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Keeping Time

Bangor Symphony Orchestra music director Lucas Richman has wielded the baton for 10 seasons, and the Grammy-winning maestro just signed on for five more.

Keeping Time
By Joel Crabtree

[cs_drop_cap letter=”W” color=”#000000″ size=”5em” ]hen conductor Lucas Richman arrived in Bangor in 2010, he was in the middle of a 12-year run with the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, so he commuted between Maine and Tennessee. As if that didn’t keep him busy enough, he found time the following year to swing by his hometown, Los Angeles, to pick up his Grammy Award for conducting Calling All Dawns, winner in the Classical Crossover Album category. Several years later, he settled into Bangor year-round.

The Bangor Symphony Orchestra kicked off Richman’s 10th season — and its 124th — with a show last month that included a world-premiere composition by one of his former students, plus music from horror flick The Village, one of many Hollywood scores he has conducted (others include Se7en, Face/Off, The Manchurian Candidate, and Behind the Candelabra).

Richman recently re-upped for another five years with Bangor’s symphony, although he still travels quite a bit, guest-conducting the Philadelphia and Cleveland symphonies this past summer, ducking out of town (and country) to lead the Oslo Philharmonic this month. But he’s always happy to get back. “From the first time I came to Bangor, and this continues to happen every time I get off the plane, I feel this sense of awww,” he says. “This exhalation of peace, that I’ve come home.”