For more than 30 years, Emmanuel Music has been central to the cultural life of Boston. And no one was more central to Emmanuel Music’s growth and achievement than its founder: conductor and pianist Craig Smith, who died this past week at the age of 60. Smith’s friendships, associations, and collaborations with director Peter Sellars, choreographer Mark Morris, mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, composer John Harbison, and pianist Russell Sherman produced defining moments in contemporary culture. Boston Phoenix classical-music editor Lloyd Schwartz pays his — and our — tribute to Craig Smith with these memories.
“Thank you!” Those were the first words I ever heard from Craig Smith. A friend had invited me to a piano recital Smith was giving at Emmanuel Church, where he was music director. It hadn’t gone very well, and she was worried about what to say to him. When we went “backstage” to the Emmanuel vestry, she ran up to him, hugged him, and blurted out, “Craig, how are you?” He enthusiastically replied, “Thank you!”
That was typical of his generosity of spirit, of his assuming the best intentions and putting the best face on any situation. And also of his often slightly distracted air, which made everyone who knew and loved him want to take care of him.
Never one to promote his own career, he was masterful at collaboration. He got extraordinary people excited about working together. What he’ll be most remembered for were the group efforts, beginning back in 1970 when he started to lead Bach cantatas as part of the Sunday liturgy (which is what Bach intended). Seven years later, Emmanuel Music became the first group in America to perform all of Bach’s cantatas. It’s still doing them. Craig encouraged cooperation and, even more important, the idea of performers giving themselves to the music, serving it rather than themselves. He gave such celebrity guests as Seiji Ozawa and Christopher Hogwood a chance to do the same. Boston’s musical life would be considerably thinner without the countless conductors, instrumentalists, and singers who “graduated” from Emmanuel Music. Many of this city’s most inspired musicians are still here because he instilled in them a kind of spiritual calling that doesn’t exist in more-competitive musical centers. “Exploration” and “wrestling” are key words in his mission statement for Emmanuel Music.
He was temperamentally unsuited to a career as a celebrity recitalist (though his playing certainly improved from that first concert I heard), but he became a great accompanist and chamber player, and an extraordinarily sensitive and illuminating conductor. The players in the Emmanuel Orchestra could read one another’s thoughts. Symphony concerts sounded like chamber music. When Peter Sellars attended Emmanuel’s 1979 concert version of Handel’s Orlando — this country’s first complete performance of that opera — he immediately wanted to work with Craig on a full-scale production. The result, two years later, was its now legendary run at the American Repertory Theatre.
Sellars’s placing Ariosto’s epic romance at Cape Canaveral made for great box office, but the heart of the production was the musical understanding that Craig imparted to the magnificent cast and orchestra, and to Sellars — helping him become a more musically sophisticated stage director (a debt Sellars repeatedly acknowledges). Craig was also the soul of unforgettable Sellars productions of Handel’s oratorio Saul and the opera Giulio Cesare (which gave Lorraine Hunt Lieberson her first great role), their memorable series of Mozart/da Ponte operas (preserved on DVD), and Mark Morris’s masterpiece L’Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato, the premiere of which he led in Brussels, where from 1988 to 1991 he was principal conductor of the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie. This past season, he programmed at Emmanuel all three of Handel’s Ariosto operas (and led two of them, including Orlando). “No conductor alive today,” I wrote at the time, “leads Handel with more gravity, rhythmic punch, and sense of melodic contour.”
His closest encounter with show biz was the concocted Gershwin musical My One and Only. But the star, Tommy Tune, didn’t like either Sellars’s direction or Craig’s unalterable decision to use Gershwin’s original arrangements. They were fired, but the buyout probably made Craig more money than anything else he did.
His ideas about music were often surprising. He gave an affectionate, scintillating concert performance of Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. He loved Ravel’s Boléro. He organized, introduced, wrote the notes for, and played in multi-year cycles of the complete vocal, piano, and chamber music of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Debussy, Ravel, and John Harbison. In 1981, he led violinist Rose Mary Harbison and the Emmanuel Orchestra in the world premiere of Harbison’s Violin Concerto, which they later recorded.
But he suffered from diabetes, and his health was deteriorating. This past summer, his heart stopped during anæsthesia for a kidney transplant. This past month, he organized a performance of Bach’s The Art of the Fugue with 13 pianists; he was too weak to be the 14th. He was scheduled to conduct Bach’s motet Jesu, meine Freude the Sunday before his death, and he led the Saturday rehearsal, but John Harbison conducted the actual performance. It was exquisite and moving. You could hear Craig’s power and tenderness behind it, inside it. No one expected that he would die two days later. It’s unbearable to think there won’t be another performance like it.