Wisdom in Lucerne, with Bernard Haitink

At Easter I went to Switzerland to listen to Bernard Haitink's conducting masterclasses at the Lucerne Festival Academy. Three intensive days of fascination later, the mystery of the maestro was in no way reduced. If anything, quite the opposite. Never has it been clearer that the sound of an orchestra changes entirely, depending on the person standing up and waving the baton in front of them; it does so immediately; and it is almost impossible to explain it. I talked to Maestro Haitink and some of his students about what the masterclasses mean to them, and found myself learning a few little lessons in the process. My feature about it all is in Radar with today's Independent. Slightly shortened for space, though, so the director's cut is below.

As an exciting footnote, I'm glad to say that the other week I ran into the youngest of the students, Duncan Ward, at the OAE Night Shift concert and he tells me he's been assisting Simon Rattle in Berlin on, among other things, Die Walküre. Watch that space.

WISDOM IN LUCERNE, WITH BERNARD HAITINK

It’s a training experience like no other. Twenty of the world’s brightest young conductors have come to the Lucerne Easter Festival, Switzerland, hoping to be chosen for a masterclass with Bernard Haitink. Of those 20, seven make the final cut. Their task: in front of the veteran Dutch maestro and a fascinated public, they must conduct the Lucerne Festival Orchestra.

There, though, any resemblance to The Apprentice ends. This is not a competition and it’s anything but cut-throat. All 20 youngsters, selected from 150 applicants, listen to the course;  they all have a chance to conduct, not just the final seven. It is like Hogwarts for conductors, with Haitink, a legend in his own lifetime, serving as benevolent Dumbledore to the lot. 

“I supervise them, give them my ideas and see if it suits them and if it helps them,” Haitink, 83, remarks with characteristic self-deprecation. “I can’t work miracles. But there are so many wrong ideas about this profession that it doesn’t do any harm when a conductor who has a certain amount of experience tries to share it with younger people. It takes an enormous amount of energy, but I enjoy it.”

Would-be conductors are at a disadvantage compared to instrumentalists: they can’t practise easily because their instrument consists of 50-80 highly trained humans. That gives this course extra value even before Haitink has said a word. “The chance to work with an orchestra like this one is something we don’t normally have as students,” says Antonio Mendez, one of the final seven; he hails from Spain and is studying in Germany. “To do Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra is really a rare thing.” (Since Easter, Antonio has won second prize in a major conducting competition in Denmark)

Each participant has prepared four set works: Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony, Schumann’s Manfred Overture, the first movement of Bruckner’s Symphony No.7 and Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite. The chosen seven each have half an hour per day to strut their stuff. 

“Some teachers might try to make everyone do things the same way that they do,” says Gad Kadosh, a French-Israeli conductor currently working as a vocal coach at the Theater für Niedersachsen, Hildesheim. “But Maestro Haitink works with each of us as an individual, trying to bring out the best in everyone.” Haitink’s techniques certainly keep the youngsters on their toes.

Usually (to generalise) a conductor gives the beat with his/her right hand, using the left to aid direction and amplify expression. Having decided that Anton Torbeev is using his left hand to excess, Haitink grabs his wrist in mid flow: the Russian student must finish the piece with his right hand alone. [Do have a look at Anton's blog.] Then, with Kadosh, Haitink does the opposite, asking him to conduct only with his left; the result sounds marvellous, apparently to Kadosh’s own surprise [photo, right]. 

Another student is startled when Haitink removes the score from under his nose halfway through a piece: he must continue from memory. “I could see that you know it,” Haitink explains afterwards. “Looking at the score was distracting you. Have confidence!”

In the most common traps, the practicality of Haitink’s advice proves its worth. “Not so holy,” he says, stopping a student after a few phrases of Bruckner. The massive Seventh Symphony’s opening inspires too much reverence; if the tempi slouch, the energy will soon flag. Haitink gently encourages him to think less of the heavens and more of the mountains. He takes the baton and demonstrates: at once the sound changes, the music becoming supple and vivid. “It’s a long symphony,” he points out. “Don’t make the brass play full out even more than they are – they will be exhausted halfway through.” 

Then there’s a recurrent question about focusing the movements. “Don’t move so much,” Haitink exhorts a student whose flailing limbs are not helping the orchestra: a particular flute entry is late every time. “Concentrate the energy.” He demonstrates – and with one flick of one finger of Haitink’s left hand, the flute is spot on.

Isn’t it alarming to feel Haitink’s eye upon your every move? “Not at all,” declares Zoi Tsokanou from Greece, the only girl in the top seven [photo, above right]. “His energy is all about ‘Let’s make lovely music’. He gives us a lot of trust and a lot of love – there’s no need to be afraid.” Her animation and assurance in the Schumann overture inspire the orchestra into giving her a spontaneous round of applause.

