies; Handel's 'Messiah'; and contemporary works. In addition to his daughter Ms. Chronopoulos, Mr. Nelson is survived by another daughter, Kirsten Nelson Hood; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. His wife, Anita (Johnsen) Nelson, died in 2012. After Mr. Nelson's death, in an interview on the French radio station France Musique, Alain Lanceron, his producer at Warner Classics, spoke of the 'humanity about him that came through in his recordings.' Mr. Nelson himself had a humble attitude toward the works he performed. 'My God is my composer,' he told the music journalist Bruce Duffie in 2009. 'If I serve myself, or if I serve anything else other than the composer, I feel like I'm being dishonest as an artist.'
