Rachmaninoff's Third: Taking Flight

SLSO Assistant Conductor Sam Hollister steps into the spotlight as guest, joined by host and audio engineer Kyle Pyke, for a behind-the-scenes look at a milestone moment—his SLSO subscription debut on the podium. The conversation explores the excitement and pressure of leading the orchestra, the journey to conducting, and the perspective shift from host to guest. Hollister also shares insights into shaping the energy of Gabriella Smith’s Tumblebird Contrails, approaching Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 from a pianist’s lens, and navigating the emotional arc of Rachmaninoff’s Third Symphony.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Welcome to today's episode of Noted, a podcast that offers a quick look at the personal stories and perspectives behind each SLSO classical program. If you are a regular listener, you may have noticed I am not Sam Hollister. My name is Kyle Pike. I am a two-time Grammy nominee, audio recording engineer for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, and most prestigiously, the second associate producer of the Noted Podcast. This week, we are exploring the 20th concert of our 25-26 classical subscription season, featuring Tumblebird Contrails by Gabriela Smith, Sergei Prokofiev's piano concerto number three in C major with Gabriela Montero as soloist, and finally, Sergei Rachmaninoff's Third Symphony in A minor. Our guest today and conductor of this beautiful program making his SLSO subscription debut is, as you may have guessed, Maestro Sam Hollister. Hi, Kyle. Happy to be here. We're always lucky to have you as our host, but today we're honored to welcome you as a guest. First, I have to ask, what does it feel like to sit on the other side of the booth?

SPEAKER_00 1:07

Oh, it's giving me such a new lease on life. I have another wall to look at. It's great.

SPEAKER_01 1:15

Shall we get into the program? Yes. This is your debut with the SLSO conducting a subscription program. Of course, you've led the orchestra in many concerts, but what does this moment feel like personally to take the podium as a featured part of our subscription programming?

SPEAKER_00 1:30

It is very energizing. It feels like such a special and fantastic opportunity to tell these three amazing stories with some of the best musical storytellers on earth, honestly, in the SLSO. And I feel very lucky that I have this lead time. There's been, you know, several weeks since I got the call asking if I would fill in. You know, a lot of times when assistant conductors are called to action in the subscription world, there's hours of notice or maybe even minutes. So I've had the opportunity to really live in these scores over the past few weeks. And the first of these two pieces on the program are pieces I hadn't conducted before. When I have these new pieces on the desk, it's like Christmas morning. It's such a joy to be able to spend time carefully with every note, every mark, every measure, and to think about the storytelling of the music. That's interesting.

SPEAKER_01 2:27

So you talk mostly about excitement. Do you feel any sort of pressure?

SPEAKER_00 2:31

Yeah, there is certainly a feeling of pressure, but at the same time, I'm fortunate that I know these musicians. You're right, I've conducted the orchestra dozens and dozens of times. I probably stood in front of the orchestra about a hundred times in the last year and a half. You know, I know these people. I feel like I know their personalities. I remember when I was at the Yale School of Music and conducting the Yale Philharmonia, it was such a privilege to be able to look around the orchestra and see my friends. And I feel much the same way here with SLSO. It would be very different if I were, you know, doing my first subscription concert with a different professional orchestra that I've never worked with before. There would be a different kind of pressure. So I can definitely fall back on my feeling that this is a family.

SPEAKER_01 3:17

So speaking a little bit about your time at Yale and your past musical career, can you talk about any challenges or experiences from earlier in your career that shape your approach to this debut?

SPEAKER_00 3:28

On a more recent note to start, you know, when we've come back into Powell Hall over this past season, I've been there for every service of the orchestra, with only a couple of exceptions, every rehearsal, every concert. So one of the lessons I've taken away from this season has been really getting to know the acoustic of Powell Hall. I'm always giving feedback to the orchestra. I'm always listening for what are the differences between the acoustic experience sitting in every seat of the hall versus being on stage and giving that sort of consultation to the orchestra's feedback. And now I'm excited for that to influence the way that I approach the rehearsal process for this subscription week. On an earlier note, going back to lessons from earlier in my musical career, it's kind of silly, but I hope that I've learned to be a bit more poised because I remember the very first time I ever conducted a full symphony. I was a sophomore in college, I think. And it was Tchaikovsky's first symphony. And I was so over the top and unpoised that my head was flying around everywhere. And actually, in the fourth movement of the Tchaikovsky, my glasses went flying off my head when I gave a downbeat and hit someone in the audience.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

Oh no.

SPEAKER_00 4:47

So in terms of challenges and lessons that I've learned, I hope that I've learned to be a bit more poised than then.

SPEAKER_01 4:55

So at what point did you decide you wanted to pursue conducting at a professional level? I don't remember my exact age.

SPEAKER_00 5:01

I was either 11 or 12, quite young, and I went to see my first orchestral performance live. And it was Mahler's first symphony with the Rhode Island Philharmonic. And I was a pianist growing up, and that's sort of where I came from. I came from the world of playing the piano and practicing on my own. And as soon as I saw all of those people working together to make music, I immediately felt a draw toward that community, that feeling of being together and being on a journey together to tell a story. I also fell in love with Mahler. I mean, uh immediately the next day, the concert was Saturday. The next day I didn't have to go to school. So I listened to all 10 Mahler symphonies.

SPEAKER_01 5:43

In one day.

