“I never had the discipline to be a concert pianist,” says the trim, fresh-faced Alexander Soddy, 42, an Oxford-born former boy chorister who went on to become a choral scholar at Cambridge. “I was always an incredible sight reader. Just by looking at a piece, I had already got to 80 percent.” Then came the slog: drilling the piano part into his fingers, alone in his room six hours a day. Now that he’s a conductor, with orchestras and soloists to play with, the final stages of preparation for performance are where his heart lies.
We spoke last February, when Soddy was taking a lunch break between rehearsals for the Metropolitan Opera’s umpteenth revival of Franco Zeffirelli’s vintage La Bohème—the vehicle for his house debut, in 2017. Everyone knows it’s not the conductor who sells this title season in, season out. Still, Puccini’s score doesn’t play itself. Though hastily assembled, Soddy’s unheralded return engagement achieved a freshness, atmosphere, flow, and moment-to-moment imaginative acuity that proved transformative.