JonathanMann, from the UK [photo, left], says that the course has been “one of the most exciting experiences of my life so far”. He has already started his own orchestra, the Cardiff Sinfonietta. What does he feel he’s learning here? “Maestro Haitink mentioned that sometimes the simple things are the hardest to do,” he says. “Holding a pause a little longer or getting a really quiet sound from the orchestra – those tiny things can make the difference between a good performance and a great one.” 

Another youthful Brit, Duncan Ward, is in the final 20 and is asked to run through the Schumann one afternoon. Having studied with (among others) Ravi Shankar in California, Ward especially enjoys Haitink’s anecdotes about the great conductors of the past, such as Bruno Walter and Willem Mengelberg: “The Indian tradition passes everything down aurally from guru to pupil,” he points out. “This is a little similar – the sense of a contact point with those great figures is fabulous.”

The course is short, but its effects long-lasting. “We will always have Maestro Haitink’s comments with us,” says Gad Kadosh. “There is so much to think about that we won’t be able to integrate everything fully right away; maybe not in a year, maybe not even in ten years. But I think that much later these ideas will pop back to us and maybe the next level of learning will happen.”

The conductor’s art is not exactly demystified by listening to Haitink teaching. “Every conductor gets a completely different sound from an orchestra,” says Antonio Mendez. “It’s something you just can’t explain.” And it’s completely true, hearing the transformation of the sound from student to student. Nobody could come out of this audience believing that a conductor just waves his arms about. 

Life lessons are here, too: concentrate energy on the essentials, rather than expending it on diffuse peripheries, and maybe the rest follows. This class isn’t just about conducting. This is the getting of wisdom. 

Bernard Haitink returns to the Lucerne Festival with the Vienna Philharmonic on 14 and 15 September. More details: http://www.lucernefestival.ch/en/

JD on R4

I'm on BBC Radio 4's The World at One today, talking about the London 2012 Festival. Do tune in.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/

Heat and light...

Kicking off the Olympic cultural festivities in style, The Dude and his Simon Bolivár Orchestra of Venezuela are back in Britain. Dudamel & co are taking over the Royal Festival Hall this weekend (concerts to be streamed live on The Guardian website, btw), and right now they’re in Raploch, Scotland, visiting the Big Noise project – Sistema Scotland’s own take on the Venezuelan music education scheme, revolutionising children’s lives through the making of music (an illuminating read about it here). We can see this concert on TV tomorrow, live on BBC4. 

But one question remains: why are we all so potty about Venezuelan young musicians when the UK has plenty of its own?

Britain’s got talent. And the real talent has little to do with Simon Cowell, but everything to do with our youth orchestras. The National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain is a prime training ground for the best young orchestral musicians in the country; to hear them is to be bowled over and out by the standard of their playing, and the passion and dedication they show for their music.

Nor are they alone. The National Youth Orchestra of Wales claims to have been the first national youth orchestra in the world. The National Youth Orchestras of Scotland, the NationalYouth Choirs and the award-winning National Youth Choir of Scotland are all flourishing. The Aldeburgh Young Musicians, based at Snape in Suffolk, takes around 40 talented kids aged ten to 18 from the East Anglia area and provides them with high-level courses in school holidays, treating them not as children, but as young artists who compose, conduct and perform their own music. 

What’s the matter with us, then? Why do we fête the Venezuelans instead? What on earth do they have that we haven’t?

It would be easy to say “Nothing”. It would be easy to pretend that the Simon Bolivárs are all show and no substance: the twirling basses, the football shirts, all that Latin heat and light. But, though it pains me to say it, there is something. And it’s the other way round. It’s something that we have that they don’t have that’s the cause.

In a recent interview for The Strad, I asked Levon Chilingirian, leader of the Chilingirian String Quartet, what he thought about this. He and his three colleagues visit Caracas regularly to coach the students of El Sistema in chamber music. “One aspect which is very different from here,” he says, “is that they don’t have any limits set for them.” Many children learning music in the UK work their way through the Associated Board grade exams system by hook or by crook. “Mostly by crook as far as I can see,” Chilingirian adds. “It can be a case of: ‘You do your Grade V this year and next year I’ll give you a nice present when you do Grade VI’. And if you suggest to someone that they might learn a particular piece, they’ll say ‘No, no, that’s Grade VII and I’m only Grade IV.”

That doesn’t happen in Caracas. Chilingirian met a young violinist who’d been learning for only a year, but brought the Bruch Violin Concerto No.1 to a lesson and was determined to perform it with an orchestra soon afterwards. The group also told me about a 23-year-old taxi driver who, bored with his job, met some youngsters from El Sistema, heard about their work and decided to become a cellist, having never touched an instrument before. “Nobody said ‘You can’t’ - so he did it,” says Chilingirian. “He’s a very accomplished player.”

Music exams in Britain are an extremely mixed blessing. On the plus side, they provide a target to work towards, a chance for youngsters to prove themselves and gain a sense of achievement. The exams set by the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music in particular are a global success story, a system embraced wholeheartedly in countries the world over, notably the Far East.

