Read selected excerpts from Ginette DePreist’s memoir Reach Up: My Beautiful Journey with James DePreist below or download a PDF (483KB) to read offline.

Foreword

Perhaps the best way to introduce this book is to say that James DePreist is easy to talk about yet hard to describe. As I began writing, I asked myself one question: Why did you love Jimmy so much? When one man encompasses so many admirable qualities, it seems almost trivial to simply say he was a conductor, yet he was a conductor—and a teacher, a poet, a diplomat, and an outstanding human being.

I met him in the summer of 1984 at the Aspen Music Festival. He was a big deal. I was not.

He agreed to conduct the Shostakovich Violin Concerto with a young, unknown soloist. It was my first performance of a concerto that would later become the signature piece of my career. That day became known as Super Shosta Sunday, and it was the beginning of a treasured friendship that I would hold close to my heart for the rest of my life.

Rehearsing and performing with Jimmy was joyous, and I can honestly say, as any soloist would, that is a rarity. The support and freedom he allowed me was astonishing, and I always felt he loved what he was hearing. After performing my concerto, I would sit in the audience, listen to the second half, and marvel at how he could direct an entire symphony and make it sound like one beautifully crafted sentence.

I worked with him all over the world, but the concerts we played together in Portland were my favorites because that was his home and because I was able to spend so much time with him and his stunning wife, Ginette. For a brief period, I was a welcome visitor in the most amicable and gratifying working environment I had ever experienced. By that, I mean the orchestra, administration, and audience all seemed to realize how lucky they were. It was Camelot, because he was a rock of leadership that never wavered.

Now, much later in life, I see clearly how this man affected and influenced me on so many levels and how lucky I was to have spent so much time with him.

That brain of his that I siphoned from every moment I had with him. Conversations that covered every subject imaginable while watching him “properly” prepare romaine lettuce for a Caesar salad. Learning, always learning, about music, about people, about diplomacy, about kindness. I learned so much from his immense humanity.

Then there was his humor. There wasn’t a rehearsal, meal, car trip, or moment backstage that wasn’t filled with laughter. The kind of laughing where your stomach hurts, you think you might need medical attention, and when you finally calm down and breathe again, he simply smiles at you. In that moment, you felt that everything in the world was right and just and beautiful. This was a moment you were grateful to be alive.

This was Jimmy. I was privileged to know him as a musician, a mentor, and a man and to be embraced by him. We all were.

—Nadja Solerno-Sonnenberg, World Renowned Violist

Introduction

I was trying, through writing this book, to reserve a space for an accurate description of Jimmy’s style, his unique talent, and what it meant for him to be a conductor. It became evident that I wouldn’t be capable of doing as good a job as Murry Sidlin, his friend and colleague for more than forty years. In Murry’s 2020 essay collection about conductors, Conduct Becoming, he painted a great portrait of Jimmy—who his friend was as a human being and a musician and the great conductor he became:

A summer evening concert at the Kennedy Center had just finished; Jimmy conducted Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana with a massive choir, 3 superb soloists, and the extraordinary musicians of the National Symphony. The ovation was greater than Mt. Vesuvius at its powerful moment of expressivity. Jimmy was only using one cane at that time. However, he did sit on a tall stool located on the podium when he conducted. Even though he didn’t move much when he conducted, he radiated, with his gestures, all that was necessary to give to the players the musical ingredients that were essential to recreate the music.

After 5 curtain calls, he made his way to the dressing room and collapsed into a comfortable armchair. A back-stage assistant brought him a towel and a tall glass of ice water, both badly needed. I entered the room applauding and all smiles, and behind me came the orchestra personnel manager Armando Sarro who piped up, “I haven’t seen such excitement since the day my Uncle Giovani fell in the sewer.” Jimmy’s belly laugh rocked the room. Would Armando have made that comment to Dor.ti, Bernstein, Ormandy, Szell, Fruebeck de Burgos, Munch, or Solti? Of course not. He made the comment to Jimmy because he knew he could, he knew that Jimmy would enjoy it and that Jimmy’s warmth and secure station in his artistic life invited humor at any time, giving and receiving.

What I remember most about Jimmy’s conducting of that concert was that the major explosive moments, and there were plenty, received major intensity from Jimmy’s eyes, opened and closed, the angle of his head, and the varying of width of his upper torso. The movement of his arms and hands alternated from lyrical to firm to very firm, but not in the way other conductors would thrust their arms about to achieve greater height for greater sound. The musicians understood it, and he never explained it; he just did it, and they played it.

Why was he such a great conductor? Because he was a poet; I mean, a real poet. The first published collection entitled, The Precipice Garden (University of Portland Press, 1986) is remarkable. When I read his poems, I realize again that what makes music a phenomenon is the expressive space between the beats, or the time that we take to go from place to place in the score. The comments made by William Stafford at the conclusion of his collection seem on target: “Art knows more than we do.” “Hidden connections.” “The power of discovery.” Stafford has connected Jimmy’s poetry to his music making. Stafford got it!

I remember going to all of his rehearsals over 8 years in Portland, and after the series of rehearsals was completed for the forthcoming concert, one would expect from him and the musicians a recreation of where they had arrived and a perfect performance of comfort and sharp image to remind us of the profundity of that composition, and what we know of its meaning. That’s what they worked to achieve in those rehearsals. Instead, at the concert, we experienced, as William Stafford observed, “that art knows more than we do,” and that he uncovered “hidden connections” and things we did not know about this music until well into the performance when we experienced the “power of discovery.” It’s all language, whether colored in sonic diversity or in a few words with contemplative time in between. He loved and accepted the mystery of it all. He did or did not know how the music would evolve, and then how it would resolve.

Most conductors become associated with certain repertoire or a single work above all others. For Jimmy, it was Rachmaninoff’s Symphony no. 2. I must have heard him conduct it twenty times, and each time he was deeper into it and able to surround himself with moments of beauty that were different, not as in focus as the last time. With a man as brilliant as Jimmy, who was unafraid to wear a miner’s helmet with a flashlight when conducting, you never knew what would look up at you from the green earth or the score.

—Murry Sidlin, Well-known American Conductor

Conclusion

I wrote this book to show what a wonderful life I had with James DePreist but also, and most importantly, what a unique human being he was. He achieved things most people would have judged impossible.

Jimmy’s determination to succeed in a world that even today is struggling to emerge from a cultural shell was enormous. What it took for him to navigate the narrow road most conductors had to travel if they wanted a decent career was nothing short of a miracle. For conductors of Jimmy’s era, the norm was classical training from an early age. Tutoring by well-known and acclaimed teachers or conductors from renowned institutions was a requisite, the candidates had to be white males, and they had better chances if they were aesthetically pleasing.

Today, the world of conducting has barely opened its door to women, although progress is underway on that front. As for African American conductors, there might be some, but many have yet to receive the attention and recognition they deserve. They are still very much in the shadows.

Jimmy never took the road well traveled to reach his goals. He was given a map that was outside the box with different rules. He was never classically trained, and he entered the conducting world at the age of twenty-six, but this compass was never faulty. He was brilliant on all levels from the music he conducted to his voluminous writing, which is still in circulation. He always managed to find a way, with determination, to navigate his journey.

I’m even more in love with him today than I was when we met. He was a unique, remarkable man.

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