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JOHN FLEMINGIn addition to being the Florida Orchestra's associate conductor, Susan Haig also serves as a community educator and symphony promoter.
When Susan Haig conducts a youth concert by the Florida Orchestra, she has to serve two masters.
She talks to the children about the music, asks them questions, gets them to clap along with a Strauss polka.
"It's a little like progressive jazz," Haig recently told an audience of schoolchildren about the final movement of Mozart's Symphony No. 40. "There's a nervousness, an anxiety to the music. Mozart was getting to the end of his life and was nervous about things."
One of the new associate conductor's most important roles is that of educator. So among her first tasks was deciding what the orchestra would play for as many as 40,000 students bused to special daytime concerts by the Pinellas and Hillsborough schools.
"It's often the first experience students have with a live orchestra," she said. "It can be a transforming experience, but it can also be one where you want to show a whole range of things. I want them to know the names Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, because you can build on that."
Her other master is the orchestra itself, top-flight musicians who must play the program she selects over and over.
"It's got to be repertoire that will engage them in some way, that they care about," Haig said. "It has to be high quality, it has to be interesting and a little bit unusual for them."
So in addition to the big names, her program includes dashes of originality, such as mariachi-flavored music by Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas and a new work called On the Wing, five minutes of colorful orchestration, soaring melody and chirpy minimalism by Alice Ho, a Canadian of Chinese descent.
In addition to the school concerts, Haig also conducts a range of programs, from morning coffee concerts to Sunday matinees, pops concerts to benefit soirees. She has a pair of masterworks programs, with Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique among the works in her debut season.
Haig, 49, is in front of the musicians for rehearsals and concerts as much, if not more, than music director Stefan Sanderling, also in his first season.
She succeeds the popular Thomas Wilkins, now with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. He had a high profile in the community and was especially popular in the schools.
Haig also will be called upon to promote the orchestra at a crucial time, when symphony orchestras are having trouble holding their place in American culture. A number of orchestras have folded, and budget cutbacks and deficits are common; Florida Orchestra musicians took a deep pay cut in September.
The orchestra advocate
Haig has an impressive background as an orchestra advocate. For 10 years, she was music director of the Windsor Symphony Orchestra, in the Ontario city across the river from Detroit. The orchestra had a deficit when she arrived in 1991 and was not seen as especially relevant in a largely blue-collar city of 200,000. She helped reposition the orchestra as part of a civic renaissance.
"When I arrived, the city lacked a certain confidence," she said. "Why would you want to come to Windsor?" people would ask. "Obviously it had a low self-image. We knew the orchestra would need to be part of what changed that."
Haig bolstered the orchestra's masterworks and pops series, as well as its programming of Mozart and baroque repertoire. She built up a Canadian music festival. She reached a wider public with tireless promotion of the orchestra.
"Susan put the Windsor Symphony Orchestra on the map in a huge way here," said David Palmer, director of the school of music at the University of Windsor. "She raised its profile to the point where it became a force in the city culturally and socially.
"One thing she did was bring in local artists to perform with the symphony. For example, I don't think the Italian Men's Chorus had ever sung with the symphony until they did a program on opera with her."
The Windsor orchestra, with a $1.4-million budget, was running in the black when Haig left two years ago to become music director of the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra in Sioux Falls. But she was music director only until last November.
She accomplished some innovative projects, such as having the orchestra record a state-funded CD of Mozart for babies and toddlers. But she resigned over differences with the board, which wanted a slower pace of growth than Haig thought necessary.
Taking up the baton
Haig did not follow a typical career path to the podium. Raised in Summit, N.J., her parents were avid music lovers. Her late father, Ernest Haig, was an executive with Martindale-Hubbell, the legal publisher; her mother, Elizabeth, who still lives in the house where Susan grew up, taught music and English and conducted children's choirs in church.
Susan started playing piano at 4, realized she had perfect pitch at 7 and took up the viola in fourth grade. But after high school, she decided not to accept admission as a performance major in piano and viola to the prestigious Indiana University School of Music. Instead, she got a liberal arts degree from Princeton University, graduating in 1976.
Princeton had a music faculty of formidable theoreticians, including Milton Babbitt, a composer of famously difficult music but a stimulating teacher. Babbitt was Haig's adviser for her senior thesis, an analysis of a Chopin Ballade.
"It was an exegesis," she said, laughing. "I wouldn't want to read it."
Haig decided to pursue conducting after earning a master's degree in piano at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, on Long Island. Her choice was between going on to get a doctorate in piano or switching to conducting.
