Celebrating her first season with the Chicago Sinfonietta as the new music director Mei-Ann Chen sat down with Chicago Classical Music to chat about her first season, goals with the organization and favorite things in Chicago.

Your conducting style is so intensely energetic and vibrant as compared to other conductors I’ve seen. Where does all that energy come from? How did you develop such a unique style?
It’s a combination of all my experiences. I worked with the oldest youth orchestra in the country, the Portland Youth Orchestra.  The most precious thing that I took away from that experience was that those children make music from the heart. They don’t know hardship yet and make music in the purest form: they simply make music because they love it.  The energy that they had has remained with me and their love for music reminds me why I wanted to be a musician to start.

I have an embarrassing admission. This weekend while I was watching the television, I saw an interesting commercial with a completely gorgeous song in it. I could have sworn up and down that the song was the theme from Alan Menken’s score for Beauty and the Beast.

Well, I was wrong.  It wasn’t Disney but Camille Saint-Saëns’ the Aquarium movement from Carnival of the Animals.  Talk about feeling sheepish.

So in addition to this little incident and the Oscar nominations on Tuesday, I was thinking about film scores and classical music, and how the two inform each other. 

How many times have you heard music at the movies and couldn’t help but think it was Holst and not Horner who’d written the score?  And how frequently have you seen outstanding orchestras and performers lending their talents to film scores?

Every once in a while, my friends and I gather with our instruments, a few choice drinks, and the parts to several different readable works to have a "chamber music party". We read and have fun in the music without any concern of critique from an audience. Chamber music is sometimes called "music for friends" and originally (pre 1800s) was intended for a private household gathering with friends and family - a lot like the parties many young musicians have today (though perhaps slightly more dignified... we don't wear powdered wigs or petticoats). It seems with the passing of a few centuries and the categorization of chamber music as "serious" performance music, a lot of visual musician to musician interaction has been lost. Instead of watching what looks like friends in intimate conversation, most times I feel like I'm watching a group of acquaintances who may not even like each other. If the music that comes out is good, does it matter? I think so.

This year’s viral holiday video seems to be the Fed-Ex delivery guy tosses a computer monitor over a fence.  Well, no offense to Fed-Ex, I think I have a better one.

It’s not often that classical music is overly popular on You Tube (leave that to Gaga and Bieber), let alone a holiday classical music video.  A few years ago there was the flash mob in the cafeteria singing the Halleluiah chorus from Handel's Messiah, and the Copenhagen Philharmonic at the train station but that was about as close to classical viral video as I remember.

The Grammy’s seem to have some interesting tricks up their sleeves these days. From nomination concerts, social media hype of a mystery band’s reunion, and restructuring of the categories of the awards given. 

I remember as a kid watching the Grammy award show because there would inevitably be an appearance by a favorite boy band of the 1990s gone by, or some new gimmicky transformation by the latest pop star.  Today, I didn’t even know there was even a nomination concert on television until my Twitter feed told me.

For an awards show that is supposed to recognize real achievements in music, the Grammy’s certainly feel more like an ode to popular music.  This is fine. There is a place for that, and popular artists deserve their moment; but what about all those other categories?