Philip Ryan Mann

When it comes to fireworks, Philip Mann is your man as conductor of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra

Philip Ryan Mann
Philip Ryan Mann

You know which cliche Arkansas Symphony Orchestra conductor Philip Mann hates? The one that goes, Make your passion your job and you'll never have to go to work. Blech. "While I'm lucky to do what I do, it's an extraordinary amount of work."

You know which one he honors? Perception is reality. His hair, his car, his clothes, his charm -- it is an act, and the act is it.

"I'm also part of the performance. For the conductor to be on the podium ... I mean, literally we're up on a podium, which is absurd, the metaphor of it, and the only reason to have someone up on a podium is if they have something to say."

Earlier this month, Mann walked the vacant concrete stage of the First Security Amphitheater in the River Market, scene this Friday of the annual Pops on the River. At 31, the traditional midsummer outdoor concert and fireworks is only four years younger than Mann. He loves it.

"It's a pure cross section of Arkansas, all types, ages, every kind of demographic is here. We're just playing for the public, and it's free," he said. "The most fun is, everyone's waiting to see the fireworks, and I get to start them."

Dressed in a Hugo Boss sport coat with a silk pocket square, Mann is the image of maestro mod. He's also a peddler of novel paradox. Of his Hugo jacket, he said, quite sincerely, that if he knew it was going to get a mention he'd have worn a more exclusive label. Of the 90-degree heat that morning, he asked, quite urgently, if we might like to step inside, someplace cooler, someplace he can get a hot coffee.

With a Boulevard Bread Co. muffin and a steaming plastic foam cup inside Ottenheimer Hall, he looked up at a woman down the concourse who'd just yelled his name.

"This is going to happen all day long," he whispered.

"Aren't you Philip Mann?" she asked again, approaching.

"Hi, how are you!" he said.

She gave her name and he said, "Nice to see you," and she said, "You have no idea who I am."

A similar thing happened two days later, on the steps of Robinson Center Music Hall. A woman shouted from the street, "Philip?" When he waved, she yelled, "I thought it was you!" With his curly blond coiffure reminiscent of New Kids on the Block, his glossy catalog look and his professional commitment to take the symphony to the street, he's not often confused for someone else. If you think that's Philip Mann, it is.

The music hall is the "orchestra's instrument," he says. It's about to shut down for about two years for a $70 million renovation. The symphony, along with Celebrity Attractions and the Doubletree Hotel, are the three principal stakeholders, says Convention and Visitors Bureau Chief Executive Officer Gretchen Hall, and since fall 2011, Mann has been the leading advocate for acoustical redesign:

"He has been very good at trying to provide feedback on user experience on all standards ... but his primary focus was to make sure that house has very, very good acoustics, in a very intimate setting, for everyone to experience music differently than what they've had the opportunity to experience in that house thus far."

MUSIC FOR MAIN STREET

Mann is the older of two sons born to Rochelle and Kermit Mann. One of his most prized keepsakes is a simple photograph of him and his stepdad Jan Roshong, backstage at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colo., where Roshong was a conductor. Although his biological father was a band leader, he credits his love of orchestral music to his stepfather, for whom a recital hall on the campus is named.

Rochelle Mann is a musician and professor who has written music education textbooks and lectures in the Kodaly method. She's a "perky ballerina," her son says, which may explain his static energy.

Roshong died of cancer in 1994, and Mom has since married a former president of the college, Joel Jones, for whom the building that houses the Roshong Recital Hall is named.

Mann's brother, Scott Mann, is an ear, nose and throat surgeon with a conservatory degree in trumpet performance. The "smart guy," Mann calls him, his brother majored in music precisely because he wished to get into medical school.

Music majors are accepted into medical schools at a very high rate, he says. "We've lost several musicians to UAMS recently."

Mann, who'd been performing and studying violin as a Suzuki student, age 5, first imagined himself a conductor when his stepfather died and Durango closed Main Street for the funeral procession. "It was this incredible outpouring of gratitude, in a sense love, for someone who had dedicated his life to the community through music. I saw the influence he had and thought, that would be something I'd be very privileged to do for a city someday," he told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2010, just before leaving that city, where he was an assistant conductor, for the top spot in Little Rock.

