By Anne W. Semmes
Come this Friday and Saturday evening the Performing Arts Center at Purchase College will be filled once again with the joy-filled music – after a hiatus of four years – of Rob Mathes’ now 29th Holiday Concert. To catch up with the award-winning, ever-performing, composing, and now rehearsing Mathes, we asked him a few questions about his much anticipated Holiday concert to get a flavor of what he will be presenting on stage and how he’s been faring.
GS: What are you most proud of in the last two (Covid) years in your musical life?
RM: The single most significant thing that happened to me in the past two years was being asked to musically direct the 00 with the New York Philharmonic. Part of that evening with orchestrating and conducting a 15-minute Suite from “Hamilton” for Lin-Manuel Miranda and Alex Lacamoire, his longtime music supervisor, and the rest was working with Renée Fleming, Sara Bareilles, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Bernadette Peters, Vanessa Williams, last year’s Tony-Winning Actress Joaquina Kalukango and Brandon Victor Dixon, arranging many of those orchestrations and indeed conducting.
My great hero, the musician Leonard Bernstein, I followed relentlessly in my formative years. I attended concerts in the shell of what is now David Geffen Hall (then Avery Fisher.) To be conducting Bernstein’s orchestra in a sense was astonishing. Obviously, my life had prepared me for it. The orchestra was great with me, and I was ready after a lifetime of writing and conducting hundreds upon hundreds of scores.
Still, it was a mountaintop experience in every way and my thanks go out to the great producer Jeffrey Seller, who produced “Hamilton,” “In The Heights,” “RENT, “and Sting’s “Last Ship,” who asked me to do it, and Deborah Borda and Henry Timms, the powerful and brilliant executives in charge of the whole thing – Deborah being president of The Philharmonic and Henry as president of the Lincoln Center. Brilliant people!
Right before lockdown I orchestrated and conducted the songs in the movie “In The Heights” and then did the same for the song score of Lin-Manuel’s directorial debut “Tick…Tick…Boom.” I worked with the band Weezer and the LA Philharmonic on a concert at Disney Hall. I did the string arrangements for the new soul classics record by Bruce Springsteen, which was wonderful as always, and worked with Sting, who produced a Reggae Sinatra project for “Shaggy,” which has been nominated for a Grammy. Those two men, who are actually very close friends with each other, are amazing to be around. Absolute giants. I produced and arranged five tracks that were filmed for a COVID benefit online for the David Lynch Foundation, one of which featured Elvis Costello, who I have spent a good amount of time with on a fledgling musical of his called “Face in The Crowd.” He is another world treasure. I have been incredibly fortunate.
GS: What inspired you to begin these concerts 29 years ago?
RM: My parents, music teachers Joan and George Mathes, now 88 and 90 years old respectively, are as well known for their love and graciousness as they are for their musical abilities. The Mathes home was all about the holiday, its message, and its atmosphere. I was brought up on the story of the manger and the kings and shepherds and the star. While my parents were very religious, they were not dogmatic, they were open. They made November and December months of delight and taught us the ideas of this child, born to bring peace and goodwill, in the best of all ways.
I always wrote Christmas music for various churches, various hymn-like chorales, and pop songs. It was initially odd to be making manger-themed music influenced by Joni Mitchell and Peter Gabriel but, when I was in my early twenties flirting hard with agnosticism, I would write about the grinding gears of that battle of faith and hope with cynicism and despair. I got over two albums of music out of that rub, “William the Angel” and “Wake Up, Its Christmas Morning” being two of the almost 30 songs, many of which have been covered by other artists at this point, the material that is the backbone of the concert. When I see some of the things done in the name of a loving creator these days, I am horrified but the holiday always brings me back to the essential message.
GS: What composers or musical influences are you featuring this year in your pop, jazz, rhythm and blues pieces?
RM: I am a musical polymorph. I love Vaughan Williams as much as Joni Mitchell, Duke Ellington as much as Radiohead, and Bob Dylan. It is a true mash-up and in the years since it became the Holiday Concert, as opposed to the Christmas Concert, partially because of the grace and advocacy of Rabbi Mark Golub and his family, I have expanded the palette of what we do. You hear big-band oriented arrangements alongside the ever-present influence of Dylan and The Band and Joni Mitchell.
GS: What stars make up the fabric of this concert?
RM: NO STARS. Let me repeat that: NO… STARS. It is family!!! People tend to pay attention more and tickets sell quicker obviously when Sting or Michael McDonald or David Sanborn and Vanessa Williams sing along with us. That said, for 22 of the 28 concerts, all we have had are the riches of our wondrous regular company, D-Train and Vaneese Thomas, two of the finest singers on the planet, my regular 40-strong Choir of Saints and Friends, a six-piece Horn Section of New York’s Finest, and my long-time band of Will Lee on Bass, Billy Masters on Guitar and Ricky Knutsen on Keyboards. These people are the backbone of the concert. The audience that comes back year after year comes because of these people, not because of the stars. I am sure I had a bunch of people come to the concert because of Sting in 2018. That’s fine. I am glad they came. The regular company is a gift.
GS: What are moving new pieces you are featuring?
RM: We always switch things up and bring songs back we haven’t played in a while so there will be some surprises, but you know what??? This is a year of returns. We are back playing live. We are going to dig deep into the main repertoire of this concert, most of which our audience has heard before, but not in FOUR YEARS. We are going to chomp down on music that means a lot to us and revel in it as if it was almost taken away from us. Indeed, it was taken away from us in the years since 2018.
GS: What pieces do you see speaking to our present time?
RM: The message of the holiday will speak to every era and every time. Open baskets, open arms, open hearts, open homes. Warmth, fragility, tenderness, hope, the promise of new life.
GS: Why your choice of charity: Food Rescue US – Fairfield County?
RM: When we did our YouTube filming for the fans last year, I discovered a number of Stamford and Greenwich residents were deeply involved in this amazing charity that gets food from all over the area that would be thrown in trash bins and increase carbon emissions and they get it to hungry people. Tons of Food is eaten by the hungry instead of thrown out. Food Rescue is a great local charity, though its work is now nationwide. I am just thrilled I have met them, and we have a new partner that we can support.
For more information on the Rob Mathes Holiday Concert at the Performing Arts Center at Purchase College and to purchase tickets visit artscenter.org.
