A new entertainment venue has the organization’s top brass excited
Manifest in what was once just another store in the Westfield Annapolis mall is the vibrant, exciting, new, unofficial home of Live Arts Maryland, the renowned organization that also stages performances at Maryland Hall and St. Anne’s Church, among other venues. In other words, this must-see destination—which its planners and supporters envision it to be—will offer new performances by local artists as well as nationally recognized guests.
The new 8,800-square-foot space named Live Arts Studio is an acoustically-sound study in black and white (punctuated with poster-size vintage photos of past Broadway legends). The floor-level stage area is intimately situated to present up-close performances for local patrons of the arts. The studio also serves as a rehearsal hall for each of the groups under the Live Arts umbrella.
Live Arts Maryland Board member Dr. Diane Lebedeff was instrumental in bringing it all to fruition. Her intense energy is obviously contagious. “We wanted to provide an elegant home space for the chorale, chamber orchestra, and all the performers. The inviting room transforms to a nightclub of sorts for shows, depending on the variety of performances.”
When it became clear that the Covid pandemic was limiting rehearsal and performance spaces nearly everywhere, the Live Arts Maryland board and, especially, Dr. Lebedeff “decided we would make this space a dream come true for Creative Director J. Ernest Green.” Now the showcase home to the Annapolis Chorale, Chamber Chorus, Chamber Orchestra, actors, and performers, it’s known simply by them all as “The Studio.”
A few weeks after a recent crowd-pleasing performance of Side By Side Sondheim—a revue of familiar music by the legendary Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim—we caught up with J. Ernest Green to discuss his background and Live Arts Studio.
Perhaps a good place to start would be to ask how someone with such an extensive affiliation with artists and musical institutions across the country ends up in Annapolis? My family is originally from Baltimore, and I had relatives living in the surrounding area, including Annapolis, which was always a favorite trip for me. We visited often. I actually grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and did my undergraduate work at the University of Toledo. I fondly remember those visits to Annapolis, even when I was living so far away.
How did you arrive at pursuing the trombone as your preferred instrument? Difficult as it may be to fathom for those who automatically associate orchestras more with stringed instruments, did you do a trombone recital at the University of Toledo? There were several wonderful brass players at the University of Toledo, and the path I chose was to play trombone in an orchestra. After a while, I became interested in directing and leadership. When you sit in the back of the orchestra, you’re not in the driver’s seat, by any stretch. So, I started conducting anything I could possibly find.
All along, I was focused on the orchestra side of things. After my undergraduate work, I was accepted as a conducting fellow at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore and eventually held assistantships in both orchestral and choral conducting. I believe I was the first person to hold those assistantships concurrently. The net result was my falling in love with choral music after my first rehearsal. It was like I got hit with a bolt of lightning, and it changed the course of my career—or what I thought would be my career. All of a sudden, I was working with singers, and I simply loved it.
Your resume is peppered with names that will be familiar to anyone who’s enjoyed popular music over the past several decades, some of them are known by their first names, last names seemingly superfluous. For example: Aretha (Franklin), Liza (Minnelli), and Barbra (Streisand), to name a few. How did you connect with Marvin Hamlisch? I received a call to lead an orchestra in Falls Church, Virginia, and several players were from the National Symphony. The people there treated it as a sort of fun community-outreach project for themselves. After that concert, a couple of the musicians went to the National Symphony and said, “We should get this guy Ernest Green in here.” So, I went to the Kennedy Center and started working as a “cover conductor,” which is essentially an understudy who was expected to walk on and conduct the orchestra at a moment’s notice. At that point, I was asked to cover for a concert with Marvin Hamlisch. The two of us hit it off immediately, and it blossomed into a friendship that I still treasure greatly.
I conducted for him just short of a dozen years, and I was musical adviser for his memorial concert in 2012, which is where I worked with the three people you mentioned. But the opportunity to collaborate at the same time with Mike Nichols [director of 18 star-studded Hollywood films] was like a mountaintop experience.
Like some other performers on that first memorial program, Liza Minnelli had come with something she wanted to sing, and my day started on stage at Juilliard beside Mike while Liza was working through her number. At the end of the day, Barbra Streisand came in to rehearse.
You dream about working with people at that level, and when you do, it is really a bit surreal.
As a result of my work with Marvin, I have connected with and conducted for many amazing musicians and performers. In recent years, I have started conducting Paul Shaffer [perhaps best known as David Letterman’s “Late Night” band leader], who is truly one of the finest musicians I’ve ever seen and worked with.
My goal with the Live Arts Studio is to take those experiences and use them to shape what we do there today and what we will do in the future.
What plans are in place to facilitate what’s happening at Live Arts Studio? Live Arts Studio is a new model. We still stage larger-scale programs at Maryland Hall and what are essentially chamber-music performances at the more intimate St. Anne’s Church, but a third option had been missing from all the music we want to do. We have realized that option, and we’re just now hitting our stride. I came here in 1985 as director of the Annapolis Chorale and worked on putting together performances and concerts. We’re still not where we need to be, but the options seem limitless. And we need the general fine-arts community here to realize that.