To be conductor of even a midmarket symphony such as the ASO, a musician-composer must have had not just an elite education but exhaustive training on more than one instrument. It calls to mind the movie Shine or the book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.

"If I were to describe the experience of working with, say, a Russian violin teacher to the average person on the street, it might sound abusive. It might sound uncaring and ruthless, but in my world, it's actually nurturing, supportive and honest.

"The optics of it is not a positive thing when you're having a bad lesson, OK, [because] there have been educational movements that suggest it's better to tell students they're always right. Two plus two equals five. In music instruction, two plus two always equals four. Give the wrong answer, it's always the wrong answer in music."

Mann attended the nation's most populous of populist universities, Arizona State, where he benefited from the free-ranging education. He began school vacillating between engineering and physics. Either was manageable for Mann's intellect, and marketable. Finally, his good sense gave way to his spirit and he majored in music. His entire destiny shifted -- his future wife, his travels, his residence, his identity. "There wouldn't be a single thing in my life that would be the same."

At the same time, "when parents in Arkansas come up to me and tell me their kids want to be conductors and what advice I have, I normally tell them to double major."

It will help to win a Rhodes Scholarship, the nation's preeminent post-graduate appointment. In Mann's case, he was one of 32, and it took him to England and Christ Church at Oxford, which in turn introduced him to the Royal Academy of Music and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. That, in turn, meant access to the most sacred musical capitals of countries like Austria, Italy, France, Germany and Russia.

Back in the States, he won an American Conducting Fellowship that sent him to the San Diego Symphony, where in 2008 he began the competitive application process to succeed David Itkin in Little Rock.

Tommy Phillips, director of artistic planning at the San Diego Symphony, said at that time Mann's community outreach exceeded his image as a conductor. "I think his conducting is very strong. Philip is absolutely capable," he said, "but his statesmanship and composure with the public is probably what people here would remember him by. ... He made himself basically the music director of our education programs."

SHOW STOPPER

The muffin dispatched, the coffee deployed, he exited Ottenheimer Hall. "Right now, perception is reality," was the last thing he said on the subject of himself.

So go ahead, judge the symphony by the Q Score of its conductor. The symphony would be much obliged!

Last month, prominent banker and philanthropist George Gleason and his wife, Linda, fulfilled the $75,000 bidding of Easter Seals benefactors Rush and Linda Harding and Chip and Cindy Murphy and invited the couples and a very tidy retinue of close friends to an exclusive dinner party at the Gleasons' new Chateau St. Cloud estate in west Little Rock. The Manns made the Murphys' guest list.

"Some maestros see their jobs as nothing but music, and some fundraising, meaning they have to be available for a dinner party by a board member," said Cindy Murphy, who is also a major giver. "For Philip, he thoroughly enjoys it. ... It not only behooves the symphony, it keeps him very motivated, and it's for real, that's why I consider Tatiana and Philip dear friends."

Murphy had very flattering things to say about the pianist Tatiana Roitman Mann, too. A fellow extrovert, she called her. For her part, Roitman Mann said the expectations on her constitute no less duty than those of her husband.

"That title [conductor], and the privileges of that title, come with certain expectations. Absolutely, there are rules. They are, simply, rules of the game. If you're going to be in the military, and if you're the military wife, there are rules and expectations. A conductor's wife is a job. It's a position," she said, laughing to herself. "I don't think it's bad at all. I respect the way I've been brought up. I respect rules very much. I respect the rules of society, and I think it's necessary, if you want to be accepted."

The couple met at a private tea at Arizona State University at Tempe. Roitman, a native of Ukraine, had moved to Phoenix from Montreal. "Philip was very impressive because he was the only person [I'd met] at that point who'd been to Europe and knew about Europe. When he found out I was from Eastern Europe, he was just bragging to me he'd spent a semester abroad being in Vienna and Paris. ... Well, it was very impressive."

Roitman Mann said neither one of them hesitated to move from the clement and coastal cosmopolis of San Diego to central Arkansas. Moving is a byproduct of success in music, she says. Conducting an unsung capital city's orchestra in the middle of the country has its benefits, he says.

