Harville bids farewell to Great Falls Symphony; search for new conductor is underway
When Grant Harville takes the stage on May 10 to conduct Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, he’ll be taking a final bow.
Harville has been the music director and conductor of the Great Falls Symphony since the 2017-2018 season.
He was selected from among 115 applicants during a 15-month search process.
Eight seasons later, Harville is bidding Great Falls farewell to join his wife, Kim, and two and a half-year-old daughter Matilda in Victoria, British Columbia.
He’s been splitting his time between here and there for awhile, but “once she was born, something had to give.”
The question was where to go.
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His wife is a pianist with a specialty in accompanying opera companies, as she is in Victoria.
Harville said there’s more opportunity for him there than there is for her here, so that move made the most sense. He’s one of the four finalists for the music director position at the Okanagan Symphony Orchestra.
People often say Victoria is pretty as a draw, but it doesn’t sway him as much, as, Harville said, “Montana is pretty.”
For his final performance with the Great Falls Symphony, he selected Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, Resurrection.
The performance involves the Symphonic Choir and two guest soloists, Diana McVey and Kimberly James. The choir has been important to him and he wanted to bring the whole group together for his last act. He’s also worked with the soloists before and “I adore them.”
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The piece requires more instruments and there will be about 165 people on stage between the orchestra and choir on Saturday, according to Hillary Shepherd, the symphony’s executive director.
After the show, the symphony is hosting a complimentary champagne toast to Harville.
“This is your time to wish him well and perhaps see him for the last time,” Shepherd said.
There are some fun stories about how Mahler 2 breaks people’s brains or changes their lives in dramatic ways, Harvill said.
It’s not quite the same for him, but he’s loved it since he was a teenager and wrote his first musical history paper about the piece.
With everything Mahler writes, the “mood is crystal clear,” but putting all the pieces together gets complicated, he said.
“It’s rich and dynamic and fascinating,” Harville said.
Conductors tend to love Mahler as he was a conductor first and a composer second, Harville said.
“He wrote music to be conducted,” Harvill said. “It’s very challenging for me, the orchestra, everybody.”
Looking back, it’s clear to Harville now that his time in Great Falls was broken into his first 2.5 years, the COVID experience for about 2.5 years and his daughter was born 2.5 years ago.
His time was divided distinctly into three different ways of thinking and what was dominating his thoughts, he said.
Those distinct chapters of his Great Falls career didn’t necessarily build momentum, “but as these things enter and force change upon you, it requires you to be adaptable.”
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The symphony is a very different group now than when he started and he said one of his main goals is to leave the organization in a position for the next music director to come in with their vision and inspire the community.
Over the last eight seasons, a lot of work was done behind the scenes, he said, including getting all the musicians on master agreements.
That took a lot of work on the part of the organization and musicians themselves as a “huge cultural change,” that was really important, Harville said, and will help the next director.
The master agreement is one of Harville’s greatest contributions to the symphony’s long-term infrastructure, Shepherd said.
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The agreement “really galvanized the direction we’re going,” she said, and defined the musicians role in the organization and gave them a voice since they aren’t a union, but operated with a collective bargaining style concept.
The master agreements have been in place for three or four years now and were “transformational” for how the symphony approached everything from hiring to managing the orchestra.
Harville was also part of the process to develop and adopt a five-year master plan, she said.
Because of those organizational efforts, all Great Falls Symphony musicians have competitive wages, she said.
As an artist, “he’s extremely talented,” Shepherd said, and they couldn’t have asked for a better music director over his last eight seasons.
He had a humble approach, she said, and put in the work to know everything about the music they were performing.
Harville also had a “mathematical way of programming” that allowed him to determine how much rehearsal time was needed for the orchestra, and anyone performing with them, to be prepared, Shepherd said.
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Among the highlights of his time in Great Falls, “having Bela Fleck was just awesome,” and Harville had worked with the banjo player a few times.
“The concert with Supaman, that’s one you don’t forget,” he said.
It might not have been as noticeable but the concert featuring music by Haydn and Mozart with Caitlin Cisler as soloist was important to Harville.
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Haydn “hits me in a personal way,” that Harville said he couldn’t explain, but it “hits me in a way that makes my brain rattle.”
Any time the choir takes the stage, “I really enjoy,” and the April concert that featured Sheherezade allowed them to shine.
For the first five years of his time here, Harville also conducted the youth orchestra.
“Kids have a way of being honest that can hit you in unexpected ways,” he said of those fun moments.
A few conversations with some students “are going to stay with me for a long time.”
Asked if there was anything he’d wished he could have done or performed during his eight seasons, he said he didn’t get to play Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony.
