Second Time Around: Meyer Brings Music Festival Back to Belmont

It's been a busy year for since he stepped off the podium after leading the wildly successful inaugural a year ago.

Meyer returned for his sophomore year at Yale, selected a major – not in music but there's a reason for that – conducted a "very quietly promoted" concert this past winter in Belmont (appropriately Wagner's "Seigfried's Idyll" was on the bill) spent part of the summer in a conductors master class in London with his mentor, Boston Philharmonic Orchestra's Music Director Benjamin Zander, and then off to Bulgaria for even more conducting. 

"I really didn't know how busy I was until I got back from Europe," Meyer said.

With all that under his belt, one couldn't begrudge the 20-year-old 2009 graduate of Belmont High School if he decided to take what's left of August and decompress before Yale restarts in September by taking it easy and finish reading "Moby Dick" – his summer novel – at his leisure.

Instead, he is spending this week scrambling as the Belmont Summer Music Festival's music director for the second year getting the word out, welcoming several score of his musical friends to town, rehearsing this talented but diverse group in two great 19th century works and then conduct two concerts filled with the music of Anton Dvorak this weekend at the . 

Whew! 

"These works feature everyone in the orchestra and the mood and feel is more intense and hopefully it will interest both the musicians and the audience," said Meyer, who will conduct up-and-coming cellist and Newton native Sebastian Baverstam in the Cello Concerto in B minor and then lead the orchestra in the composer's 8th Symphony in G.

Stellar soloist for Dvorak's Cello Concerto

"He's got star material," Meyer said of Baverstam, who ran into the 23-year-old – a multi-competition winner and soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra – at the New Haven train station and got him to commit to the concert.

The concerts are Saturday, Aug. 13 and Sunday, Aug 14 at 2 p.m. at the Beech Street Center, 266 Beech St. 

The concerts are free.

Meyer's said his year's orchestra is made up of musicians from Oberlin Conservatory, Juilliard, New England Conservatory, Harvard, Yale, Amherst and two – including the concert mistress – from the Royal Academy of Music in London. 

In addition, the orchestra will include a pair of veterans: trombonist David Schwartz from Belmont and former BSO bassist Robert Olson.

Meyer hopes to repeat the musical and popular success conducting Beethoven and Mozart last year before stand-room audiences. 

"The beauty of conducting is that every performance, every rehearsal is different," he said, especially when conducting Dvorak who was one of the great orchestrators, "who wrote a new language that came from nature; the trees, the mountains, these jaunting folk themes but retaining the classical form." 

And Meyer hopes to convey these highly romantic themes and "exciting playing" for the orchestra and those attending the concerts this weekend.

"The role of the conductor is to be beyond the podium, to be the person who inspires and ignites and draws these wonderful and unpredictable connections with the audience," Meyer said.

"Those are my goals," he said.