(Above: David Amado, new artistic director and conductor of the Oregon Mozart Players; the group opens its 2025-26 season on Oct. 18 at Beall Hall on the University of Oregon campus.)
By Daniel Buckwalter
At the very top of David Amado’s website is a credo that he lives by when conducting an orchestra, a North Star that always points to collaboration.
It reads in part: You couldn’t do a concert without a conductor, but you also couldn’t do it without a principal oboe. Or the second trombone. We all need to be here. Somebody needs to give it direction, and that happens to be my job. We’re all trying to accomplish the same thing.
The 57-year-old Amado will bring that guiding doctrine to Eugene on Oct. 18 as the Oregon Mozart Players’ new artistic director and conductor, replacing Kelly Kuo and becoming OMP’s sixth artistic director with the Nomad & Native program.
“It is fundamentally a collaborative pursuit,” Amado tells Eugene Scene. “That’s how I approach music-making.”
And that collaborative pursuit, Amado notes, is something that he grew into. He recalls conducting studies at the Juilliard School under the well — shall we say stern — guidance of Otto-Werner Mueller, a German-American who also taught conducting at the University of Wisconsin Madison and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
Mueller was born in 1926 in Germany, and while he has been credited with teaching important conductors such as Rudolf Barshai, Keri-Lynn Wilson and Paavo Järvi, he also had, Amado notes, a domineering — almost intimidating — presence on the podium and in the classroom, all the more so because he was a tall man.
Indeed, there’s an often funny and equally reverent first-person piece by Nathan Cole in Violinist.com — “Forte Only! Reflections on Otto-Werner Mueller at Curtis” — in which Cole explains why Mueller could never have led a professional orchestra.
“Within a week he would have gone on a Godzilla-like rampage and decimated the group, beginning with the brass,” Cole writes.
Amado says he absorbed Mueller’s mannerisms and tried his best to incorporate them in the professional sphere. It didn’t last long.
“It was an uncomfortably bad fit,” made more so, he adds, because “I come from a family of chamber musicians,” where collaboration is the rule.
Amado notes that he was shedding himself of Mueller’s mannerisms by the time he became the artistic director and conductor of the Delaware Symphony Orchestra in 2003, but another problem popped up. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” he says.
So he and the orchestra worked together — for 20 seasons — and “It was a lovely experience,” Amado says. Upon his departure, in 2023, the Delaware Symphony named him Music Director Laureate, the first in that symphony’s almost 120-year history, which Amado sees as a symbol of the “thoughtful and endearing” relationship each has for the other.
Asked if he gets a permanent parking spot as part of the title, Amado laughs. “It wasn’t until the last two seasons that I finally got a spot,” he says. “And that wasn’t guaranteed.”
Amado, who is also the artistic director and conductor of the Atlantic Classical Orchestra in Vero Beach, Fla., explains that he was “eager for a new dynamic” when OMP was looking for a new leader. He threw his name into the hat and came to Eugene almost a year ago for his audition.
“It was like a speed-dating thing,” he recalls, and what “sealed the deal” for Amado was the quality of people in the chamber orchestra and their professionalism, as well as the quality of people who flock to Eugene concert and chamber venues.
“We’re just going to make music,” Amado says, adding that he wants OMP to continue to reflect the values of Eugene. “This orchestra belongs to Eugene.”
The Oregon Mozart Players open its 2025-26 season at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 18, in Beall Concert Hall on the University of Oregon campus with the program, Nomad and Native. The concert features violinist Sunmi Chang, mezzo-soprano Agnes Vojtko and flamenco dancer Martita Santiago. Ticket information is online at oregonmozartplayers.org.
