Larry Rachleff conducted the Shepherd School Symphony Orchestra at Rice University for three decades. He did not like to be called “maestro.”
“In fact, he would get mad at you,” says Matthew Loden, the Lynette S. Autrey Dean of Music at the Shepherd School. “In a very professorial way, he'd get a little annoyed and make sure that you just called him ‘Larry'."
“He was very ecumenical in how he worked with people,” adds Loden, the former CEO of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. “If you had talent and interest and a demonstrated hunger for learning the art of playing in an orchestra or of conducting an orchestra, he wanted to help you.”
An enthusiastic recruiter and caring mentor, Rachleff passed away Aug. 8 from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He was 67. His dedication can be seen in the dozens of Shepherd School alumni populating the ranks of North America’s major orchestras, including several in the Houston Symphony; prominent conductors who trained under him include James Gaffigan at Komische Oper Berlin, Orchestre National de France’s Cristian Macelaru, Marlon Chen with the Manila Symphony, and many others.
Loden and Rachleff go way back. Loden was a violin undergraduate in the late ‘80s at Oberlin Conservatory, where Rachleff was director of orchestras and led the contemporary-music ensemble. Once the latter group was getting ready for a tour accompanying noted pianist Jeremy Denk. Amid the airport hustle and bustle, Loden recalls seeing Rachleff seated by the gate with his eyes closed, tapping his fingers while mentally rehearsing Olivier Messiaen’s evocative Exotic Birds.
“He had just been sitting there going measure by measure, by memory, through this piece while everybody was trying to grab coffee or a snack or screw around like conservatory students will do,” he says. “His moment of calm, his go-to place, was working through the music in his head for the performances to come.”
Loden also crossed paths with Rachleff during the former’s first stint at the Shepherd School, as director of music admissions in the early 2000s; and the Aspen Music Festival, where Rachleff worked closely with the conducting fellows for many years. Some of Rachleff’s other posts included conductor of the University of Southern California’s opera theater, principal conducting teacher with the American Symphony Orchestra League, and music director of the San Antonio Symphony and Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra.
More recently, Loden recalls watching Rachleff conduct a Brahms symphony during the season just past. “One often thinks of Brahms as being a very autumnal composer that requires orchestras like Vienna and Philadelphia that have huge amounts of experience and gravitas with this music to be really the only ones that should approach these great works of art; and our symphony orchestra, under Larry's baton, playing Brahms was as moving a musical experiences as I've ever had,” he says.
A native of New London, Connecticut, Rachleff was an equally magnetic presence off the podium. His Shepherd School colleagues were fond of collecting “Larryisms” like “rhythm has no cracks” and “the best view is from the edge of the cliff,” while Loden recalls often seeing him in the hallways, warmly greeting the students who approached him for musical or professional advice. He wasn’t shy about calling prospective students to sing the Shepherd School’s praises, and could be quite persuasive when courting future faculty members as well.
“For a brief period of time there was a faculty-student chamber orchestra,” says professor of flute Leone Buyse, whom Rachleff wooed from the University of Michigan in 1996 and ‘97. “It was just as thrilling to play under Larry Rachleff as it had been for me to play under some of the greatest conductors in the world, the biggest names [from] when I was in the Boston Symphony and the San Francisco Symphony. He had a powerful grasp of the music and was very inspiring.”
He could also be quite clever, Loden remembers.
“Larry had this really wonderful way of deciding what he wanted and then approaching you in a very non-conductorly kind of way to talk to you about what it was that he wanted, but he would sometimes be oblique about it,” he says. “You wound up leaving a conversation with Larry realizing that he had just gotten exactly what he wanted out of you, and you didn't even know what was happening. He was really quite magical in the way that he could talk you into things.”
A musical celebration of Rachleff’s life will be held later in the fall semester, and the Shepherd School symphony's Sept. 30 concert will be dedicated to his memory.
Chris Gray is a Galveston-based writer.
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