Bruno Ferrandis will return to the Santa Rosa Symphony for 3 shows this weekend

For the first time in nearly four years, beloved conductor Bruno Ferrandis will return to the Santa Rosa Symphony, for three shows this weekend at the Green Music Center.

It will be his first Sonoma County appearance since 2019, and he’s thrilled to be back.

“It means a lot because I know so many people. I could shake hands with everybody in Santa Rosa,” Ferrandis said in a Zoom interview from southern France last week.

The wide-ranging program, showcasing virtuoso pianist Jon Nakamatsu, features five pieces, including two works by French composer Lili Boulanger, who died in 1918 when she was 24.

A Maurice Ravel piano concerto and compositions by Claude Debussy and Philip Glass round out the program.

Ferrandis, 62, served as music director for the Santa Rosa Symphony from 2006 to 2018 and is now conductor laureate.

Symphony marketing director Brenda Fox said Ferrandis possesses tremendous artistic and personal integrity and loves Sonoma County and symphony patrons.

“We were lucky to have him for 12 years,” she said. “And when he comes back to conduct the orchestra, it feels like an old true friend has returned home.”

Ferrandis called the upcoming concerts a “hybrid program” because his Santa Rosa Symphony successor, Francesco Lecce-Chong, chose the Boulanger pieces, then Ferrandis selected the rest of the program.

“As a Frenchman, I immediately thought of Nadia Boulanger (Lili’s sister), a master composition teacher who nurtured the careers of hundreds of students, from Leonard Bernstein to Aaron Copland to Quincy Jones,” he said.

“So I decided to do something around the Boulanger family,” Ferrandis said, noting that Nadia Boulanger was a “singular woman who taught all these men.”

All three concerts include a preshow conversation, an hour before showtime, exploring the Boulanger sisters’ enduring contributions to 20th-century music.

The two Lili Boulanger pieces in the program are “completely opposite in mood,” Ferrandis said.

“One is very sad. You can feel the death of the person coming up. And one is very happy and very light.”

In Lili Boulanger’s work, “you hear a lot of Debussy,” which led Ferrandis to choose Debussy’s “La Mer” for the upcoming program.

When he discovered that Nadia Boulanger served as a mentor for Philip Glass, he selected “The Canyon.”

“The guy is minimalist,” Ferrandis said, “very American, New York. It’s a landscape. ‘The Canyon’ goes very well with ‘La Mer’.”

During Ferrandis’ tenure as music director, the Santa Rosa Symphony moved from the Luther Burbank Center to the Green Music Center at Sonoma State University.

Asked if that was an acoustic upgrade, Ferrandis said it was like “night and day.”

Luther Burbank, then called the Wells Fargo Center, was originally built as a church and required “an enormous sound system to propel the sound to the ears of the listeners,” he recalled.

The Green Music Center is an “organic, state-of-the-art hall,” Ferrandis said.

“Inaugurating that hall in 2012 as a young conductor, it was incredible for me. I could not even imagine that one day that would have happened. And it did. I was very, very lucky.”

Despite the generous budget and technical expertise that went into building the Green Music Center, there was no guarantee the acoustics would be brilliant.

“Acoustics is rarely easy,” Ferrandis said. It takes “such a fantastic amount of different expertise: the material, the architecture, the proportions, the distance, the imagination.”

One bit of imagination caught his fancy: the back wall that can open to enable concertgoers on the lawn to hear the performances.

“It’s like an ancient Roman arena,” he said.

Before his first performance, Ferrandis “tested the hall” and its sonic capabilities.

“I remember vividly, I was sitting back outside in the trees, very far away from the stage, and there was a viola player,” he said.

“They were just plucking the instrument. And I could hear it like a little needle falling on my table. The precision of the sound was incredible.”

Though Ferrandis appears and sounds French, he was born in Algiers, where his father worked as a lab technician, during the war between Algeria and France.

The hundreds of thousands of French residents of Algeria were called “Pieds noirs (black feet),” he recalled, perhaps a reference to the black boots of French soldiers.

“We were the invaders,” he said.

The French “took Algeria, and then we were kicked out of Algeria,” he said in his distinctive French accent.

Ferrandis was just 2 years old and his brother just a month old when his family left in 1962, the year Algeria proclaimed it independence.

“I was lucky in the sense that I didn't see the war,” but his family and others “had to abandon their houses, their properties, everything.”

Today, Ferrandis is “in between” the French from France and the Algerians from Algeria, he said. “We (the pieds noirs) are neither of them.”

He considers himself French “by education, by language, by history. But to the French, to this day, there is a difference. They know the difference between us and the French metropolitan.

“And we know the difference too. I always feel I don't really belong.”

Ferrandis believes his nonnative background may have diminished his career prospects in France.

“I never made it in France (though) I work in France a lot, with the Paris Radio Orchestra, in Bordeaux, in Nice,” he said.

“I used to live in Nice, and I even conducted the Opera of Nice, my hometown, but I never, never felt at home there. So it’s a very strange situation.”

Though he’s now the symphony’s conductor laureate rather than its musical director, Ferrandis doesn’t see himself as close to retirement.

“Unless you cannot move your arms and your brain doesn’t work, retired doesn’t mean anything,” he said.

Just last week, a conductor fell ill in the Czech Republic, and Ferrandis flew over to Ostrava, a city in the eastern part of that country, to conduct an opera.

Ferrandis emphasized how much he loves his work and how he could never imagine giving it up.

“For me, the dream retirement,” he said, “would be to die while conducting.”

Michael Shapiro’s latest book, “The Creative Spark,” won the 2021 Independent Publishers award. Contact him via his site: www.michaelshapiro.net.