IS HE THE ONE?

Maybe, but guest conductor's name is pronounced OH-nay

By Rich Copley RCOPLEY@HERALD-LEADER.COM

Darryl One had an appointment to meet the press, but something else came up: a pickup basketball game.

Invited to play a midday game at the High Street YMCA, the conductor asked to delay a lunch date for 90 minutes.

Some around here might say the third aspirant to succeed George Zack as music director of the Lexington Philharmonic Orchestra has his priorities in the right order. And the maestro, who holds a master’s degree from Indiana University, talks enthusiastically about his excitement at being in yet another basketball hotbed.

But that’s only after a good two hours of chatter about conducting and music while sitting at Cheapside Bar and Grill.

One (pronounced OH-nay) grew up in Chicago dabbling in music, but he was fairly convinced his future lay in numbers.

“I was in the high school choir, but I didn’t know too much about music back then,” One says. “I had played drums in a garage band. We played what was current at that time. This one guitarist liked the Edgar Winter Group, so we did Free Ride and things like that ... These guys wanted to make money, so we tried to be a wedding band and learned things like the Hokey Pokey. It was mostly an opportunity to sock your drums and turn your guitar up high.”

But math was his “strong suit,” so One entered the University of Illinois as a math major. Still, music held an appeal for him, so he went to the music department to see whether he could sign up for some classes. He ended up with the best score on the department’s music aptitude test that year and was placed in the second level of music theory.

“I thought, ‘Maybe I should think about being in music,’” One says. “But I didn’t know exactly what I could do, since I wasn’t a virtuoso violinist or anything. I was a garage band drummer, so I couldn’t make a career at an instrument and performing on it.

“I went into composition and liked that. My undergraduate degree was in theory and composition.”

But he wound up directing two chamber ensembles and being the assistant director of the orchestra in his senior year.

His path was clear.

After graduate work at IU, he landed his first gig, as assistant conductor of the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra in North Carolina. Two years later, he landed the same post at what was then the Denver Symphony (now it’s the Colorado Symphony Orchestra).

Those jobs, and a subsequent post as associate conductor of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, gave One an appreciation of how orchestras that play together often play well.

He recalls a summer concert in Atlanta, with Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 was on the program. Instead of rehearsing the orchestra on the piece, which it had played often, he simply asked them to watch him in the first movement, because wanted it slower in one spot.

“It was one of the best Tchaik 4’s I ever did,” One says. “After the concert, a few of the musicians said, ‘We really liked what you did there. And I said, ‘Oh, the way it slowed down?’

They said, ‘Well, that. But what we really liked is you trusted us,’ and so as a result, they did I everything I wanted them to do. It was one mind, which was kind of great.”

It’s a unity of mind One has tried to engender in his music director posts with the Victoria Symphony Orchestra in Victoria, Texas, a post he has held since 1995, and at the Modesto Symphony in California, where directed six seasons, ending in 2005.

One says that kind of unity and well-prepared musicians enable an orchestra to explore the nuances of a piece, as opposed to just getting the notes correct.

At his first Philharmonic rehearsal , One and the orchestra launched into Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 after a brief introduction, and played it straight through. Then he went back, working to sharpen phrases and sculpt dynamic shifts in the music.

In addition to the music, One has an eye on fund-raising and audience development, with projects such as “Symphony Savvy” classes he’s offered in Victoria. Last year, he says he billed the series like an infomercial, promising attendees that afterward they’d be able to identify when pieces were composed and who the composer was. This season, he says the class is writing a symphonic score that the orchestra will play at the final rehearsal of the season.

“I wanted to give a little added value to our subscribers and attract new people,” One says of the classes.

In programming, One says, he shoots for themed seasons that help give pieces context and the orchestra’s marketing department a hook for ticket sales.

“If you program a season with a link that goes through it, people are more apt to say, ‘I want to hear the whole thing,’” One says. “When you program a Beethoven cycle, there are people who want to say they’ve heard all the Beethoven symphonies, or all the Vivaldi seasons or Brandenburg concertos.”

He’s done higher concept seasons with themes like Shakespeare or a storybook season with a name like “Tales and Scales.”

If he gets the Lexington gig, maybe One could come up with a basketball season.

Reach Rich Copley at (859) 231-3217 or 1-800-950-6397, Ext. 3217.