On the up curve

William Eddins, National Symphony Orchestra's ebullient new principal guest conductor talks to Michael Dervan about his passions: Brahms, Gershwin - and cooking.

Don't be taken in by the programme. William Eddins makes his first appearance as the new principal guest conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra on Friday in an all-Gershwin evening. It's a stereotypical gesture for an American conductor to make in a European context. But Eddins's original decision to study conducting was prompted not by a popular American, but by a composer at the heart of the European tradition.

"I got interested in conducting when I was at Eastman, because my first year at the school I started playing orchestral keyboard. And I discovered it was great fun, because a lot of the music of the 20th century has fabulous piano parts. But, always being a Brahms junkie, I wanted to play a Brahms symphony. And, you know, there aren't a lot of piano parts in Brahms symphonies!"

Eddins was not to be fobbed off with the readily available substitutes of piano or piano-duet arrangements. "It's not the same, it just really isn't. I thought a minute, and said I've got two choices here, I could learn the violin - and I've got enough problemswith just learning the keyboard instruments - or I could start studying conducting and see where that takes me. So I started a basic conducting course. And here I am, 22 years later, making the majority of my living out of it." He was a bit of a prodigy, so that move was actually made when he was just 15.

Brahms, of course, was not the only attraction. There's the extraordinary breadth and quality of the repertoire. And then there's the nature of the orchestra itself. "It's also interesting to deal with this particular instrument, the orchestra. Because it is a thinking instrument, which gets you into trouble, half the time - though we won't go into that right now - but nonetheless it is a very interesting beast. You could argue about it. You could say voice is a thinking instrument - you know all the old jokes about vocalists - but the orchestra is truly the one thinking instrument that you can run up against and try and master. You never master any instrument, of course, but especially not the orchestra."

It's often said that conductors need a degree in psychology rather than a degree in music. "I wouldn't argue against that, I really wouldn't. Musicians, we're not the most mentally stable of folk. Our advantage is that we have an outlet, in that we do play music. We have this, and we go out on stage and play a symphony, and some nights it can be utterly incredible. But we're not the most stable of folk.

"We've spent all our lives trying to master the unmasterable, arguing with, say, a late Beethoven sonata for five hours a day. And no matter how well you play it, you could always play it better. That's both wonderful and extraordinarily frustrating. You will never reach your height as a musician. And at some point, there's always going to be a down curve. But nonetheless it is the pursuit of insight that makes it so wonderful, at least in my book.

"Conducting, of course, is something that certain musicians have simply taken up, without engaging in specialist training. I wonder about them. I really do. I was trained very rigorously in conducting by some very good teachers. I do not use probably 30 or 40 per cent of what I was trained to do. I certainly can, and in some circumstances I do.

"But in a lot of circumstances it's not really necessary. In, say, a Beethoven symphony, it's in two, it goes. Everyone knows it. What you try and do is to make musical gestures, trying to convey this abstract concept between you and the musicians just through gestures.

However, there's an element of conducting that is extremely physical. In many situations you do have to lead the orchestra, they rely on you to provide things for them.

"There is a huge difference between doing, say, The Rite of Spring and doing a Beethoven symphony. Any chump, any Tom, Dick or Harry who's a good musician, can get up in front of an orchestra and pretty much get them through a Beethoven symphony. You would be in serious trouble in about five measures of The Rite of Spring. It would just be an utter mess. They would not know what you mean to do. That whole area of conducting is something you simply have to be trained at. Opera conducting is another great example."

The opera house has been a major traditional route for conductors on the rise, building up from stand-in opportunities (often without rehearsal) to the responsibility of preparing productions from start to finish.

"That is tremendous training. If you do it wrong, not only are you going to screw the orchestra up, you're going to screw the singers up. You really have to know what it is that you're doing. Every motion that you do has to be thought out and everything has repercussions. This is a situation where for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and sometimes it's more than equal. So you really have to be on top of the ball, physically, mentally, and be able to know the physical art of conducting."

The most difficult thing in a conductor's career, says Eddins, is getting started. "It's not easy finding an orchestra who'll let some 22-year-old idiot get up in front of them and say, I'd like to experiment, now. I remember like it was yesterday the first time I got up in front of a professional orchestra for the first time. It was the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and it was Peter and the Wolf, something they could play in their sleep. The first minute and a half was fine, and then I did something with my right elbow - to this day I don't know what - and the cellos started slowing down. I almost went into a dead panic. Then suddenly I realised, there's a huge difference from a student orchestra to a professional orchestra. It's like driving a 63 Beetle and going to a modern-day 308 Ferrari Testarossa.

"This thing reacts to you. You have to have a whole other level of understanding of what is going on. You simply don't have the experience in a whole lot of situations to tell musicians who have been on the stage for 30, 40, 50 years, what to do. You have to earn their trust. You also have to swallow a lot of pride.I've learned to rely a lot on these people who I know and I trust.

Eddins's enthusiasm is as infectious in conversation as it is in the concert hall, where he has already turned Irish audience's heads with his Beethoven as readily as with his Gershwin. He makes his approach sound like that of a firmly-rooted pragmatist. Ninety-five per cent of what goes wrong on stage, he says, is the conductor's fault. His response to the stray elbow movement in Peter and the Wolf? "Don't do that again. Do something else. Don't stick your elbow out like that. It's obviously not going to work."

And his general aim is simple: "My goal is to make life easy for my musicians, for them to play my musical ideas, or their musical ideas, for that matter."

It doesn't come as any surprise that Eddins has very clear ideas about what is his kind of music and what is not. Mozart (especially the piano concertos directed from the keyboard), Beethoven and Brahms are favourites, and he's very comfortable with a broad range of 20th-century repertoire. Wagner, Bruckner and Mahler he leaves alone, and he's got very mixed feelings about Tchaikovsky, describing the B flat minor Piano Concerto as a work he despises.

He really needs this kind of clarity since he maintains: "If I ever get to the point where I'm unhappy doing what I do, I get to walk off stage and I will never walk on stage again. Back home, in my office, I have applications to CIA, which is not the Central Intelligence Agency, but the Culinary Institute of America. Those applications are filled out.

And the only thing that I would have to do is put them in the post. I love music too much to not enjoy it. I've promised myself that."

William Eddins conducts the NSO at the NCH on Friday in an all Gershwin programme: Strike Up the Band, Catfish Row, Rhapsody in Blue (in the jazz-band version, with himself as soloist), Cuban Overture, and An American in Paris