Byron Stripling Joins MSO As New Principal Pops Conductor
David Lewellen
PUBLISHED
Tagged Under: 2024.25 Season, Conductor
Byron Stripling now has the official title of the Milwaukee Symphony’s Stein Family Foundation Principal Pops Conductor — but he isn’t taking anything for granted.
After several well-received concerts with the MSO in the last few seasons, Stripling was named in May to a title that had been vacant in Milwaukee since Marvin Hamlisch died in 2012.
“We weren’t actually looking,” said MSO executive director Mark Niehaus, “but it just became clear to us that Byron was it. Doc (Severinsen) and Marvin were fantastic artists and entertainers, they had the skills to hold the audience’s attention, they conducted, and they performed themselves. Byron checks all of those boxes.”
But Stripling cautioned, “You’re always auditioning, no matter what.” Speaking by phone earlier this month, before his first Pops weekend of the new season with the MSO, he said, “In any arts field, you have to sell the product. As a conductor, I’m always generating new content. That’s a 24-7 gig, working to create something that will draw people in. It’s not just Milwaukee. When I walk onstage anywhere, I have to introduce people to the music so that they feel it in their bones and they want to come back.”
Stripling will conduct at least three weeks of concerts a year in Milwaukee and will have a hand in shaping the rest of the Pops season. “We know that Byron has a whole catalog of guest artists he can bring in,” Niehaus said. “He’s a very creative guy, and as he gets to know the jazz musicians in Milwaukee, I could see some really interesting things developing.”
Stripling will debut in his new role Sept. 20-22, with a program titled “When the Saints Go Marching In,” dedicated to the multiple genres of music associated with New Orleans.
The popular song of that name is now associated with white Dixieland bands, among other things, but Stripling points to its origins as a black spiritual. “New Orleans musicians had no fear of any type of music,” he said. Originally, “people thought it was blasphemy to play it in a nightclub.” But for the program in Milwaukee, “Saints” will share the bill with songs of pain from the slavery era such as “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” “That’s the best way to talk about it,” Stripling said. “You sing to get to the next place in your life.”
And even if the blues was born in the Mississippi Delta, “it all piped into New Orleans,” he said. “Not only the music, but a way of life, a feeling you get. We have a way of singing that out.”
The concert also pays tribute to Louis Armstrong, by far the most famous New Orleans musician. “I never met him, but his music reached out through the speaker and grabbed me,” Stripling said. “If there was another father for me, it’s Louis Armstrong. He influenced people like Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. They all tried to sing like him.”
Later in the season, Stripling will lead concerts themed around The Beatles (who owe more to rhythm and blues than most fans realize) and Motown and the Philly sound. In working with classically trained musicians, he said, he has an advantage in being able to sing a passage the way he wants it, and “sometimes I’ll pick up my trumpet and play what I need from them.”
Programming any concert, around any theme, he tries for a mix of the things that people expect to hear and something less familiar that they may decide they like. He gave the example of a long-ago Los Angeles Philharmonic concert, when he mostly wanted to hear Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring but was also greatly impressed by another piece on the program written by conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen.
As he begins his new role with the MSO, Stripling said, “People don’t realize how good you guys are. It’s amazing that this quality exists. I want people to know the beauty and the joy of what this orchestra can do.”