And yet, and yet... How many people in the UK have horror stories to tell about childhood music exams? How many youngsters who might have gone on to enjoy making music socially are left with a terror of performing after an unfortunate sojourn in the exam room? How many have had a bad experience and given up, because working for an exam is no fun at all? For many of us, these exams are our first-ever try at playing to other people, and an unhappy start can leave deep scars.

This set-up is satisfactory for very few. The examiner has little space to write notes and very, very little time in which to do so. Sight-reading tests rarely bear any relation to real music. The pieces offer a bit of choice, yet so little that often a child has to spend months practising something that he or she doesn’t even like – and then, of course, it often sounds like it, too. And sometimes a candidate’s chin wobbles or the eyes start to brim, but an examiner can’t take time to reassure them, because the system is a conveyor belt - the next candidates are in the waiting room building up their own store of nerves and mustn’t be kept waiting. This is an exam all right. But is that any way to make music?

It’s worth reflecting that in a target-oriented, achievement-focused society blighted by the class-ridden nature of the education system, children have to be very lucky to find themselves making music for the sake of enjoying it. Oftener than not they do so to please their parents, to win a music scholarship (few parents realise the hard work involved in that), to pass exams that will allow them to go on and pass more exams. It’s all about measurement and competition. But for El Sistema, it’s about personal and social transformation. 

Maybe it’s no wonder that many successful British professional musicians of my acquaintance never went through the graded exam system at all; if someone is more than averagely talented, exams quickly become an irrelevance. Do they hold the students back? I believe so. Just think about scales. You could learn them all. But if your grade prescribes only a certain number of them, you’re probably going to bother learning just those few, aren’t you? Levon Chilingirian is right: music exams instil the sense of an invisible ceiling that we dare not shatter. Rarely are we encouraged to chuck out the exam books, find a piece of music we love and damn well learn how to play it, even if it’s by Rachmaninov. That would be real motivation: a passion from within.

Plenty of other ways exist to learn and make music, and plenty exist in the UK. There’s Colourstrings, for example – a Saturday morning music school derived from Zoltán Kodály’s famous Hungarian system in which every child first learns to sing; they subsequently develop excellently trained 'ears'. The kids perform to one another in relaxed concert days, play in ensembles together early on and seem confident with their instruments.

And now we have pockets of El Sistema too: with enthusiasm for these schemes taking root around the country - the Big Noise in Scotland and In Harmony across England, in centres including Lambeth, Liverpool and more - there’s hope that our youngsters may also discover, like the Venezuelans, that making music is about joy, life and love. Not about quaking in your shoes alone with your half-size violin in a chilly school gym in Hatch End.

The Venezuelans are back? Bring 'em on. We need their inspiration. It’s working. It needs to work some more.

UPDATE, 5.40pm: This is clearly ringing some bells, and not just in the UK. Try this post by John Terauds from Musical Toronto: http://musicaltoronto.org/2012/06/20/music-exams-can-be-limitations-instead-of-goals/

Szigeti speaks!

"The unforgivable sins of big business" - Joseph Szigeti's opinion of the fact that the record catalogue contained only four recordings of Bartok playing the piano. The great Hungarian violinist is interviewed in this priceless radio broadcast from 1964 by John Amis, talking about the intuition of art, Dartington, fingering ("the lifeblood of performance"), Prokofiev, recording, Bartok's passion for Beethoven, and much else...

A good honours day for musos

It's a bumper year for classical music and opera in the Queen's Birthday Honours List for the Diamond Jubilee. As if perhaps someone suddenly realised there were all these amazing people who deserved honours and hadn't yet got them, so they're having a little catch-up? Arise, Sir David McVicar, just for starters. 

Violinist Tasmin Little has been awarded an OBE (and about time too!). ENO's own lightning conductor, Ed Gardner, also gets one; so does pianist Joanna MacGregor. Harry Christophers, conductor of The Sixteen and more, is given a CBE, as are composer and broadcaster Michael Berkeley and TV choir supremo Gareth Malone. Andrew Jowett, chief exec of Symphony Hall, Birmingham, receives the OBE just in time for that fabulous venue's 21st birthday and one also goes to Elaine Padmore, formerly director of opera at the ROH. Nor has ballet been left out: OBEs for Michael Nunn and William Trevitt, founders of BalletBoyz. Conductor and composer Douglas Coombes is given an MBE; so is Katie Tearle, formerly head of education at Glyndebourne and now on board as opera and ballet specialist at Peters Edition; and Ernest Tomlinson, that usually undersung composer of "light music". Meanwhile, down under, pianist Piers Lane has received an AO - Officer in the General Division of the Order of Australia. 

As it's not easy for classical musicians to be noticed and honoured in this day and age, etc etc, they all deserve a big cheer! BRAVI, FOLKS!