Before he left the River Market that day, he said Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola or Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe could speak to his civic accomplishments. "The fact that I can tell you to talk to Mark Stodola or Mike Beebe about me and what we've done is why I came to Arkansas. It was, really, to make a difference beyond just entertainment."

INFLUENCE AND INNOVATION

"Philip and Tatiana both understand the importance of music and arts education, and they are true advocates to ensure that our children have access to the arts," first lady Ginger Beebe said. "Philip has helped all of us to hear, experience and enjoy music in different ways."

From Mann's Intimate Neighborhood Concert (INC) series last year to his partnerships with the theater community -- the last holiday concert was directed by Nicole Capri of Arkansas Repertory Theatre and the symphony now has a series at the Argenta Community Theater -- he has worked to expand from what George Keck, music department chairman at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, calls "the upper 5 percent" that normally constitute the patronage of a symphony.

The president of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra Guild, Keck recently returned from the annual League of American Orchestras conference earlier this month. The overwhelming share of discussion concerned, as it so often does, how to return orchestral music to popular favor and youth-anize it. Mann, he says, has done two things exquisitely.

One, "The orchestra really sounds good now, because it's brilliant, it's virtuoso, the blend is a thousand times better, and the woodwinds is a totally different group ... but I would say that of the entire orchestra. The entire orchestra plays so much better, so much more brilliant, and far more difficult literature now that Philip is conducting." The examples he gave include the Mahler symphony last season and the two Brahms concertos.

Along with the elevated performances, Mann has created the position of composer-in-residence. Last year, it was the much-sought-after Christopher Theofanidis. This year, Mann landed the yet more eminent John Corigliano, arguably the most important living American composer.

Two, "Philip gets the amateur worldview of what a conductor ought to be. It is the hairdo. It is the Armani suit. It's the young, enthusiastic, energetic -- the way he hops up on the podium when he comes out. His charm, his humor, the fact that people know he travels around the world still conducting. People expect that now in a first-class conductor."

If the perception of Mann is a little foppish, a lot accomplished and not a little bit awesome -- and let's just say it, maybe headier than a midmarket symphony town like Little Rock should expect -- then that is true, Keck said.

"Yes, that perception is reality."

Self portrait Philip Ryan Mann

• DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: Nov. 10, 1977, Seymour, Ind.

• FAMILY: wife, Tatiana, son, Julian, 2

• NICKNAMES: The traditional "Maestro" follows me, which is especially cool when spoken by a bartender. My wife calls me "Solnyshko," Russian for "sunshine."

• I DRIVE a 2002, seal gray, Porsche 911 Carrera 4S.

• MY FIRST CAR WAS a 1975 Toyota Land Cruiser with a Chevy 350 conversion and a Holley two-barrel carburetor. We used it to do things like pull stumps out of the ground.

• A GREAT MORNING HAS some score study with an espresso from a desk with a view.

• MY GREATEST CONTRIBUTION TO MUSIC: my work in support of music education programs for kids.

• THE WORST THING I'VE DONE TO A BATON: accidentally folded them in my luggage and broke them all in half.

• THE WORST THING A BATON EVER DID TO A COMPOSER: Lully stabbed his foot with his baton during a performance of his Te Deum. It turned gangrenous, and he died.

• MY FAVORITE POP SONG: impossible question for a musician. All-time favorites? Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody," John Lennon's "Imagine," etc.

• MY FAVORITE JUNK FOOD: dark chocolate

• WHAT PEOPLE ALWAYS ASK ME AT PARTIES: Am I really doing anything up there or just waving my arms around?

• MY GUILTY PLEASURE: Scotch and cigars

• A RECENT GIFT I'VE GOTTEN: Scotch and cigars

• AN ITEM MY FAMILY WOULD IDENTIFY WITH ME: My wife calls me foppish, so maybe something like a pocket square?

• I HAVE A PHOBIA ... you know, my biggest phobia and fascination would be tornadoes. I was almost killed by a tornado as a kid in Indiana.

• AT TIMES I'D RATHER BE fly fishing on the San Juan in Colorado or one of our great rivers here in Arkansas.

• THE MOVIE I'VE SEEN MOST: The Big Lebowski

• THE WORST PART ABOUT MY JOB is the hours. My last day off was Jan. 3. I remember it.

• ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP: musician

High Profile on 06/29/2014

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