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Introduction

Teatime with the Maestro

The Screen House Effect
Film in Knoxville in the year 2000

Shadows and Light
An electronic look into Laestrygonians, theater, world premieres, and Knoxville

What's going on?
Check the following schedule of local arts and cultural events.

Kirk Trevor confronts rumors, Knoxville's peculiar audiences and the 21st century

by Jack Neely

Knoxville Symphony Orchestra boosters claim it's the oldest symphony orchestra in the South. It traces its origins to the classical ensemble that German immigrant Gustavus Knabe founded in Knoxville in the 1860s, not long before the construction of Staub's Opera House. The KSO's direct lineage begins in 1910, with Bertha Roth Walburn Clark's

string quartet, which grew into a larger orchestral group in the 1920s. The full-sized Knoxville Symphony Orchestra formed in 1935.

The fact that Knoxville has a symphony orchestra is one of the city's vital statistics, often mentioned alongside UT and McGhee Tyson Airport. It's one of those things civic boosters brag about, even if they never go to a performance.

The KSO has offered performances continuously for 65 years. For nearly a quarter of that period, its conductor has been Englishman Kirk Trevor. Originally a cellist, Trevor studied conducting at London's Guildhall School of Music in the 1970s. He conducted other American symphonies before the KSO hired him to replace exiting conductor Zoltan Rosnyai in 1985. After 16 years, the 48-year-old Trevor has been at the helm of the orchestra longer than any other director besides 26-year conductor David Van Vactor. For the last several years, a large oil portrait of a radiant Trevor, in tuxedo, has hung in the lobby of the Tennessee Theatre.

At his house on a piney hillside south of the river, Kirk Trevor is just back from his second home in the Czech Republic, where he conducts an orchestra in the city of Zlin. Of his three, now four homes—in Bratislava, capital of the Slovak Republic (near Zlin), Indianapolis, and, soon, Columbia, Missouri, where he'll be conducting the Missouri Symphony Orchestra in the summers—Knoxville is the principal one. Obviously, it helps that his home is near Alcoa Highway and the airport.

With CNBC on mute, Trevor's unpacking, preparing for the evening's rehearsal, and answering calls from agents, trying to juggle next season's schedule. In camping shorts and a plain T-shirt, he's not the sort of guy it's easy to call "maestro." His luggage is still in the living room, and he hunts for his ringing cordless phone as he makes tea in the kitchen.

"Often, the answer to your question about how we came from where we are to how we came here is..." He trails off, and you infer by the distant clomping sounds that he's found himself in some other portion of his house.

He returns after a while and relaxes as much as he can with a cup of tea and sits still long enough to talk frankly about his tenure with the KSO.

He's not as concerned about whether the KSO is or isn't the oldest orchestra in the Southeast as are the marketing folks who write the program copy. "The thing about 65 is that you do feel there's some foundation for the orchestra's existence," he says.

For now, that existence seems secure, but things could be better. After reaching an all-time high a few years ago, season-ticket sales have been dwindling, down to 2,300 this year of a possible 3,000. Trevor and others close to the symphony seem uncertain about how to interpret the slump.

Still, the KSO has hardly ever been busier. In his tenure, Trevor has added the pops series, five weekends a year that the KSO backs up a visiting pop star, as well as accompaniments to ballet and opera performances.

"I was hired, I think, to add zest and life and a new image, to reinvent the KSO," Trevor says. " They hired a 32-year-old whippersnapper who had a lot of experience in pops and reaching out to a big constituency. They hired me to step out of the box, and the box it was in was small. When I came here 16 years ago, the orchestra had seven weekends of masterworks, five weekends of chamber, a total of 12 weekends of performances, and that was it."

He enumerates the current agenda of the KSO, which is much busier than it ever was in the days of Van Vactor or Rosnyai. "Thirty weekends we're now playing," he says. "We've added variety, not just numbers. I still think there's a large amount of room for further growth in the variety of concerts we offer. We're still expanding along the same tracks: the pops field, the standard classical field, and collaborative partnerships with opera, ballet, theater.

"It's a juggling act, getting more and more complicated. Knoxville has a lot of great culture, but it has inherent problems," he says, especially with scheduling the ever-busier KSO, as well as trying to avoid same-weekend clashes with other area events.

"It is amazing that on any given night in Knoxville there might be a symphony performance, a dance performance, a musical running at the Civic, a rock concert at Thompson-Boling, an outstanding choral or instrumental concert at UT Music Hall, as well as some truly first-class programs that our local churches put on," he says. "That, for me, is the strength and weakness of our situation. Too many cultural choices at times!"

Those choices, though, don't include the family series, a concert series for parents and children, for which Trevor had high hopes. "Perhaps my biggest frustration has been the sad lack of an audience for our family series," he says.

He's proud of his work in the development of the pops series, but says "popular" music isn't always as popular as marketers expect. "You think you know," he says. "We had a great pops program last year, and it just didn't sell." He mentions disappointing sales for legendary Drifters vocalist Ben E. King. "If somebody'd told me the biggest-selling pops concert in the last 10 years would be the Kingston Trio—that and the Moody Blues—I would have said 'You're crazy!'"

"You shrug your shoulders and say, what would sell in Knoxville? Dolly Parton would sell. Well, Dolly Parton won't do a show with us."

He seems relieved the upcoming season's pops series is indeed selling well, already outdoing last year's: the KSO will accompany Anne Murray, the Temptations, the Beatles tribute "Beatlemania," the Four Tops, and Burt Bacharach. "If you bring people back, they bring back the same audience. That's not the case with classical. But with Pops, the risks are large. If you don't sell, you can have a $60,000 loss on one concert. That was the whole budget of the KSO about 20 years ago."

