The garden at Benjamin Zander’s home on Brattle Street is full of tulips, a rainbow of colors that resemble an artist’s paint-splotched palette. There are vivid reds and pastel oranges and bubbles of silky purple next to buttery white – one can’t walk into the garden without taking a moment to appreciate the beauty.
A woman wandered in to do that Friday. “You have a beautiful orchestra of flowers,” she said. Zander smiled. “My brother tells me it would be his worst nightmare to have random people come in like this,” he said, “but I love it. I have a sign out front inviting them to take a look, and so they do all the time.”
Zander thrives off connection. At 85, the Cantabrigian is the musical director and founder of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and its Youth Orchestra, as well as co-writer of the national bestseller, “The Art of Possibility.” The roles take up all of Zander’s time; he is either fundraising and raising awareness for the orchestra, which allows members to join free of charge, or going on global tours to give speeches around possibility. During an interview he received an important call about funding; at another point, Alfonso Piacentini, Zander’s assistant conductor, stopped by to ask if Zander was ready to play Mozart. Pianist Alessandro Deljavan had landed that morning from Italy and was inside the house, Zander explained. They would practice in the evening for a Symphony Hall concert Friday, which would begin with Deljavan’s playing of Mozart and end with Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9. “It’s profoundly reverent and religious music which has a power of healing,” Zander said. “When we come out of the rehearsals, we’re all feeling enlivened and elevated, more in touch with our humanity than we possibly ever get. It’s extraordinary.”
He describes symphonic works less around their sounds and more around the emotions they awaken within him. In speaking of conducting, Zander said he’s like the flowers in his garden: “I’m bursting with energy and with excitement and with a sense of fulfillment.” It’s always been the case. He remembers when he was 4 watching his father play piano, moving with the music, his feelings like waves – an amateur player, but ecstatic from the beauty of the piece. Zander wanted to experience that joy, and so he started playing as well. As a precocious cellist, he was soon writing his own compositions.
When Zander was 9, his mother decided he should compete in a competition near their home in Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, England. An adjudicator from London said Zander had no talent and should stop composing.
Rather than telling her son, she instead sent the pieces to Benjamin Britten, the most well-known British composer at the time. Four days later, the telephone rang. It was Britten, inviting the family to holiday close to his house by the sea in Aldeburgh. They ended up visiting for three summers so Zander could learn from Britten.
Six years later, Zander’s talent took him farther: He was invited to spend the summer in Italy, where he would study with Gaspar Cassadó, a Spanish cellist of extraordinary caliber. When the summer ended, Cassadó told Zander, “Okay, now let’s get to work.” Zander responded that he had school to attend, and Cassadó was befuddled. “Why?” he asked. “Why do you want to go to school?”
Zander ended up studying with Cassadó for five more years, and never went back to school again.
After skipping straight to university, Zander won a Harkness Commonwealth Fellowship and traveled to Cambridge, where he has lived for the past 60 years. He worked with the New England Conservatory for 45 years. His first wife, Patricia, became Yo-Yo Ma’s recital pianist for 13 years. His second wife, Rosamund Zander, collaborated with him on the renowned “The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life,” published in 2000. He explained the text, his eyes lit as brightly as when he speaks of music, as “the philosophy of life, which is transformational, and very different from normal books. It’s not a how-to book. It’s a book of transformational thinking.”
This philosophy, he said, is too difficult to explain, but he offered a story in an attempt to show part of its meaning. Years ago, Zander taught a class at the Walnut Hill School for the Arts, a school for young artists in Natick. When he had a great soloist come to play with the Boston Philharmonic, he saw it as an opportunity to get his class tickets to attend – the soloist was one of the best in the world, he said, and he wouldn’t want his students to miss him. The students were lucky, as the event sold out within days. When the concert ended, Zander, exhilarated, looked up at the audience to see the kids. Half were missing.
On his drive to school the next morning, Zander was angry. On the phone with Rosamund, his rant was endless: The students were ungrateful, he told her, rude and thoughtless. Rosamund, whom Zander described as sphynxlike in her mysticism, had only one request: “Remember to apologize to them.” Zander, at first, was confused – he had given the students ample warning of the event, and yet they hadn’t attended, that was no fault of his. But then he thought about Rosamund’s words, and his philosophy of the art of possibility.
Zander walked into class and didn’t scream or berate the students. Instead, he told them, “I apologize to you. Because I didn’t tell you about this great violinist. I didn’t tell you that just listening to him play would transform your relationship to music. I didn’t tell you that. So I’m really sorry I let us all down.”
The normal reaction when things don’t go our way is a downward spiral: We get frustrated and assign blame, punishing and pushing out negativity. Zander offers a different perspective, that though we can’t control the situation around us, we can control our reaction to it. In this scenario, instead of giving into his anger, Zander looked within himself to see what he could have done. “That’s a completely transformational way of looking at experience,” Zander said. The book has been published in 27 different languages, and Zander has gone on global tours to speak to the change it proposes.
“Most 85-year-olds are sitting in an old people’s home in a rocking chair, with nothing to do,” Zander said. “And as you see, my life is incredibly busy. It’s as busy now as it’s ever been.” Still, he said, at some point it’ll come to an end, a reality he doesn’t like to think about, but must. The concert on Friday, the sole local celebration of the 200th anniversary of Bruckner’s birth in Austria, is important to Zander, who returned to the works many times over the life of the Philharmonic and became one of only two Boston conductors to receive the Bruckner Society of America’s Kilenyi Medal of Honor. (He won it in 2021; the prior Boston winner was Serge Koussevitzky in 1934.) “Particularly when you’re dealing with somebody who’s 85, it’s unlikely that I’ll ever do this again,” Zander said of conducting the Bruckner. It’s the orchestra’s final concert of the year.
This time, he doesn’t want to make the same mistake as with his Walnut Hill students – it’s not enough to provide people with the tickets to an event, he said; one must also explain why it’s so special. “You have to tell them,” he told me, of Cambridge Day readers. “This is exciting. This is important. It’ll never happen again. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience.” The music, he promises, “makes some of the most beautiful sounds that exist in the world.”
- The Boston Philharmonic plays Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 in C Minor and Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9 at 8 p.m. Friday at Boston Symphony Hall. The Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra plays Schumann’s cello concerto at 8 p.m. May 3 at Boston Symphony Hall. $32 to $125. Information and tickets are here.
This post was updated April 24, 2024, with corrections to the text around details of Benjamin Zander’s studies as a child and his marriages.
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