Canberra’s busiest baton on a global swing

WE’VE been reporting on Canberra’s busiest conductor, Leonard “Lenny” Weiss, since he was a whippersnapper, and he’s showing no sign of slowing down.

This, after all, is the man who once simultaneously conducted the Canberra Youth Orchestra, the National Capital Orchestra, the Canberra Qwire and the ANU Choral Society and his characteristic mode is busy, busy, busy.

As he was finishing a conducting stint with National Opera’s “The Elixir of Love”, Weiss announced his imminent departure the following day on the long-postponed 2020 Mr and Mrs Gerald Frank New Churchill Fellowship.

The preceding weeks in Canberra had gone well as he reunited with the orchestra he had founded, the Canberra Sinfonia, to play the opera and enjoyed rehearsing with local singers.

His tenure as NZ’s national assistant conductor-in-residence, managed by the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, had come to an end after recording some new music for the SOUNZ Centre for NZ Music and even singing in Beethoven’s “9th Symphony” under the baton of Giordano Bellincampi.

After a quick dash through Sydney, he was off to Perth for the Australian Conducting Academy, working with Israeli conductor and pianist Asher Fisch and the WA Symphony Orchestra on Elgar’s “Enigma Variations” and operatic arias from Mozart, Strauss and Massenet featuring WA mezzo-opera Ashlyn Tymms.

Perth was the perfect point to fly directly to Tokyo to work with Riccardo Muti at the Italian Opera Academy. Every day for the better part of two weeks he got an hour of orchestral podium time with Muti by his side, an experience that scored a rave review from Weiss: “It would be an understatement to say that furthering my technique, knowledge of opera, and learning the inner works of Verdi’s masterpiece ‘Un Ballo in Maschera’ with Muti was simply inspiring… this may have been the most artistically energising and motivating time of my career to date.” 

The Opera Academy culminated in a final performance of “Un Ballo” for which Weiss conducted from the Act II love scene through to the Act III arias “Morrò, ma prima in grazia” and “Eri tu”. 

Back home, he focused on “The Elixir of Love”, but not before popping in on the Four Winds Music Festival with his mum over Easter, where I asked him whatever happened to his masters at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where in 2020 Weiss had received Peabody’s Rising Star award? 

While there, covid struck so he called a pause and slipped back into Canberra with the initial idea of resuming his studies later.

The Churchill Fellowship will see him travel throughout Europe and the US for the next three months, assisting and observing leading international conductors, including Marin Alsop and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the Ravinia Festival, Yannick Nézet-Séguin for a Met Orchestra performance at Carnegie Hall and Simone Young at the Berlin Philharmonic. Busy, busy, busy.

On his return he will work with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra before returning to Europe – Weiss has been selected into the Kodaly Conducting competition in Hungary.