He thinks the whole program, including the classical series, could be improved with more aggressive marketing. Tossing a brochure across the coffee table, he offers an example of what he considers effective marketing tactics: a promotion for the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, which, for a few weekends a year, Trevor also directs. Large on the cover is a photograph of renowned Canadian violinist Lara St. John, posing nearly nude. "That's the kind of marketing I like," Trevor says. "Creative, imaginative—risque, perhaps." He's not certain how well such marketing would go over in Knoxville; in any case, KSO promoters aren't going for it.

He professes to be surprised that some consider the KSO's repertoire to be relatively conservative.

"I don't think of myself as conservative," he says. "The word eight years ago was that we were too progressive. I was more daring and, according to our marketing department, paid the price in dwindling subscriptions. Of course, some want the Beethoven Five andWilliam Tell at every concert." Tastes for more familiar works are reflected in ticket sales. "There's no doubt the highest ticket sales we have had have been relatively conservative: Beethoven Five and Six sold out. Verdi's Requiem sold out."

"Most of the stuff we play is 100 years old," he allows. "Even Stravinsky is 100 years old now. If I play Stravinsky, and people think that's conservative, well I have to throw my hands up and think about the 5,000 people who think that Stravinsky's as far as I should go.

Still, he regularly does go farther than that. "We do new music, if not always what people would consider avant garde. I am of the opinion that contemporary music should connect to your audience in some way, so that it will still have some traditional features for the audience to hang on to. Music by Joan Tower and James McMillan and Jennifer Higdon that we have performed in the last three years falls into that category."

"I think it has become less liberal, less far out there, than it was between five and eight years ago," he admits. "Some might say it's too conservative because you don't have an avant-garde piece in every program." To support an avant-garde program, he says, the metropolitan area would need 3,000 people who really like avant-garde music. He estimates the real number is about 500.

"The mistake I think a lot of people make is that they try and somehow confuse symphony and pop. The fact is, we are not a rock band, we are a symphony orchestra." The symphony orchestra is basically a 19th-century construction, he says, spanning Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Mahler. "This repertoire represents the canon of orchestral music, and cannot be ignored."

That said, though, he says he'd like to try some of the work of David Byrne, late of the art-rock group the Talking Heads. "And I would love to play the music of Frank Zappa—he wrote a lot of orchestral music—if I could convince the board that we would not alienate an orchestral audience. Of course, it wouldn't fit into either the Masterworks series or the Pops series. I think it would need to be identified as a different series. Like extreme sports, I'd call it Extreme Concerts."

Trevor believes orchestral music will survive into the 21st century. "It soothes the soul," he says slowly. "It calms the heart." Then, speaking more rapidly, he starts over with a new thought. "What orchestral music has that pop music doesn't, is orchestral music invigorates the imagination, challenges and questions the intellect. There are layers, levels on which you can appreciate the music." He says much of the best of orchestral music appeals to the novice and to the scholar.

Compared to other orchestras, Trevor says the KSO is a little on the Romantic side. "There are certain things we do well and better than others. I certainly can be regarded as a specialist in the late-19th century repertoire, 1880-1920 or 1930: those 50 years. French impressionists, Ravel, Debussy. Mahler. This orchestra had no Mahler experience beforehand, but now we've almost done a complete cycle."

Compared to other orchestra audiences, he says Knoxville's is distinct in positive and negative ways. "Knoxville is enthusiastic. But they seem enthusiastic for the orchestra's existence. The audience loves having a symphony orchestra of this caliber in town. At the same time, I find them a little impassive about the quality of the performances there."

He brings up an example of a recent performance of a Dvorak piece, "an outstanding performance," Trevor says, that got the polite standard response that he says the orchestra gets even when they're under par.

"There's almost a set length of time a Knoxville audience will respond: 46 seconds they will applaud, and that's all. Not always emotional about really what they've heard. Their passion is not for the music, but for the orchestra itself. The audience has no qualm about a standing ovation—but it's a passionless standing ovation that I find extraordinary. Almost as if the audience is applauding the fact that the orchestra got through it. I seriously think you could give an abysmal performance and a great performance and it would be the same. And that troubles me."

Some believe that the audience, and the orchestra itself, might be energized with a new conductor. Big cities swap conductors on a fairly regular basis, often sparking new popular interest in the symphony. Several musicians in the KSO say that, while Trevor has made significant contributions to the growth of the symphony, a new conductor would be a "shot in the arm."

Trevor denies rumors that he's about to step down. "I have heard this rumor for years," he says. "Wishful thinking, perhaps." He admits his managers have applied for other jobs on his behalf, and that "I do not see myself staying in Knoxville forever. I think that would be hazardous to all our healths."

"I love the town," he says. "I love the mountains. If I could get a job in Knoxville as a stockbroker or a lawyer, I would—that is, if I left the orchestra.

"Of course, there are always going to be small things you don't like," he adds. "The late-night eating here, I think, is abysmal. Every restaurant in Knoxville closes at 10." He admits he has some of the same problems in Bratislava, where he keeps an apartment.

"The reality is I have been a candidate in a number of different places," he says. "Everybody applies for jobs. The fact that I'm being considered, that my managers apply on my behalf, doesn't mean I'm leaving next month or next year or in the next five years. Does that mean you're a loser if you don't get it? It's like the Olympics, but there's no silver medal, no bronze medal in the conducting field."

Sometimes he does get it. "I happen to have just been appointed to conduct the Missouri Symphony Orchestra, in Columbia." It's strictly a summers-only post that folds in well with the KSO, which takes summers off.

"Football coaches stay until they start losing. Maybe some people would say I'm losing. There are some weaknesses, but I think the orchestra plays well. I can't stay here forever. I'm well aware of that."