Feeling sound

PROVIDENCE — While he fought cancer in a Vancouver hospital, Bramwell Tovey, the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra's artistic director and conductor, was asked to listen to a CD of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, with himself conducting, and decide whether it was good enough for broadcast.

At 22, the British native was hired as staff conductor of the London Festival Ballet. Rudolf Nureyev was a featured dancer. Tovey conducted for dozens of orchestras, ballets and operas, and for more than 40 years he has traveled the world, performing, conducting, teaching, composing and writing about classical music.

Newly hired last April, he gave a concert for the Rhode Island Philharmonic’s 75th season. Two months later in the Canadian Rockies, he got winded carrying his luggage and was diagnosed with myoepithelioma, which produced a tumor that wrapped around his torso and climbed his chest.

Big enough to hold six liters of fluid, the tumor drained him. He had surgery, six months of chemotherapy, and six weeks and a day of radiation.

It was a low point. “I was really, really ill.” He lay there, “listening to myself conducting.” Absorbed in the music, emotional from the cancer and the medicines battling it out in his body, and hearing how his conducting spoke through the orchestra, he came to terms with his mortality, his survival, and the alchemy of music.

“You kind of realize how life-enhancing classical music is.”

Saying conductors are still valued well into their 80s, he expressed his hope that he could have “another 20 years conducting.”

He spoke backstage Thursday at Veterans Memorial Auditorium after a full day of rehearsals for Saturday’s "All Mozart" concert. He’s been looking forward to this concert for months, he said, partly because he loves Mozart and also because the Rhode Island Philharmonic Youth Symphony Orchestra will join the Philharmonic for the "Magic Flute" overture, and he loves working with young musicians.

Also, conducting means cancer is no longer in charge.

When he’s conducting, he forgets the disease. Sometimes he'll feel a stab of pain, but he is quickly absorbed in smiling upon the next group of instruments he’ll call in, as if he knows they’re going to produce something lovely, or in drawing out streams of colors above the musician’s heads, or with coaxing imaginary beasts from a cave, giving them breath, then sending them back behind the guard line of double basses.

Comparing how he looked in April, he said he has a little less hair, and it's almost all white. Looking more well-fed and relaxed than gaunt and stressed, he considers the effect that this depth of life experience will have on how he conducts.

"If you've been through something," he said, "whether it's bereavement, joy, the arrival of a child ... classical music is about those things. Those things come out.

"I'm a different person," he said. "Older, more sensible." The folly of youth has stepped aside. Now he can hear the subtleties.