Assistant Conductor Ryan Tani Prepares for the Holiday Season
David Lewellen
PUBLISHED
Tagged Under: 2024.25 Season, Conductor, Pops
Ryan Tani can’t spend too much time thinking about his first year with the Milwaukee Symphony because so much more is coming quickly.
Tani, who took the post of assistant conductor in the fall of 2023, will be leading four weekends of concerts before the end of the year. He will be on the podium for movie soundtrack performances of the Disney/Pixar film Coco Nov. 2-3 and The Muppet Christmas Carol on Thanksgiving weekend, as well as conducting the symphony’s popular Hometown Holiday Pops concerts Dec. 14-15 and 20-22.
Aside from weekend assignments at the Bradley Symphony Center, Tani is the conductor the orchestra sees the most on the podium, leading educational concerts, runouts to destinations around Wisconsin, and backing up Music Director Ken-David Masur and the parade of international guest conductors on subscription weeks.
“Last year was a chance to do everything. It challenged me in every way,” Tani said. “Family concerts, Pops concerts, speaking to the audience — all of those were things I’d never done before, and nothing prepares you for any of them.”
For instance, Tani had never tried to sync an orchestra to a movie until his MSO audition in the spring of 2023. But after successfully leading two movie concerts last year, he says, “It’s like playing a video game or solving a puzzle in real time. You have to take in input (from the monitor) as well as give it out (to the orchestra).”
Looking ahead, Tani said that his next two assignments present different challenges. The orchestra for Coco will contain two guitarists and a lot of Latin percussion to reflect its Mexican setting. And in the film’s themes of ancestry and family, Tani may be thinking of the fond memories he has of his own Spanish-speaking grandmother.
The 30-year-old The Muppet Christmas Carol, however, is a holiday tradition for many families, and they will enter the Bradley Symphony Center with “high expectations for what it sounds like,” Tani said. “People love it because of the music, and the score gets put in the forefront.” The Muppet songs advance the plot of the movie, he said, while in Coco the songs express the characters’ emotions. And in any movie, the orchestra faces the challenge of performing the score straight through, although it was written to be recorded in multiple takes over days or weeks.
The Hometown Holiday Pops concert, expanded to two full weekends this year, is “a great way to bring people into our hall,” Tani said. “Music is such a part of the holiday, and people find reasons to connect through music. As a singer, I love that.”
Singing, in fact, was Tani’s original plan for a career in music. But he injured his voice through overuse as an undergraduate, and diverted his path to conducting — he joked that it gives him a villain’s origin story. But, he added, “I found that in conducting, I connect with people in a really deep way.”
And he has learned to connect with the musicians of the MSO. “Every time I get on the podium, I want to do better than the last time,” he said. “And I get all the feedback — it’s too fast, it’s too slow, I’m talking too much, I’m not talking enough, I’m stopping too much, I’m not stopping enough. I just have to keep my own compass and learn this orchestra and how to support them.”
The complications are even greater because many of an assistant conductor’s concerts are put together with only one rehearsal — which might be a week or more before the actual performance. “It takes strategic planning to put together a one-rehearsal concert,” Tani said. “I’m going to show them things, but I don’t have time to stop and mention it. I have to trust them.”
When he makes his subscription debut in April, leading music of Copland and Beethoven, he will get four rehearsals, and he’s already looking forward to the opportunity to take some time to go deeper.
“We can always do better, but at some point we just need to feel comfortable and present and mindful,” he said. “I don’t need to fix every problem, because many things will fix themselves. But I’m passionate about getting better and working with this orchestra that I spend so much time with.”