SPEAKER_00 5:43

In one day, which is somewhere between 15 and 17 hours of music. Um I was gonna say that rivals the Lord of the Rings marathons that I've done. Yeah, perhaps even slightly nerdier. Yeah, just a bit. So my dad took notice and he got me actually Leonard Slacken's first memoir for my next birthday. And it was reading that memoir and thinking about his reflections on the world of being a conductor and being a participant in the life of the orchestra that really galvanized my feeling that that was absolutely where I wanted to be.

SPEAKER_01 6:21

So you serve as either conductor or assistant conductor for almost all of our concerts. So you spend a lot of time with the orchestra and rehearsals. If you could choose one inside the orchestra moment to share with our listeners, what would it be?

SPEAKER_00 6:34

Well, yeah, inside the orchestra, I guess we did have a pretty inside moment in June of 2025. We had an acoustic listening session with the orchestra, and Stefan and I both conducted in turn so that the other could listen from the hall. And it was just a closed event for us in the orchestra to hear the hall after the renovations were approaching completion. I remember this. I was there too. You were there. The thing I remember about that experience was that I've never ever felt so much joy in a group of people. It was like they were coming home after decades away from their home. It had only been two years. It'd only been two years, but it was the greatest feeling of relief and communal joy that I've ever been able to witness. And the looks on their faces and people crying happy tears just to see the renovations, to see their home again, to hear the wonderful sound. One of the pieces we played on that session was Strauss's Heldenleben, which is this rich and profoundly powerful piece of music. And I don't know if I've ever seen musicians having so much fun.

SPEAKER_01 7:44

So looking at this program, Tumblebird Contrails is playful, energetic, and inspired by movement and flight, with sudden bursts of activity that mimic birds starting across the sky, hence the Tumblebird imagery. How do you convey that feeling or texture to the orchestra?

SPEAKER_00 8:02

Yeah, it's it's a challenging piece, actually, because it's driven by sensory input of this one moment that Gabriella Smith had while hiking at Point Reyes, just north of San Francisco. And you mentioned the birds flying overhead, there's the sound of waves crashing against the shore and the cliffs, there's the sound of wind whistling through the brush that dots the surface of the shoreline. And all of these things are overlapping. But what's weird about music that's notated on paper is that at some point you have to make a marking. You have to write something down. And it makes it seem, when you look at it on the page, abrupt. Like, oh, now there's a thing. And on top of that, I'm conducting in a tempo with beats that have a certain pace and that feels like there's information constantly starting and stopping. But this piece is, I think, one idea that has to happen seamlessly from start to finish with no abrupt onsets, no ab no audible changes in the sound. If you drop the needle at the beginning of the piece and then drop the needle two minutes later and listen to that moment, it sounds completely different, but we can't be aware of those changes. So I think the challenge in rehearsal for a piece like this is figuring out how to adapt all of those concrete markings on the page into the most organic representations of a natural phenomenon as we possibly can.

SPEAKER_01 9:27

You mentioned your first instrument is piano. How does that perspective influence the way you approach conducting Prokofiev's piano concerto number three?

SPEAKER_00 9:37

Well, I always do feel a special excitement for piano concertos when I'm conducting. And, you know, I never really played much in the way of piano concertos with orchestra, but it always excites me nowadays when I'm conducting because I get to kind of imagine the feeling really vividly in a way that is harder for me to do if it's a violin concerto, since I don't play the violin. But I also feel a special affinity to piano soloists and piano concertos. You know, conductors like me who come from the world of piano, we already feel like we're reading scores when we read our piano music, because we're reading two lines at once. Typically, it is sort of one line for the left hand, one line for the right hand. And so we think about music in terms of simultaneous sounds, things that line up vertically on the page. So the jump to studying full scores is a very natural one for a pianist. You know, when you're looking at all of the different orchestral instrumentalists stacked on top of each other on the page of the full score, it feels very comfortable and similar to sort of the way we're trained as a pianist. So I often find that the pianists who solo for piano concertos have a real interest in the orchestral component of the piano concerto because they also feel an affinity for the full score. And so it's a very artistically fulfilling relationship to develop between a pianist and a conductor during a piano concerto, I think.

SPEAKER_01 11:07

Rachmaninoff's third symphony famously received a lukewarm response at its premiere, yet it has since become recognized as a masterpiece. As you prepare this work with the orchestra, does that story of resilience and eventual triumph resonate with you either personally or as a conductor guiding the orchestra through its challenges? Absolutely, for sure.

SPEAKER_00 11:27

Rachmaninoff had a very difficult experience with criticism throughout his life. One of his very first major orchestral pieces, his first symphony, was completely destroyed by the critics. And it's tough because there's a very valuable role of criticism, but it can also be devastating, especially at an early stage like that. And he faced that a lot even much later in his career, by the time he got around to his third symphony. He'd had plenty of successes too, but he was no stranger to a severe critique. But I really admire the fact that when you look at a piece like his Third Symphony coming much later in his life, he hasn't really changed his approach. He hasn't modified the way that he wrote music. You know, it's as though he knew what he wanted to write and he wrote it. And time has borne out that his music has depth and value, and we have such a profound appreciation of Rachmananoff's music today. And we see that with many composers. You know, time goes on and we really understand that they were, in a sense, ahead of their time or onto something that the critics didn't see at the time.

SPEAKER_01 12:35

Well, Sam, we're all excited for your subscription debut. Thank you so much for giving us a rare look into this beautiful program. Thank you for having me as a guest. Is it okay if I do your sign-off? Yes, that is great. And to our listeners, thank you as always for joining us for this episode of Noted. Sam will be back with another episode soon, so stay tuned, and I'll see you at Powell Hall.