Last month, St. Louisans faced a unique risk when comedian Jim Gaffigan and conductor James Gaffigan played two very different shows in the same city on the same night. Luckily, it seemed that ticketholders for each event got to the right theater without any confusion. “My show is with @jerryseinfeld,” Jim Gaffigan clarified on Instagram. “I assume @jamesgaffigan is with Lydia Tár.”
The joke is old hat for both Gaffigans, who got to know each other in the early days of their careers—thanks to a mix-up with their Apple Store invoices—but have yet to meet in person. Perhaps, conductor James Gaffigan tells me over drinks at Schwarzes Café (a former David Bowie haunt in West Berlin), they will team up for a performance together. Jim Gaffigan, he says, would be perfect as a narrator for Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.”
In the meantime, however, James Gaffigan has a lot to focus on, preparing for his first performances with the Komische Oper as its new Music Director, beginning on Friday with a special “docu-symphonic” concert program focusing on music from 1923, and continuing with a revival of “Eugene Onegin” that opens on December 15. In between rehearsals, we discussed his first season here, his other gig as the Music Director of Valencia’s Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia, and getting caught shoplifting at the Metropolitan Opera gift shop. We began by discussing one of the last major performance periods he had in Berlin, in December 2021, which included a production of “Don Carlo” at the Deutsche Oper.
The Milliseconds Before the Now
An interview with conductor James Gaffigan
