By Sol Hurwitz
Rye opera-goers who attend a Metropolitan Opera performance of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” in December are bound to feel a surge of local pride when the conductor, J. David Jackson, mounts the podium.
Maestro Jackson, 67, has deep roots in Rye. He was born, raised, and educated in Rye and graduated with the Rye High School Class of 1975. His paternal grandmother, Harriet Delevan Walker, a violinist, grew up in a house on Smith Street.
“Harriet’s father, Charles Henry Walker, owned, appropriately enough, a smithy on Smith Street,” Jackson said in a recent interview with The Rye Record. “Her paternal grandfather, Alexander R. Walker, came to Rye in the mid-19th century.
“My father, James, who started the J.A. Jackson Corporation in Mamaroneck, died last year. They’re all still here. My father and all of his family on both his parents’ sides are buried in Rye’s Greenwood Union Cemetery.”
Jackson started at the Met as a rehearsal pianist. He made his conducting debut in 2008 with “Hansel and Gretel” and has since led the orchestra in “Queen of Spades,” “Simon Boccanegra,” “Porgy and Bess,” and “Orpheus and Eurydice.” An assignment to conduct “Werther” was canceled because of the pandemic.
All music staff at the Met are given the same contract with the title “assistant conductor,” regardless of whether they are a rehearsal pianist, prompter, diction coach, or conductor. If you conduct performances, as opposed to rehearsals, you are offered an additional contract as a conductor.
The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra has been hailed by critics as the best in the business and is a challenge for any conductor.
“It’s about taking all those incredible individual talents and molding them into a community endeavor,” Jackson explained. “You have to find the flow and convince everyone that your vision is the only one possible at the moment.”
Last January, Jackson made his Carnegie Hall debut conducting the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra Chamber Players.
“Jackson led with spirit and energy, wonderful color and style,” wrote George Grella of the New York Classical Review. “It was a sheer joy to hear the ensemble playing with such savoir faire.”
Jackson’s journey from Rye to the Metropolitan Opera started with his parents. They took him to chamber music concerts at the Rye Free Reading Room and to the Community Concert series at the high school auditorium.
“I remember being enthralled by the sound of an orchestra — all those individual voices coming together in such astonishing ways,” he recalled. “It was like hearing art and architecture sing. Only later did I realize I wanted to be the one managing all of this.”
He took piano lessons from his mother, Jane Jackson, a pianist and organist. And he took violin lessons from Joyce Allen Shepard, a Juilliard graduate who, as chair of the Rye Free Reading Room’s music committee, persuaded the world-famous Emerson String Quartet and Tokyo String Quartet to come to the library to preview works they were preparing for Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center.
“I remember, as a young child, sitting transfixed only a few feet away from these extraordinary musicians,” Jackson said.
At Rye High School, Jackson was concertmaster of the orchestra. In his senior year, he performed the first movement of the demanding Bruch “Violin Concerto No. 1” with the orchestra conducted by his faculty mentor, Murray Cornelius.
Jackson discovered his talent for composing when he was 16.
“I was returning from a date on foot over the snow on a moonlit night and was so struck by the serenity of that walk that I just sat down at the piano and began writing music to try to capture the beauty of that moment,” he recalled.
Jackson attended Amherst College, where he majored in music and graduated summa cum laude with a degree in composition, while continuing violin lessons.
“I didn’t get any real training in composition until I got to Amherst,” Jackson said. It was there that Pulitzer Prize-winner Lewis Spratlan recognized Jackson’s promise as a composer.
“The man was an artistic titan, probably the best American composer of the past century, ” Jackson said.
He received a master’s degree from Peabody Conservatory, where he studied under the renowned conductors Sixten Ehrling, Franco Ferrara, and Otto Werner Mueller, while resuming piano instruction.
After Amherst and Peabody, Jackson went abroad in search of opportunities as a rehearsal pianist. He did an initial stint at the Opera of Monte Carlo, followed by many years in Germany.
“I really learned my craft at the National Theater in Mannheim,” he said. “My first week there I had to play “Peter Grimes,” ‘Falstaff,” “Fidelio,” “Madame Butterfly,” “The Merry Widow” and conduct “Falstaff.”
Later assignments took him to Brussels, where he landed at the Théatre Royal.
“I started there as a rehearsal pianist, but they were just starting an opera studio where I was invited to conduct,” he said. He made his official conducting debut there with Donizetti’s comic opera “Don Pasquale.”
Jackson is an artist of remarkable versatility and boundless energy. He is an eloquent raconteur, and he speaks seven languages — English, Italian, French, Spanish, German, and Russian, and is conversant in Czech — a distinct advantage for an international musician on the move.
Jetting across continents, he has conducted the Hong Kong Philharmonic, and over the years, in addition to composing, has had a dizzying array of orchestral, choral, and opera engagements in Italy, Portugal, Czech Republic, Turkey, England and Canada. In the U.S., aside from New York, he has conducted in Texas, Virginia and Florida.
Each summer, as music director of the Trentino Music Festival, Jackson travels to Italy to direct a program for young artists, roughly ages 18-26, where he also serves on the faculty.
“We welcomed over 150 students last summer up in the beautiful Italian Dolomites and offer performances of several operas and musicals, faculty recitals,” he said. “and now we have new dance evenings, two to three different symphony programs and over 30 chamber and voice recitals.” Students come from the U.S., Latin America, Europe, and Asia.
Among his dozens of original compositions, his favorite is “Model Love,” written in 2011for American Opera Projects, for three singers, chamber orchestra, and rock band. He is currently working on a choral piece based on Anglo-Saxon riddles.
With a full schedule of conducting and composing, Jackson still has found time to write two murder mysteries, “A Death for Mozart” and “Death Comes to Puccini,” and is completing a third, “Wagner’s Death Mask,” forming a trilogy.
“My heroine, Maria, half Italian and half Catalan, is a rehearsal pianist who gets opera jobs in different countries and in different theaters, all where I once worked,” he said. “She falls in love with Max, an Austrian junior detective on the case.” Each plot relates to an opera by the composer in the book’s title.
After years of working abroad, Jackson has happily settled in Mamaroneck, close to his family. He lives in a house his grandmother Harriet and her husband, James, bought new in 1924, where he enjoys cultivating his English-style garden. His mother and sister, Sally Tobin, live in Rye, and his brother, Bob, in Newtown, Conn. Family reunions include six nieces and nephews.
What is Maestro Jackson’s next big goal? A permanent position as the conductor of a major symphony orchestra perhaps? His cryptic reply: “Yes, or with an opera company. Stay tuned.”
J. David Jackson will conduct The Magic Flute at the Metropolitan Opera on Dec. 13, 15, 18. 21, 26, 28 (matinee) and 29.