As a budding young pianist born and raised in New York City, Andrew Litton was taken to The Nutcracker at New York City Ballet when he was 6 years old. He loved the performance, especially Tschaikovsky’s captivating music, he recalls. “It’s fascinating to look back. Sitting there as a little kid, I could have never imagined in a million years that one day, I would be conducting this piece.”
As it happens, George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker was the first ballet Litton would conduct after becoming NYCB Music Director 10 years ago. Dressed in his signature high-collared tuxedo, baton in hand, the Company’s resident maestro is well known to NYCB audiences as a powerhouse at the podium, the zestful, exacting conductor who has won critical praise for the lustrous sound and consistently high standard of performance of the 62-piece NYCB Orchestra.
In a recent conversation, Litton, fresh from conducting the Symphony Orchestra of India in Mumbai, recalled the thrill he felt when he was offered the job. “After 33 years of being an orchestra conductor and an opera conductor, I was very interested to try something new,” he says.
And new it was. As a student at Juilliard, Litton had a brush with ballet, accompanying star dancers Rudolf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova, and Cynthia Gregory as an onstage pianist. But after winning a prestigious conducting award, he left ballet to become an internationally renowned symphony orchestra conductor with resident positions in Britain, the U.S., and Asia, as well as an indemand guest conductor of symphony and opera orchestras.
As NYCB Music Director, he quickly learned how different leading a ballet orchestra would be. He credits his colleagues, notably former Associate Music Director Andrews Sill and the late Resident Conductor Clotilde Otranto, with helping him to find his footing. He adjusted to following sight instead of sound, learned to tweak phrasing for different casts, and figured out how to communicate musical reference points with the repertory director leading rehearsals (singing a phrase, instead of citing a dance step or counting, worked like a charm).
And landing at a ballet company where 80 percent of the musical repertory comes from the concert hall has allowed Litton to call upon his decades of experience with the music that inspired Balanchine and Robbins. “That’s been really fun for me,” he says. “I love conducting pieces like Jewels where three composers give you three different experiences in one night. It feels like a symphony to me.”
As for narrative ballets, Litton points out that those in the NYCB canon have wonderful music. “Not all story ballets do, but when you get to perform Tschaikovsky and Prokofiev—Romeo & Juliet is one of the great ones—it doesn’t get better than that,” he says. Besides The Nutcracker, he counts Coppélia, which NYCB will dance this spring, as a conducting favorite. “It’s such a joy and such great music,” he says. (Delibes’ Coppélia also happens to have been his audition piece for the Music Director position.)
At NYCB, he relishes the opportunity to dive into challenging and otherwise seldom performed pieces by composers like Anton Webern, Paul Hindemith, and Igor Stravinsky. “Ballet audiences, maybe because they also have the visual stimulation of space and choreography, have a way to get around the thorniest music,” he observes. “Look at Agon. Try and program that into an orchestra concert, and people will be scratching their heads. But watch it with the dance, and it’s incredible.”
During the Company’s 2025 Fall Season, Litton looks forward to conducting Gabriel Fauré’s Ballade, a 1980 Balanchine ballet last danced by the Company in 2003, and Heatscape, a 2015 ballet by Resident Choreographer Justin Peck set to a 1925 Bohuslav Martinů concerto that will have its NYCB premiere. “It’s fun to do pieces like Ballade that have a musical history without being part of the standard repertory,” he says. “And Heatscape fascinates me. It’s on the fringe of classical music performance, but the ballet gives it a whole new life.”
Whether conducting a score new or beloved at NYCB, Litton’s view from podium remains exhilarating. “There’s still a frisson after 10 years of walking into that pit and bowing and knowing, as you look at the faces in the audience, that when you turn around you’re going to change lives. Because that’s what our performances do,” he says.
