Critically acclaimed American conductor Andrew Litton has brought prominence to orchestras the world over. Ahead of his India debut at the SOI Autumn 2025 Season, he talks about the masterworks of Mahler, Tchaikovsky, the privilege of conducting them and his first brush with ballet as a young piano student.
By Dr. Karl Lutchmayer
Over the last four decades, Andrew Litton has established himself as one of the leading conductors of his generation. Following prestigious appointments in the UK, Norway, Singapore and the USA, he now lives in New York from where he joins me on a Zoom call. Just back from the last school run of the year, he is every bit as energetic and effervescent at 9 am on a computer screen as he appears on the concert stage. Before I even have the chance to ask him about his forthcoming concerts conducting the SOI, he tells me how much he is looking forward to visiting India for the first time. “I’m really excited to be there, to experience the culture and, of course, the cuisine. I’m going to be learning the ropes, and that was partly what was so attractive about the engagement: here was a chance to work with a new orchestra, in a new place, in a new country.”
A New Yorker by birth, Litton has been the Music Director of the New York City Ballet for a decade. Following his tenures with symphony orchestras in Bournemouth, Bergen, Dallas and Colorado, this was a bit like coming home. “I’m from the Upper West Side originally, and my parents lived right near Lincoln Center. So, I always joke that I am the real West Side Story because I was born two days after ground was broken on Lincoln Center. Every day, as a little boy, when I was taken for a walk, it was to look at the construction site, so when the New York City Ballet [resident at the David H. Koch Theater at the Lincoln Center] asked, I thought I’ve got to do the New York thing.”
Litton goes on to discuss the experience of taking over the role. “The biggest challenge when I started out as a ballet conductor was learning to follow sight. After 33 years, one gets pretty good at following sound but following sight is a totally different thing. The orchestra note has to be when the ballerina lands, but they all jump to different heights! It was a very steep learning curve.” Nevertheless, the role came with important opportunities to widen his repertoire. “When I showed up there, I knew, as conductors do, the three main Stravinsky ballets—The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring. But [at the New York City Ballet] we do 21 Stravinsky pieces in the core repertoire, and some are masterpieces that never get played in the concert hall.”
The New York City Ballet, however, was not Litton’s first brush with the genre; as a student pianist he had worked with the legendary dancer Rudolph Nureyev, an experience he calls extraordinary. “I was a first-year piano student at Juilliard and by February, I was feeling pretty depressed because there were 199 other students who could play faster and louder than me. The phone rang one night, around 11 pm, and it was a really good friend, a senior student, saying, ‘You’ve got to do me a favour. I took an engagement playing piano for some guy called Rudolph Nureyev on Broadway, but I’ve also got another engagement. Can you do it?’ How could I not do it? I learnt the repertoire and was taken to Steinway Hall to pick the best nine-foot concert grand they had. And the one I picked happened to have been Rubinstein’s. It was all so exciting—suddenly I was somebody. Then I was warned by the choreographer, ‘Rudy, he has a huge temper, so if he screams at you don’t be surprised.’”
The two weeks of rehearsal, he recalls, were lovely. On opening night, though, says Litton, “Nureyev was in the wings stretching, and you could hear the audience through the curtains. I was as nervous as you could be. This was basically my professional debut. Here I am, sitting with the world’s greatest male dancer at the time, and so I turn to him and say, ‘Tell me, Rudy, do you ever get nervous?’ His eyes flashed with rage. He said, ‘What a stupid question. Why would you ask such a question? Of course, I get nervous! You must get nervous. Do you hear all those people out there? Do you have any idea how much money they paid? You have to get nervous and you have to learn to channel it into energy and excitement.’ At that moment the stage manager called ‘Places!’ When Nureyev walked onto the stage, I felt like somebody who had just powered down a nuclear reactor. I felt so relaxed—if this guy is nervous then it’s cool to be nervous. It was the greatest life lesson ever.”
Litton has continued to play the piano professionally throughout his career, both as a soloist and chamber musician. How does that affect his role as a conductor in works like Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, which he will be conducting at the NCPA? “Early on in my career I would often find myself wanting to conduct it the way I would play it, but as an experienced conductor you realise, you have to be Switzerland here with your views,” he says. “There are times when I’ve suggested a different fingering to somebody so that they’ll get more sound, and they go, ‘Woah!’ That’s fun. But normally, I keep my mouth shut. This is the soloist’s moment and I’m here to make them shine.”
Litton will also be presenting Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 at the SOI Autumn 2025 Season. “I think what makes this symphony so compelling is how personal it feels. Mahler once said, ‘the symphony must be like the world, it must contain everything.’ In his Fifth, we get just that—sorrow, love, irony, joy, all wrapped in an extraordinary orchestration and emotional landscape. It’s like going to a museum and, somehow, one painting says it all,” he says. Mahler, Litton feels, is one of those composers whose life one must know to truly appreciate the music. “His music is based on certain childhood experiences. Half of his brothers and sisters died, and he once wrote that there was never a moment that there wasn’t a casket in the living room. The family lived near an army barracks, so marches were going by all the time with their drums and trumpets, but he also loved nature so there’s always bits of nature strewn in [the music].”
What also makes Mahler’s Fifth extraordinary possibly has something to do with what he was experiencing while composing it. “During a turbulent part of Mahler’s life, he fell in love with Alma Schindler and wrote the fourth movement, the Adagietto, as a love letter to her. Since then, like Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’, the movement has been misused on sad occasions such as Robert Kennedy’s funeral. But rather than taking it as a dirge, it has to have some sort of movement.” He pauses for a moment, before adding, “You know, it’s a great privilege to get to conduct these symphonies, and very often, I have sleepless nights before because you question your ability to make such a fantastic masterpiece work. However, I find that the music carries you—it’s above all that.”
This article was originally published in the August 2025 issue of ON Stage.