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There are probably 10,000 pieces he’ll never conduct, but eight years is a lot of music, Harville said.
“We got to do so much great stuff,” he said.
During the pandemic, they had to shift operations and performances, but that allowed the symphony to do some smaller events they might not have done otherwise.
Great Falls is a city of about 60,000 with a larger metro area of about 80,000 “with a million dollar symphony. There are communities 10 times our size that would struggle to do $250,000.”
There’s something unique about Montana, where communities are sort of like their own islands and they “don’t have to fake community,” Harville said. “Great Falls is Great Falls and everybody knows that.”
There’s a strong sense of community and being a bit in the middle of nowhere, there’s also a sense of self reliance.
“If we’re going to get something done, we’re going to do it ourselves,” he said, which was a sentiment that built such a strong local symphony that is entering an exciting time.
The next season, which is scheduled to begin in October, will feature the six candidates for music director and conductor, one for each concert throughout the season.
The two year search process began this season and drew 238 applicants from across the globe, Shepherd, the symphony’s executive director, said.
The symphony established a 12-person search committee composed of conductors, musicians and those with administration experiences.
They broke into teams of three, with each reviewing about a quarter of the applications, whittling the list down to 13 candidates who were asked to answer a set of questions on video, Shepherd said.
The full search committee reviewed those responses and further narrowed the list down to six candidates with two alternates.
The top six were scheduled for the season’s concerts and started programming, which “gets perspective of how they thing,” Shepherd said. “Programming is a vessel by which to achieve an artistic vision.”
“Really amazing programs” are planned for the search season and “our community will be involved” through surveys and events.
“It’s going to be a pretty amazing time getting to know everybody. It will be fulfilling and exciting for everybody involved and the community gets a say,” Shepherd said, “in making sure the next maestro or maestra is the perfect fit for Great Falls.”
For Harville, music was “sort of part of the furniture growing up.”
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His parents both had strong musical backgrounds with his accountant father serving as a church choir director and his mother as a music teacher.
Growing up, he was in choir and played the viola and tuba, but didn’t initially think of music as a career.
“It was when I was 12, I thought this is what I’m going to do,” though he said he’s not sure exactly what drew him in.
Carrying a tuba back and forth every day during middle school didn’t make him the most popular kid and he didn’t get beat up, but participating in the youth orchestra was significant for Harville.
“Those are the people where I didn’t have to pretend, I could be the person I wanted to be,” he said.
Playing instruments and singing, Harville liked music history and theory and enjoyed watching the conductor, but never had plans to become one.
In his early 20s, Harville had to take a conducting class for his degree program and “it was like a light bulb, oh, this is what I’m meant to be doing.”
The Wisconsin native said he sorta talked his way into a conducting program and has stayed employed ever since.
Orchestras largely existed because of opera, Harville said, and the notion of large musical productions that anyone could attend was “absurd” before opera.
It wasn’t expected to be a big event, but it was, and the orchestra evolved and has always been community focused ensembles, he said.
When musicians create things, they create what makes sense to them and it’s a window into their consciousness, “making a statement of humanity’s place in the universe,” Harville said.
Music tells you something about humanity and with a large range of music ranging from Mozart to Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini, the symphony’s range “allows us to see humanity from all these other perspectives,” Harville said. “The place where we become more aware of what it means to be human beings, we’re strengthening the bonds of the community, that’s where the orchestra lives.”
Some of the offbeat pieces that might be unexpected favorites include a piece by Rodion Shchedrin that loosely translates as “naughty limericks,” based on a Russian satirical poem. It’s a jazzy thing with some vaguely disrespectful sounds and “it’s a lot of fun.”
His daughter’s name is Matilda, which in French is Mathilde, and whenever she here’s the song APT by ROSÉ and Bruno Mars, she gets excited because she thinks they’re singing her name. It’s a song Harville said he’s been hearing a lot lately.
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Some of his favorite offbeat orchestral pieces include Iron Foundry, which is some of the “scariest music you’ve ever heard in your life,” and Boris Blacher’s Orchestral Variations on a Theme by Niccolò Paganini.
A lot of a classical musician’s education is teaching them how to listen to music and while they think they’re learning to play, “the music is teaching us how it works,” Harville, and “classical musicians tend to have very varied tastes.”
Having moved to Great Falls from Pocatello, Idaho, Harville said, “in a smaller place that’s sort of out of the wat, it’s really easy to see the challenges of that or the things that we don’t have and forget about the ways that it can be fantastic if we want it.”
Asked if there was anything he’d want to add, Harville summed up his eight years in Great Falls.
“It’s been great.”
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