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Beating time
Daniel Hege’s “quirky path to conducting” depended on opportunities to pursue varied interests.
Like Bethel students today, Daniel Hege thrived during his four years on campus, 1983-87, by pursuing his many interests.
He came to college, he says, with “a passion for music, but it wasn’t channeled.” So at Bethel, he tested that passion from a variety of angles.
He played trombone in the jazz ensembles and tuba in the Wind Ensemble – then heard and fell in love with the sound of the oboe and began studying that instrument with Don Kehrberg (now professor emeritus of music). He sang in the Concert Choir, formed a madrigal group and performed in Bethel music theater – the one-act opera The Old Maid and the Thief by Gian Carlo Menotti, the male lead in the Cole Porter musical Kiss Me, Kate. He discovered the Wichita Symphony Orchestra and attended as many concerts as he could.
About halfway through his time at Bethel, Hege says, he began hearing about a professor in the history department “whose classes were not to be missed” – Keith Sprunger. So Hege began developing his love of history, beginning to see, he says, “how history and music were related, and that my whole life, I had been thinking like a historian.”
He ended up with a double major in music and history. For his history seminar paper, he researched the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich and how he managed to survive and write music under the Stalinist regime in the mid-20th century.
Hege’s “musical epiphany” came, he says, in his junior year when one day Walter Jost ’49, Concert Choir director, asked Hege to direct a rehearsal in Jost’s absence. As a result of that experience, Hege says, “I became curious about conducting.
“You have to enjoy the process of taking the music apart and putting it back together. It takes a lot of study. It involves coaching. It means knowing the music 100 percent and also being able to gauge people’s [both players and audience] reaction to it. It’s not just beating time.”
With the 2010-11 season, Hege begins his tenure as conductor and music director of the Wichita Symphony Orchestra. For his debut performance in that role, Oct. 16-17, he conducted Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 in C minor, “Resurrection” with a 200-voice choir consisting of the WSO Chorus, the Friends University Singing Quakers and something new – the 56 voices of this year’s Bethel College Concert Choir.
He’s not sure he would recommend his “quirky path to conducting.” Many conductors, he says, would have a story something like this: Began playing violin at age three; practiced five hours a day for 15 years; attended [name of prestigious summer music camp here]; studied at the Eastman School of Music or Julliard or the Curtis Institute. For him – after moving to a farm near Aberdeen, Idaho, at age nine-almost-10, with father Carl ’61, mother Anne and two younger siblings (Beth Hege Piatote ’89 and John ’94) – the early story was milking cows, moving irrigation lines and driving a potato truck.
“What that got me,” he says, “was discipline, consistency and a work ethic.” After participating in Bethel’s music camp after his junior year in high school and learning to know Bethel music faculty, Hege picked Bethel as his college and came “not seeking a ‘career’ but asking myself what I would like to do for the rest of my life.”
When he began to see that the answer might be “conducting,” Hege chose to continue his education at the University of Utah – to be closer to home, his parents and “the beautiful mountains,” not because it was a “name-brand institution” for his field.
However, just as he’d experienced at Bethel, being at Utah gave him the opportunity to try different things. He was assistant conductor for the university orchestra, founded his own chamber orchestra and began conducting the Utah Singers (the non-audition university choir, affectionately called “the Utah Screamers”) after the director failed to show up one day and then never returned.
Upon graduation from Utah, Hege won a prestigious competition for the post of principal conductor and music director of the Young Musicians’ Foundation Debut Orchestra in Los Angeles, as well as the assistant conductor position for the Pacific Symphony Orchestra.
After doing this for a time, he made another unconventional turn in the path. “I learned so quickly and maybe not deeply enough [while working in California],” he says. “I took a calculated risk and applied to be conductor of the Chicago Youth Symphony. These were the best high school student musicians in Chicagoland – but it was still high school. My colleagues said: ‘This is a step backward, not good for your career – you can kiss your career goodbye.’
“It was like having my own lab,” he continues, “an orchestra I had to teach everything to. I needed slow, steady work – and they were playing the great works, what big orchestras do. These players could handle anything as long as I could teach it to them – the onus was on me, not them.”
Then in 1996, Hege won auditions for assistant conductor positions with the Kansas City Symphony and the Baltimore Symphony, whose principal conductor was David Zinman. Hege was traveling with the BSO during a tour of Japan in 1999 when Zinman was laid low by kidney stones and Hege was asked to take over.
One of the numbers on the program, Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, called for two tubas. Orchestras don’t customarily have two tuba players, so for the tour, the BSO had “borrowed” one from the Syracuse (N.Y.) Symphony Orchestra – which happened to be in a search for a music director and conductor.
Hege had guest conducted the Syracuse Symphony – a fulltime professional orchestra – but had not applied for the lead position because “I thought I wasn’t ready.” However, the SSO’s tuba player took back the tale of Hege’s performance in Japan and the search committee asked Hege to apply. In 2009-10, he completed his 10th season with the SSO.
Hege lives in Jamesville, N.Y. (he comes to Wichita for a week at a time for intense practice sessions with the WSO before their weekend performances), with his wife, violinist Katarina Oladottir Hege, a native of Iceland, whom he married in 1995. They have three daughters – Arianna, 13, Anna Sofia, 9, and Sabina, 5.
Recalling his Bethel years, Hege says, “I had a couple of friends who left because they said Bethel was too small, not competitive enough. Well, if you go to a larger school, you probably will have to sacrifice everything else for the sake of that one thing. And what happens if you’re No. 2, or not where you want to be – you ‘fail’?
“I had opportunities I would maybe not have had at a larger school. It enabled me to go out and do it myself, gave me confidence and helped me think: ‘I can do this.’
“My professors didn’t say to me: ‘Wait until you get out in the real world – it will be really hard and you should be prepared not to make it.’ They said: ‘If you have a dream, pursue it.’
“Bethel had great [musical] training for me, and also allowed me to be involved in many things. It led me to a window where I was able to look out and see what was possible.”