Bringing us the Brazilian way of making music

The dynamic Brazilian conductor, Celso Antunes, makes his first Dublin appearance as artistic director of the National Chamber Choir tomorrow. He talks to Michael Dervan

Celso Antunes talks about his early musical experiences almost as a series of conversions. He got his first guitar at the age of five or six. "That's the Brazilian way of getting contact with music." And, naturally enough, when people noticed he had a certain talent, he was given lessons. In truth, however, he remembers sitting out harmony and counterpoint classes and looking longingly at the football field outside, where he would much rather have been. But he must have made something of his talent, because he talks of playing gigs from the age of nine, "in bands, playing rock'n'roll".

He was in his early teens when he turned from the guitar to the cello, and then "it began to click into my head that music was something very serious, and that it meant something to me".

Not long after that, when his parents moved house, he ended up in a music school where choral singing was compulsory. His first experience was actually in music by a composer younger than him, the Missa Brevis, K49, written in 1768 by the 12-year-old Mozart. "I remember getting extremely excited at the sounds I myself was producing. I didn't know I had absolute pitch - the ability to identify musical sounds by name.

"Nobody had told me. It was a very funny experience for me. I usually say that from then on it was a kind of a virus, actually. Then when I was 15 I was singing in all choirs possible. Everything I spotted I would join." The conducting started when he was asked to take sectional rehearsals with some of the choirs he was in. This, he realised, was something new that he could do, too. And when he went on to study music at university, his specialisations were voice, composition and conducting. He became a pupil of Eleazar de Carvalho, a leading figure in Brazilian musical life, who had studied under Koussevitzky at Tanglewood in the late 1940s, side-by-side with Leonard Bernstein and Lukas Foss.

It was at the age of 20 that Antunes met the conductor Jamil Maluf, recently returned to Brazil after an extended period of study in Germany.

"I decided I would take private lessons with him. He was the first person who came to me and said, 'Look, you play the cello. You sing. You have very good aural training. But you have to play the piano.' So I got piano lessons, and practised like hell."

The serious conducting had already started, with choirs and chamber orchestras, and the choral repertoire he worked on seems to have been adventurous - he mentions performances of Ligeti's Lux aeterna and Xenakis's Serment as works that fitted into a repertoire which readily embraced the avant-garde. Then Maluf, who was at the time the director of the São Paolo Symphony Orchestra, took on his young protégé as assistant, giving him "the usual heavy jobs, rehearsing trombones, double basses, this kind of thing. And I'm very happy I did that. It helped me learn lots of repertoire from scratch."

It all seems a healthy mix for someone who was going to chart a career as a conductor with a special interest in both contemporary and choral music. But, says Antunes, "I always thought, from my cello time, that if I wanted to learn music properly I would have to leave Brazil." The route out in the mid-1980s was very much the same as the route out of Ireland has been for many a promising musician here - a foreign government scholarship. Having failed at attempts to study in London and at Bloomington in Indiana, he was awarded a DAAD scholarship to study in Cologne, a city he had nominated with hardly a hope that his dream was going to be realised. He was awarded a one-year scholarship in 1986, and the following year took exams "in which I had to do everything but dance" to have it extended. Then, to cut a long story short, he completed his formal conducting studies, and he's been based in Europe ever since.

"To be honest, I never dreamed of coming to Europe and making a career here. That was from my standpoint something I would never achieve, especially in Germany. All of a sudden, I was there, working. And here I am." His first appearance in Ireland was in 1998, for the annual Messiah performances by the Irish Chamber Choir and the National Chamber Choir. "The sound of the choir impressed me tremendously," he says. "It was a very warm sound, very beautiful. I enjoyed it greatly." And the relationship "was something that developed from there."

What was it, then, that prompted him to apply for the post of artistic director when it became vacant? "First of all, the choir itself. I really love the choir. Then the challenge I saw through analysing what the choir has done and what the choir can do - the challenge of trying to do the things the choir has not done." In this instance, he's talking basically about repertoire. "I'm trying already to show what I'm aiming at through this season. I'm thinking of expanding the variety of music that the choir is going to make, from Josquin and Dufay, to Petrassi and Penderecki - dealing with masterpieces of the choral repertoire which the choir hasn't sung, beginning also with Bach, which is also absolutely necessary for a choir at this stage of development. We will definitely be exploring areas of repertoire where the choir has not been yet."

An example of Antunes's new style is a concert scheduled for November which will feature Dufay's motet Supremum est, written in 1433 for the peace treaty of Viterbo, between Pope Eugene IV and King Sigismund, and a new work by Stephen Gardner to the same text, along with Schoenberg's Friede auf Erden (Peace on Earth) and related music by Schütz.

The changes he has planned, he says, range far and wide. "First of all, a few things that have to do with what the choir produces in rehearsal. A basic thing which I will try to improve is its prima vista ability, which is something which I feel is very poor. It has to do with the whole educational system, and how things are treated here in Ireland. That's the impression I have. That's something that I will definitely try to correct, not only through methodically improving the skills, but also through helping the singers, telling them how to work, and how to solve problems regarding that.

"The other thing I definitely want through the expansion of the repertoire is to bring in new vocal techniques, which are something the choir should be in touch with - experimental stuff, things that are not currently part of their technical repertoire." In the short term, he won't be bringing many guest conductors in.

"Definitely not this year. But I intend to, of course. It's absolutely important that there's an exchange there. I think it's important that in the first year they work with me as much as possible. I am going to set up something, I'm going to change a few things. If there's an opportunity for me to be present, I think I should be." The flavour of what may be in store in the future can be gauged from visits already planned to South America, and appearances already set up for Germany's biggest music festival, the Schleswig-Holstein Festival, where the choir will work under the baton of Christoph Eschenbach, recently appointed music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Antunes's mix of German training and Brazilian passion certainly seem set to provide an exciting future for a national resource that's surely ripe for development.

Celso Antunes conducts the National Chamber Choir at the National Gallery, Dublin, on Thursday (6.30 p.m.) in a programme of Josquin (Memor esto, verbi tui), Lassus (Prophetiae Sibullarum), Hindemith (Six Chansons) and Petrassi (Nonsense Rhymes). Booking and information from 01-700 5665

Aidan Dunne's Visual Art column will appear on Friday