"I remember thinking then if somebody told me that I could play piano at Carnegie Hall next week, I would just be terrified, but if somebody told me I had an opportunity to conduct there, I'd be thrilled," she said. "So I just knew that this was something that I had a deeper confidence in.
"For piano you have to have the technique that is totally reliable; for conducting you have to have this internal musical desire to make things happen, and that's something I felt I had."
Haig is modest about her piano playing, but it has put in her in good stead with Florida Orchestra musicians. One afternoon, in a recital hall at the University of South Florida, she played the piano reduction of the Beethoven Violin Concerto orchestra score with concertmaster Amy Schwartz Moretti, who was preparing for a performance of it on a masterworks program.
"She's so musical with her piano playing," Moretti said. "Usually when she's conducting, she's communicating with us verbally about what she'd like the music to be, but when you get to play with somebody, it's such a different feeling. You just feel it from their playing, and you don't have to speak it."
When Haig decided to become a conductor, women were rare in the field. Even today, the list of women who regularly appear on the orchestra podium or in the opera pit is short, with Marin Alsop, JoAnn Falleta, Jane Glover and Simone Young among the most prominent.
Haig does not dwell on the topic of gender and conducting. "I think most women do not want it to be a distinction, do not want to think of themselves as women conductors, and we don't. It's irrelevant, really. You're a conductor, just like a lawyer's a lawyer."
Haig, with a master's degree and doctorate in orchestral conducting from SUNY-Stony Brook, used her piano talent to get into opera as a coach and assistant conductor. For seven years, she worked with the Juilliard American Opera Center, Minnesota Opera, New York City Opera and the Canadian Opera Company.
"For a pianist who wants to be a conductor, it's just perfect," she said. "It's the way all these German conductors got going; they were all pianists, they all worked in the opera houses." (This was, in fact, precisely the career route taken in Germany by Kurt Sanderling, the eminent conductor and father of the Florida Orchestra's music director.)
"You learn an opera score from the inside out. Pretty soon you can live and breathe this opera, eventually the maestro gets sick, you get thrown in the pit, and that's how you become a conductor - in Germany, where they have so many performances of an opera."
But that's not the case in the United States, so the odds of a conductor calling in sick are long. Haig covered, or stood by, for many a maestro at New York City Opera but was never asked to step in at the last minute.
"We all had our concert dress in our locker. If anybody was sick, I hate to say, it was good news. It never happened."
Haig has since conducted more than a dozen operas, primarily in the Italian repertoire. But starting with a three-year tenure as resident staff conductor with the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, she changed gears.
"Professionally, one tracks into one or the other, and I've taken the orchestra track," she said. "In time, I'd like to do both."
Orchestra or opera: Does she have a preference?
"It might be that I would give opera an edge just because I love the voices and I also love that supporting role," Haig said. "When you're in the pit, it's the stage that's the focus, and you're in a supportive, facilitating role. You're in that as an orchestra conductor as well, but you tend to be the focus of the evening because you're the most visible, central person who's flailing away.
"I love the collaboration in opera. The pacing is an issue in being sensitive to singers. There's an ebb and flow, a certain unpredictability."
It takes a long time to rehearse an opera. "With an orchestra, you're almost immediately making music," Haig said.
A daunting challenge
The Florida Orchestra, with a budget of $7.5-million, is far larger than any group she has led before, and its problems are daunting. Morale is down after the recent budget reduction of almost $1-million.
"I hope with the arrival of a new team there will be an increase in the response of people," Haig said. "To me, that's the key to vitality, a broadening of the audience. The financial goals and the artistic goals come together when there's a larger audience hearing the music."
Haig, who is single and has a condo in South Tampa, says audience-building goes beyond the concert hall. She wonders, for example, why U.S. orchestras today appear so rarely on television, the medium that once brought baby boomers Leonard Bernstein's concerts for young people.
"I think it's the big missing link between the public and orchestras," she said. "TV is the great public square. That's the place where orchestras should be. I hope it can happen here."
She also ponders how the language of symphony orchestras creates barriers between people and music.
"Why do we continue to say "classical' music?"' Haig asked. "I've come to realize it puts the music in a straitjacket.
"It implies that we're not doing new music. It sanctions separating concert music from popular culture. Beethoven will win out if we just let him."
At a glance
Susan Haig conducts the Florida Orchestra in a coffee concert at 11 a.m. Friday in Ferguson Hall of the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. $17-$28. She also conducts free concerts with fireworks at 7 p.m. Friday in Tampa's Plant Park and 7 p.m. Saturday in St. Petersburg's Vinoy Park. 813 286-2403 or toll-free 1-800-662-7286 or www.floridaorchestra.org