Cristian Macelaru’s first weekend as the music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra wasn’t without its fraught moments.
The night before his first concert, the orchestra’s principal trombone, Cristian Ganicenco, died from cancer, and the ensemble quickly put together a tribute encore. Then, during a break in the performance on Friday, a freak misstep sent a harp crashing into the orchestra’s associate concertmaster, who sat out the remainder of the performance with dizziness.
Through it all, Macelaru, 45, led from the podium with undaunted assurance, beating in a new era for one of the oldest orchestras in the United States. And, despite his cosmopolitan career, he is trimming his portfolio to focus on Cincinnati. Earlier this year, he stepped down from directing the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne in Germany, and at the end of next season, he will depart the Orchestre National de France.
“An American orchestra is very different than a European orchestra, not in how they perform or in their artistic level, but in what they represent to their communities,” Macelaru said during an interview in early October, while a bus with his face on it drove by.
“The work is a lot more complex and challenging here, but it’s also much more rewarding,” he said. “I’ve always had such strong beliefs about what I would do if I were a music director of an American orchestra.”
Macelaru’s arrival, which came after the Cincinnati Symphony welcomed a new chief executive early this year, comes at a moment of artistic development and financial strength for the ensemble. “This,” he said, “was really attractive to me.”
For example, the orchestra is in discussions with several European festivals about a return to international touring. There are also talks of recording projects; there, Macelaru’s output includes a Grammy Award-winning account of Wynton Marsalis’s Violin Concerto with soloist Nicola Benedetti and the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Macelaru’s primary goals in Cincinnati, he said, are to develop the orchestra’s ability to play in different cultural styles to energize their performances, and to continue to emphasize works by living composers in his programming.
“He presents new music very confidently,” said the composer Anna Clyne, who first met Macelaru at Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz, Calif., which he also leads. “He gives it the same weight and presence as standard repertoire.”
Additionally, several key seats in the orchestra are open, and hiring musicians is one sure way to leave a lasting impression on an orchestra’s sound. Macelaru jumped in on associate principal trumpet auditions during his first week as music director.
He is taking over from the well-liked Louis Langrée, whom the orchestra’s musicians credit with bringing a French lightness to their playing after years of heavier Germanic interpretations.
“Now, Cristi is asking how to use those different parts of our palate more for different works,” said Patrick Schlecker, the orchestra’s principal timpani. “He’s already drawing out our best musicianship.”
Macelaru was born in Timisoara, Romania, the youngest of 10 children. He picked up the violin at 5 and soon began performing in the amateur orchestra conducted by his father. Although he sat in the concertmaster’s seat, so his father could keep a close eye on him, his older sister quietly led the section next to him, as the associate concertmaster.
When he was 17, Macelaru came to the United States to study at the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan, where he fell in love with conducting. Larry Rachcleff, from the Shepherd School Symphony Orchestra at Rice University, told Macelaru that he would teach him only if he earned a master’s degree in performance and won a job with an orchestra first. Macelaru won positions in the Miami Symphony Orchestra and the Houston Symphony before beginning to study with Radcliff at the age of 28.
“I started quite late,” Macelaru said. “But there are so many moments in my conducting life that I am able to return to the feeling of playing the violin and being in an orchestra.”
A breakthrough came in 2012, when he stepped in for Pierre Boulez at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Then, after a stint as an assistant and then associate conductor with the Philadelphia Orchestra, as well as his job at the Cabrillo Festival, he returned to Europe for his posts in Germany and France.
“His best performances with us,” the WDR Symphony principal bassoon Mathis Stier said, “were of Eastern European repertoire, composers like Bartok and Rachmaninoff and Ligeti and Tchaikovsky.”
Stier is a friend of Macelaru’s family, and participated in the premiere of a bassoon quartet by Wynton Marsalis that Macelaru had commissioned to celebrate the 50th birthday of his wife, the bassoonist Cheryl Macelaru. The couple and their two children have been based in Paris, but Cristian has also purchased a condo in the Over-the-Rhine area of Cincinnati, where he can live and cook for himself while in town.
“It’s probably the most European neighborhood in the city,” said Robert McGrath, the orchestra’s chief executive.
Macelaru first led the Cincinnati Symphony a decade ago, in a Cincinnati Opera production of Verdi’s “Il Trovatore.” He returned over the years as a guest conductor, then in 2024 received a nod to succeed Langrée.
“Cristi seemed like an old friend to the ensemble, even though he’d only conducted us a couple of times,” said Stefani Matsuo, the orchestra’s concertmaster. “He really draws out the best in everybody.”
During the final rehearsal before his debut as music director, Macelaru dispatched critiques with deft politeness. He’d pause to make balance adjustments, and double back to ask the strings for more dig and stylized playing — “Like raindrops, here!” — in Clyne’s “Abstractions.”
“I am totally comfortable never being remembered for my own interpretation,” he said in an interview, “but what I would trade that for is someone listening and being able to understand distinct voices that composers will have of the same orchestra.”
True to his word, his podium mannerism is simple. At the concert, tight, mechanical motions in Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F kept the orchestra in lock step with the soloist, Hélène Grimaud. His baton work in a suite from Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” was fussier at first, but later relaxed in the sweeping elegance of its waltzes.
“Back in 1904, Richard Strauss came onstage to conduct his own music here,” McGrath said. “Elgar came and conducted the May Festival in 1911. There’s an awareness of that history, a pride in this orchestra and this in this community.”
McGrath oversees a $42.5 million budget, and in a field where structural deficits have become common, the Cincinnati Symphony is a debt-free organization. Still, it isn’t immune to the challenges faced by other orchestras, like rising expenses without ticket sales to make up the cost. Programs of films with live soundtracks or music from video games are popular with audiences, but attendance and subscriptions for traditional classical programs have not fully recovered from the pandemic.
To attract audience members, Macelaru said, “we need to go into these communities with the humility and the respect of trying to learn something that is really, truly valuable.” That is hardly a new idea, but his twist is that he seems to genuinely want to create more of a musical exchange with Cincinnati’s neighborhoods, and adapt and learn from the city’s artists.
“I remember him saying in an interview during the search process, he drew a line in the sand and said that he would not specialize in any repertoire,” said Schlecker, the timpanist. “I remember we were like: ‘Is that going to hurt him? Is he too broad?’”
But when Macelaru visited in February to conduct Dvorák’s “New World” Symphony, Schlecker said, his approach electrified the orchestra, revealing fresh details even for the more seasoned players. Something similar happened during the “Rosenkavalier” suite this month.
The way he achieved it? “I told this orchestra,” he said, “‘Your Strauss will sound better if you play it the way a Gospel choir sings.’”
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