Music without the lectures

New RTÉ Concert Orchestra principal conductor Laurent Wagner tells Michael Dervan about rehearsal techniques.

One of the traditional routes to a conducting career is through the opera house. It's the route that was followed by Laurent Wagner, the newly appointed principal conductor of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra.

A Frenchman, born in Lyon, he turned to conducting after he realised that his musical studies hadn't actually prepared him for what he wanted to do. He had studied bassoon, piano and singing, and thought of composition as an option. What he wanted to do was to work with string instruments and with singers. But, since he didn't have the skills in either area that would have enabled him to become a performer, he turned to conducting.

In 1982 he moved to Vienna, to train under Karl Österreicher, and after graduation worked his way up the ladder in German opera houses, beginning at the bottom, as répétiteur (coaching the singers). It's a tough training ground, and the earliest opportunities to come his way weren't appetising.

"It's not very easy, because most of the time you are playing the piano, and then, the director says to you, you have to conduct Don Giovanni in one week," Wagner says. "I started with Don Giovanni, without rehearsals."

What he was presented with was taking over, in the middle of a run, a performance of Don Giovanni that had been prepared and already conducted by someone else, the snag being that, since the work was in repertory, he wouldn't get any rehearsal at all.

"I did that, and it went very well," he says. "But this way you don't collect the experience in working with the orchestra. At the beginning, I conducted only performances. And then the first time I had to prepare a production, with all the rehearsals, I only prepared it, I didn't conduct it. I can say that my best conducting teacher was not Mr Österreicher in Vienna, but it was several orchestras in Germany. They are very good teachers, but very tough."

He faced an obvious dilemma in taking over a production from someone else. Should he conduct it as it had been prepared and performed, or should he attempt to impose his own vision on the work? It's not a question he seems to have spent much time over.

"I was very stubborn and ambitious," he says. "The way the previous conductor had done it, that was not my way. I had every time the ambition to make 'my' Don Giovanni or 'my' Siegfried. That's very interesting if you have a good stick technique. It's possible without rehearsal to make a Siegfried that will become completely different from the previous conductor."

Wagner never experienced flak over his musical interventions.

"If it is convincing, the people like it. If it is not, they don't," he says. "I never had the director of the opera come to me afterwards and complain."

I mention Hans Knappertsbusch, one of the great Wagner and Bruckner conductors of the mid-20th century, whose notorious dislike of rehearsing harked back to an age when rehearsing and conducting were often treated as tasks for different individuals.

"You speak about Knappertsbusch," Wagner says. "He is one of my models, because this capacity to show the music without speaking, that is the best. I think a conductor should speak as little as possible."

It's an attitude you can always expect orchestral musicians to love, because it means they spend more time playing and less time listening to someone talk - or, as they sometimes experience it, being lectured about what to do.

Moving from being a conductor of performances only to taking full responsibility was a challenging transition.

"In the beginning that was a very tough job, because I hadn't got the experience of working with the orchestra, planning and organising rehearsals," Wagner says. "I had to work on myself. That's a process during the whole life for a conductor, or a musician, or a singer, to learn every day. Nobody can say: 'From today, I'm a conductor, and I can do this or that.' Every day we have to learn new things."

In 1990 he became the second conductor in Dortmund (the post is paradoxically called first Kapellmeister, while the actual number one is called Generalmusikdirektor), where a lot of modern repertoire came his way. And in 1994 he rose to the top, when he was appointed Generalmusikdirektor of the Saarländisches Staatstheater at Saarbrücken.

Saarbrücken, with a population of 180,000, is the capital of the Saarland, the smallest German state with a population of 1.04 million. There he took charge not only of the opera but also of the symphony concerts of the theatre's 82-member orchestra, in a city that also boasts a radio orchestra that's well-known on CD, especially for its advocacy of new music.

The Saarbrücken appointment was a turning-point in his career, seeing him move from being a conductor who worked mainly in opera, to one who now works mainly in concert.

However, it was in opera that he first came into contact with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra. First impressions count, and he has no doubt about what struck him when he came to work in Dublin.

"My first impression was of the rehearsal schedule," he says. "That was very shocking for me. We had to prepare Salome by Strauss with six rehearsals, and that six included the dress rehearsal with singers. I thought it's not possible. And then I heard that this orchestra had never played music by Richard Strauss in the past! I came to the first rehearsal with the orchestra in the radio building in RTÉ, for the first of two reading rehearsals. And I had the biggest surprise of my life, seeing that the orchestra was very, very quick in working, in reading, and that discipline was so good that I didn't have to say anything twice. This feeling was fantastic."

Two more rehearsals, he says, "would have been great", but even without them, the challenge he had thought impossible was successfully surmounted. Irish orchestras, he had just discovered, are more like their British counterparts than their colleagues in continental Europe. They deal with shorter rehearsal periods and have to be better sight-readers and quick learners.

His ambitions for his three-year term with the RTÉCO sound quite modest. He understands that at all times he has to work within the limitations of the orchestra's size, and find a way forward with that in mind.

"The Concert Orchestra is not a very big symphony orchestra," he says. "We have only eight first violins and two flutes, two oboes, and so on. Maybe we can sometimes take a few extra players, but basically we have to work with the people we have in the RTÉ orchestra."

There's a lot of talk these days about orchestras around the world having lost their sense of direction, of failing to nurture new repertoire, of running the risk of turning into musical museums. At the beginning of the 21st century, says Wagner, an orchestra must make sure "that the public has first of all had the opportunity to digest the music of the 20th century. Because that hasn't been the case. At the beginning of the 20th century the public had digested the romantic music. But now, in the year 2003, the wider musical public hasn't digested music by Schoenberg, by Stravinsky and by Bartók. I think the most important thing now is to play this music more and more and more."

He is also interested in commissioning new music from Irish composers, but he hasn't yet worked out the detail of what will be possible in this regard with RTÉ.

His first series at the Helix is themed around major European musical cities, including Leipzig (Schumann, Bach, Wagner, Mendelssohn), Prague (Dvorák, Martinu, Mozart), Paris (Rameau, Franck, Ravel, Bizet) and Budapest (Bartók, Liszt, Kodály). The omission of Vienna is easily explained. Next March, he's presenting a five-concert series on that city, mixing the greatest names of the 18th and 19th centuries - Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert - with later works by Mahler, Zemlinsky, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern.

He's clearly aware that the RTÉCO has long lived in the shadow of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. The Ulster Orchestra's profile outside Northern Ireland is low enough that he seems not to take it into his reckoning when he declares that what he hopes to do is "to show that the RTÉ Concert Orchestra is not an orchestra in competition with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra - that's another size, another repertoire - but that the artistic quality can be the same, and its acceptance by the public can also be the same.

"I don't know exactly at the moment what the relationship between the orchestra and the public is, but I'm sure that it can be improved and developed so that the people of Dublin and Ireland will know better that we actually have two orchestras here."

The Five Cities series with Laurent Wagner and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra opens at the Helix, Dublin on Saturday, October 4th. Booking and details from the Helix at 01-7007000.