Peter Oundjian is musical director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. On June 18, he will conduct the TSO in a special "late night" performance of Mahler's Fifth Symphony, 10:30 p.m. ET at Roy Thomson Hall, presented in collaboration with Luminato.
Do you like baseball?
I have been a baseball fan for a long time. I came to America in 1975 from England. I thought cricket was the greatest game and baseball was a girl's game called "rounders" that men played in America.
I thought it was somebody pitching and somebody trying to hit. How boring! They only had one pitch and one stance. In cricket, we had all these delicate glides and knocks and different ways of hitting. Plus, we could just miss the ball forever in a very elegant way.
Then I joined the Tokyo [String]Quartet, and, of course, Japanese people are more fanatical about baseball than any Westerners. They made me start to play. It was fun, but I thought it was totally wimpy to use a glove to catch. It took me a while to feel that playing with a glove was not cheating. In cricket, with even a perfectly ordinary fly ball, it's not guaranteed you are going to catch it. In baseball, really, how often does anyone miss a fly ball?
When my son was about 7 in Connecticut, we used to spend hours playing catch. That's when I started to understand the intricacies of the game, all the little tensions.
I must confess they elude me.
There are boring games of baseball, without question. But there is so much mind-reading going on between the catcher, the pitcher and the guy at bat trying to figure out what's coming at him next and why. That can become incredibly interesting the more you know.
Do you watch live or on TV?
I watch it more on TV. I go to Blue Jays games three or four times a season.
If they televised paint drying, would you watch that?
That's exactly the point! You don't know what to watch. That counts for some of the greatest things in our culture. Frankly, if you don't know anything about the language of Shakespeare, that can lose you pretty quickly. The same with some of the great music. You have to give it more of a chance to absorb. Baseball is definitely that way.
Do you still play baseball? When did you last wear a glove?
My son is in college now and we'll play catch occasionally, but a game of baseball? I suppose 15 years.
The "bleacher bums," ball-capped fans in the cheap seats with a beer and a hot dog, giving outfielders the raspberry. How do you reconcile that with the refined world of the symphony?
It's not quiet that intrigues me in baseball. People are attracted [to it]for different reasons. I have to protect my skin at this point and my alcohol intake in the sun, I'm apparently supposed to limit.
Baseball films and books often portray the game as a metaphor for life. Do you see it so?
It's a good way of attributing some sort of great profundity in the game, if you want. There's a potential in a lot of sports for learning great life lessons. It can teach us a lot about healthy human interaction.
There are a preponderance of baseball films - Field of Dreams, Bull Durham, The Natural, Eight Men Out, The Babe - that baseball fans like to the point of worship. Do you enjoy baseball films?
There's a lot of time for other things in baseball movies. If you took a three-hour baseball game and only showed the action, it would probably take, I dunno, 17 minutes.
I'd say 17 seconds …
So that leaves an awful lot of time for dialogue. You know the expression "It ain't over till it's over?" Honestly, in hockey or soccer, if it's 5-1 with two or three minutes left, the team with one isn't going to win. That's not true in baseball. It allows for the outrageous comeback. There is always hope. And hope makes a good movie.
I gather you threw out the first pitch at a Jays game.
Indeed! It was nerve-racking. I had been told by a member of the TSO that I was not just throwing out the first pitch, I was representing the entire arts community of Canada, and if I threw it in the ground, it would be an embarrassment to everybody.
How did you do?
I was lucky. It was a nice curve and ended at [Blue Jay]Kyle Drabek's left knee. Curve inside.
Would it have been a strike?
Yeah, in that it looked like it was going straight, but then it curved down so someone would have tried to hit it. It was going so slowly that anyone could have hit it. Drabek trotted out. He said, "Nice pitch, man."
Did you practise beforehand?
Oh, about 48 years!