No roundabout path: Tempo accelerated toward Carmel Symphony's appointment of David Commanday

David Commanday built quickly upon two guest-conducting stints with the CSO.

Transitions toward new artistic leadership in the arts sometimes proceed at a glacial pace. Hiring a music director of a professional symphony orchestra is a process fraught with trials, delays, and second guesses. The Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra has been without a head of its conducting staff since Krzysztof Urbanski's tenure ended several years ago.

Not so with the appointment of David Commanday to lead the Carmel Symphony Orchestra. His predecessor, Janna Hymes, departed for a similar post in Arizona just before the current season opened. There was a sudden vacancy at the top as the CSO's Oct. 7 seasonal launch approached.

After the native Californian was brought in from his base in Illinois to conduct the first CSO concert of 2023-24, "the musicians of the CSO fell in love with Maestro Commanday at their first rehearsal," executive director Anne Marie Chastain said in a statement Dec. 12 announcing his hiring as music director. The transition from guest conductor to maestro in charge of the 85-member professional orchestra took just over two months.

Commanday also led a Veterans' Day concert Nov. 11. "Audiences are responding," Chastain added, "and we can't wait to see how the Carmel Symphony Orchestra evolves under [his] leadership."

In an interview with me last week, Commanday recalled: "I was not initially hired with a view to be a candidate. We hit it off well. It was very satisfying to work with the musicians there. There was a lot of pleasure in the hard work, and one thing led to another."

Commanday was also taken with the CSO's home, the Palladium at the Center for the Performing Arts. Among the notable features of the 1,600-seat hall from its inception has been its acoustical design. Impressed with the sound environment, the guest conductor detected some relatively blank spots onstage  that became evident in the orchestra's rehearsals for Oct. 7. 

Commanday's ear, trained in a number of different concert environments here and abroad, was sensitive to a few things that could be better. He knew the work of the Palladium's acoustics designer, Artec Consultants, from having conducted at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, which opened in 2011 in Newark, the same year the Palladium went into operation.

"It occurred to me from the podium it wasn't easy to hear the winds," Commanday recalled, so he asked a musician or two not playing a particular piece to go out into the hall. They reported the same gaps in the balance he had noticed. For the Veterans' Day concert, Commanday had the staff lower the acoustical "clouds" (glass canopies) to the recommended orchestral setting; for years, they had been up in a position better suited to amplified acts. 

Raised in an arts-rich environment in San Francisco, Commanday is the son of a prominent choral conductor and music critic, Robert Commanday, who died in 2015. Young David took to the cello at an early age, studying with Margaret Rowell. He credits her with unbelievable energy and the inspiration to build on his having immediately "made a connection with the voice of the cello." 

As a teen he advanced at the Tanglewood Music Festival, where he was appointed principal cellist, and became inclined toward conducting through work under the batons of Aaron Copland, Seiji Ozawa, and Leonard Bernstein. His college career at Harvard had him concentrating on psychology, while continuing his cello studies with the eminent teacher George Neikrug. 

"That convinced me that I needed more to make music than understand why other people  did." As a cellist, he has continued to be active to this day ("I like keeping a personal voice"), though he never nurtured dreams of a solo career. "Being an undergrad classmate of Yo-Yo Ma put that in perspective," Commanday said with a chuckle.

His principal training as a conductor was at the University of Vienna, though from his father he had learned how to read a score, starting at age 9. Near the end of his three years of study in the Austrian capital, he met his wife, a clarinetist. After marriage and moving back to the States, he and Karla Commanday-Mirosav raised three children,  now adults. The couple make their home in Peoria, Ill., with three Scotch terriers. 

Much of his conducting has focused on ballet, as well as leading youth orchestras, principally with the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra, which he led to national distinction. He has found the key to youth-orchestra success instilling a professional attitude to bring talented but inexperienced musicians to a realization of ensemble success. Conducting for dancers involves adding a further layer to the conductor's job, which he describes as  "enabling the composer's love letter to the audience so that it understands what the composer has in mind."

He conducted the Peoria Symphony Orchestra for ten years, ending in 2009 with his controversial dismissal. He lost no time in founding the Heartland Festival Orchestra, a chamber orchestra there that he still leads, exploring multi-platform ways of presenting music. 

"From its founding we were already set up to be doing video," Commanday said, "and we added live stream at that time. We commissioned a photo-choreographic work with photo imagery submitted from around central Illinois." The new CSO music director hopes that such technical expansion of the orchestra's activity will be possible in Carmel.

With Chastain, he will put his stamp on the first full season of his contract next year, setting up what she expects will be the official observance of the CSO's golden anniversary a couple of seasons hence.