Foot in the Door
The Hart School
University of Hartford
West Hartford
Oct. 14, 2025
The last time I saw Chadwick Thomas, he was performing at First Church in West Hartford as part of the congregation’s Sunday chamber music series. This time, he was on his home turf at the University of Hartford, and Thomas had stepped out of the performer’s chair and onto the conductor’s stand.
He was the first guest conductor of the evening, leading a 13-piece ensemble of Hartt School students. I asked him what it was like to be a conductor instead of a performer.
“I have a different responsibility in a way. A lot of what I have to do is show everyone where we are in the structure, especially this sort of slow piece. It's sort of easy for people to get lost in the form of the piece. So, I mark the important sections and the downbeats and help everyone stay together.”
There’s more to it than that. He said that one of his former teachers likened reducing conducting down to keeping the members together to being a traffic cop. Thomas doesn’t just tell the group where they’re going, but how to get there.
“The next step is that we have to show some type of expressive interpretation. So, 13 players might all have a different idea of how they want the piece to go, and we have to kind of unify the group,” he explained.
His 13-piece ensemble opened the first Foot in the Door concert of the 2025-2026 school year. The Foot in the Door series has a long tradition at the University of Hartford, where members play in a variety of ensemble sizes from small chamber groups to large chamber orchestras. The selection of music focuses on established as well as emerging 20th and 21st century composers.
The ensemble performed Concerto de Chambre par 13 exécutants, a piece from Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu. I watched Thomas carefully, trying to understand how his gestures impacted the performance of the ensemble. A closed fist brought the music to a halt. A brief pause on the upbeat was a signal for the next wave of instruments to come in. The intensity of his swings informed the playstyle, with longer strokes of the baton giving way to slow, expressive passages. But a sharp swing brought about a shrill shout from the ensemble.
Thomas’ conducting led the ensemble into those moments that surprised the audience, but his steady hand made them predictable for the performers. Conducting is all about body language, and that’s an interesting facet of musical performance I’d never considered. The person in charge cannot make any noise, less they distract from the performers. It all needs to be visual, and visual enough that performers can see both the music and the instructions. That means big arm movements, cartoonish facial expressions and a level of trust between the ensemble and the conductor.
The other guest conductor for the evening, Jacob Bender, received his degree in conducting. While he enjoys conducting the most, Bender continues to perform as well.
“I enjoy playing, and it reminds me of what I would want to see from a conductor, from a player's perspective,” he said. “It helps me to be a better conductor if I remember what it's like to be a player.”
The piece that his ensemble performed, Oiseaux exotiques by Olivier Messiaen, was a contrast to Thomas’ in that there were large sections of the performance that Bender did not directly conduct. There, the interplay between Bender and pianist Markus Kaitila was similarly unspoken, with the two understanding wordlessly when to drop off and pick up the music.
No matter how many times I attend concerts such as this, I learn something new. By focusing on the person in front of the ensemble, I learned that the silence is just as important as the sound.
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