With a world premiere production of Balanchine’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” wrapping up Miami City Ballet’s 30th anniversary season, it would surprise no one to learn of the workout dancers have gone through to prepare.
But the orchestra? Just ask flutist Emilio Rutllant, who’s been training intensively, running and cycling. While the dancers’ grueling solos are en pointe, Rutllant’s are in the pit.
The talented musician who grew up in Vero Beach is the youngest principal flutist in Miami City Ballet’s Opus One Orchestra. His 26th birthday last week – St. Patrick’s Day – was spent in rehearsal for the spectacular re-imagining of Balanchine’s ballet.
For the ballet, which opened last weekend in Miami and plays the Kravis Center next weekend, the orchestra plays for the entire evening-long story ballet, a rarity for the company and for Balanchine, who choreographed very few in his repertoire. Artistic director Lourdes Lopez was granted broad freedoms by the Balanchine Trust for the new rendering, which has the action taking place not in a forest, as Shakespeare had it, but underwater.
For the musicians, it amounts to a marathon – hence, Rutllant’s endurance training. And it is testament to the ballet company’s commitment to live music, reinstated in 2010 after a two-year hiatus due to a funding shortfall. A $900,000 challenge grant from the Knight Foundation came just in time for the ballet’s 25th anniversary.
The Opus One Orchestra began its new life with a bang, when then-artistic director and founder Edward Villella recruited a celebrated conductor, Gary Sheldon. Principal guest conductor of the San Francisco Ballet, one of the top companies in the nation, as well as Ballet Met and Opera Theatre of Syracuse, Sheldon that year won the American Prize in Conducting.
“The Knight grant served a wonderful purpose of kick-starting both the interest and support in the orchestra, but also the level of playing, as more and more musicians became aware of the new higher standard,” says Sheldon. “We were reaching for new heights.”
A graduate of Juilliard who studied with Leonard Bernstein at Tanglewood, he has guest conducted the BBC Symphony, the Montreal Symphony, and Spoleto Festival Symphony. Being in the pit for a ballet, though, requires a vigilance for what’s happening not only in the orchestra but on stage.
“Conducting for ballet is both accompanying and accommodating,” says Sheldon. “There are always small moments or movements that make every performance unique, and I stay closely in tune with the stage, to watch and breathe with the dancers and make changes.”
He also points out that because Lourdes is staging more and more new works, the orchestra is having to learn musical scores that most in the orchestra have never heard, let alone played. “That’s a new challenge,” Sheldon says. “I’m proud that our Opus One Orchestra has gone after it in a very assertive way.”
It was Sheldon who hired Rutllant after contacting his teacher Trudy Kane at the University of Miami, “one of the outstanding flutists of our time,” Sheldon says.
“I asked if she had someone special to recommend, and without hesitation she recommended Emilio.”
Kane has been principal flutist for the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra since 1976. It was she who schooled Rutllant in the nuance necessary to accompany a performance like opera or ballet.
Those nuances, though, come only at the direction of Sheldon; Rutllant can’t see the stage, and wouldn’t look if he could. Even though he and other musicians are passionate fans of ballet, in the pit, the 50-member orchestra focuses on the conductor alone.
Sheldon encourages the musicians to watch the ballets from the audience when they’re not performing. He himself spends hours in company rehearsals, familiarizing himself with the choreography, the tempo of the music and the individual dancers.
“He knows them all,” says Rutllant. That enables the conductor to adjust for cast changes, anticipating a particular dancer’s interpretations and tempos.
Each of Miami City Ballet’s four programs per season requires on average four orchestra rehearsals.
Rutllant starts his work well before then. For the current ballet, Mendelssohn’s music, about half of it from the famous overture and other incidentals to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” was delivered to Rutllant more than a month ago; he has been practicing daily – in addition to his workouts.
“It’s both technically challenging and physically challenging,” he says. “There’s one particular solo in the scherzo movement at the very end of the first act. The flute has this really virtuosic line that’s full of non-stop 16th notes, and you only have two places to breathe in the entire thing. I’ve been doing cardio just to make sure I have the lungs.”
At the same time he is preparing for a competition in New York, for a piece that is “extremely virtuosic that lasts 14 minutes and took six months to prepare.”
That competition, for the New York Flute Club, will cause him to miss the Kravis Center performances of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” But he’ll be back next season.
And in the middle of it all, he’s studying for his day-long doctoral qualifying exams that allow him to move on to working on a dissertation.
With his other orchestra work – he also plays with the University of Miami’s Frost Symphony Orchestra – Rutllant plays up to six hours a day. Practice is second nature, from the time he picked up the flute at Oslo Middle School. That was a year after he arrived in the U.S. from Chile, not knowing a word of English, brought to Vero by his mother, Clara McCullough, after Emilio’s father died.
At Oslo, he studied flute under Sherry St. Petery, in a nascent orchestra program begun by Matt Stott. An “overachiever” by his own admission, he sailed through the first-year flute book in a semester and soon took up oboe besides.
By his freshman year in high school, as Stott moved on to found Vero Beach High’s remarkable orchestra program, Rutllant added private lessons with Jane Weise. He has also studied under Tina Burr, principal flutist with the Atlantic Classical Orchestra and the Brevard Symphony.
By his junior year, he was ready to give his first concert, to an enthusiastic audience at Sun-Up Center. “It was a fundraiser to buy my first semi-professional flute,” he says.
Today, he is on the emerging artist roster for one of the world’s top flute companies, Miyazawa.
His senior year, he gave another fund-raiser, this time at the high school’s Performing Arts Center; funds went to college tuition.
At Stetson University he became the principal flutist, and he is now flutist with Frost Symphony Orchestra, the orchestra of the University of Miami’s renowned Frost School of Music.
Now, he’d like to bring performances back to Vero. “I’m thinking of finding a way to establish a chamber music series,” he says. “I would like to establish a few performance locations, with Vero being one of them.”
