WHYY’s ‘Fresh Air’ host Terry Gross has the script flipped on her by Philadelphia Orchestra’s Yannick Nézet-Séguin

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Terry Gross marked the 50th anniversary of her longtime WHYY radio show “Fresh Air” by putting herself in the hot seat. During a fundraising event at WHYY on Sunday, the tables were turned as Philadelphia Orchestra conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin interviewed Gross.

“I’m thrilled, and I’m a tiny, teeny bit nervous,” Nézet-Séguin said as he sat down with Gross in front of an audience.

Nézet-Séguin is a frequent guest on “Fresh Air,” having been interviewed by Gross five times over the last seven years. The two have spoken about many subjects, including Nézet-Séguin’s musical upbringing, the healing role of music during the COVID-19 pandemic, the music that inspires him, and how he helped bring Leonard Bernstein’s life to the big screen.

“I want to ask Terry Gross, the best interviewer in the world: How does an interview differ from a conversation?” he asked.

“When I’m interviewing somebody, I want to put the spotlight on them. It’s my job to ask questions that will, hopefully, provoke interesting and revealing answers,” Gross said. “In a conversation it’s about me, too.”

The conversation started with a question about the music Gross heard while growing up in Brooklyn, New York.

“My parents listened to WNEW-AM,” she said. “They played a mix of Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra and ‘How Much is That Doggie in the Window?’ and ‘Hot Diggity Dog Ziggity Do.’ It was a mix of great stuff and really horrible stuff, and I hated all of it because it wasn’t rock and roll.”

As a conductor with a particular affinity for choral music, Nézet-Séguin was interested in how Gross prepares her voice for radio to maintain her signature warm sound. She does nothing to maintain her voice, Gross said, other than quitting smoking years ago out of a deep-seated fear of laryngitis.

“Did you ever have a Plan B in your life?” Nézet-Séguin asked.

Gross explained that “Fresh Air” is her Plan B. Plan A was to become a schoolteacher, a professional path that immediately failed. Gross got a job out of college at a junior high and said she could neither cope with administrative hostility nor take control of a rowdy classroom. She was fired within six weeks.

“I knew I wasn’t made for it really quickly, but I didn’t want to be a quitter,” Gross said. “I felt blessed when they fired me.”

Nézet-Séguin and Gross share a deep appreciation for music, but they came to it from different directions: Gross grew up with rock and roll of the late 1950s and 1960s, later developing an affinity for jazz. Nézet-Séguin said his first profound experience with music was buying a CD of Johannes Brahms’ “German Requiem” at age 13. They both have strong feelings for opera.

It took just seven minutes for Gross to turn the tables and pose a question to her interviewer, asking Nézet-Séguin about a scene from the opera “Dialogues of the Carmelites,” a favorite of Gross’s

“What was it like for you to conduct that death scene?” she asked.

“After a few weeks of rehearsal, the whole cast was bursting in tears at that moment,” Nézet-Séguin said. “As musicians and singers, we have to project that emotion to the audience, but if we’re too emotional ourselves we can’t project it to you. We have to get past it. We have to get it out of our system. At some point the cast has to cry it out, and we have to collectively talk about it.”

“It reminds me: I heard Mabel Mercer, the great cabaret singer, perform,” Gross said. “There was a reception line afterward, and what she said was: ‘It’s my job to make you cry. If I cry, I’m the one who’s crying, not you.”

“Exactly,” Nézet-Séguin said. “It’s so true.”

Gross occasionally agrees to be an interview subject rather than the interviewer. In 2013 she was the recipient of WHYY’s Lifelong Learning Award and sat for an interview with Scott Simon of NPR’s “Weekend Edition.” More recently she sat for a long interview about her life and career on the podcast “Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso.”

“Do you like being interviewed?” Nézet-Séguin asked.

“I’ve had interviews that were really horrible questions, and it becomes boring, and I’ve had interviews that have gone pretty deep,” she said. “But one way or another, I learn about interviewing by being interviewed. You learn what is an answerable question, and what is so broad it’s like, ‘How am I going to answer that?’”

Currently there are no plans to broadcast the Gross-Yannick interview on “Fresh Air” or WHYY-TV.