The orchestral road to Dublin

Alan Buribayev takes up the baton as the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra's principal conductor today. Michael Dervanhears about the journey that brought a 31-year-old from Kazakhstan to Ireland

AS A MUSICIAN, Alan Buribayev didn't come out of nowhere. He's a fourth-generation musician, a tradition that runs through both sides of his family. One great-grandfather, Akhmet Zhubanov, was a composer, and his opera Abai(about Abai Kunanbaev, a founder of Kazakh literature) still opens the opera season in Kazakhstan every year. His great-aunt Gaziza Zhubanova was, he says, "probably the most significant Kazakhstanian composer of the 20th century".

These days, Buribayev keeps her work alive by conducting her Piano Concerto in Sweden with soloist Freddy Kempf. His mother plays the piano and teaches, his father plays the cello and conducts and is also now his country’s vice-minister of culture and information. There was so much chamber music going on in the family that, Buribayev says, “sometimes I think I like chamber music even more than symphonic music”.

His own instrument was the violin, but by his early teens he found his interest turning towards the orchestra. Away from his musical studies, his taste ran to pop music. His favourite was Queen, "still the best group, ever". But one day he heard some music on the car radio in Greece (where his father was working) that left him transfixed. It was the overture to Wagner's Tannhäuser. He asked his father how could he become involved with this music. "That's simple," came the reply. 'You have to become a conductor."

Buribayev’s focus, however, was never on conducting; it was a way to get to the music rather than the music being the way to get to stand in front of an orchestra. Conducting as a power trip was not for him.

In Greece, he found inspiration in visits by Kurt Masur, and later had an electrifying encounter with Yuri Temirkanov at the Malko conducting competition in Copenhagen. There was no first prize awarded that year, but Buribayev won a special prize. In a conversation about Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, which had featured in the competition, “Temirkanov destroyed completely my whole approach to this symphony, and he left me thinking that I wanted to follow this man and learn about his approach to the orchestra”.

He later worked as Temirkanov's assistant on a production of Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spadesin Lyon, taking over when Temirkanov cancelled, and also took over concerts with the St Petersburg Philharmonic in Japan, after Temirkanov cancelled again.

His route to those successes involved an extraordinary leap. Getting actual experience with an orchestra is extremely difficult, and “this is the tragedy of young conductors, because you need your instrument, and our instrument is other people playing for us”.

Student conductors can work, if they’re lucky, by conducting an “orchestra” of two pianos or, if they’re not, by conducting thin air. Buribayev’s first time to conduct an orchestra, he says, was at an international competition. “I’d studied the scores and knew how to beat the time. But the first time conducting them was in the competition.” He didn’t win, but he did get a diploma. And he used that to swing an appearancewith the regional Karaganda Symphony Orchestra in Kazakhstan. He made a good enough impression to get asked back, and was then appointed associate conductor.

He put off conducting studies in Vienna for a year to avail of the opportunity. And although he had to stay in “a very bad hotel with no hot water, sometimes taking a shower in the basement because that’s where they had the showers”, it was worth it. He was conducting regularly, and with a real orchestra.

In Vienna, where his teacher was Uroš Lajovic, he went to hear great conductors rehearse with the Vienna Philharmonic, to find out “what can you say to the Vienna Philharmonic? How can you make the music even better, if it is already great?”

Buribayev’s career has been on the rise since then. He took first prize at the Antonio Pedrotti International Conducting Competition in Italy in 2001, and appointments followed at home (the Astana Symphony Orchestra) and abroad (as Generalmusikdirektor of Germany’s Meiningen Theatre, as well as conductorships with Sweden’s Norrköping Symphony Orchestra and the Brabants Philharmonic in the Netherlands).

He first appeared with the RTÉ NSO in 2006, returned in 2007, and was announced as the orchestra’s new principal conductor in 2009. He comes across as both alert and astute, aware of his relative youth and youthful tastes (in his first season he’s indulging himself in the colours of romantic music and the challenges of new music).

He’s fastidiously modest and seems to be a sponge for everything around him, always learning, always willing to try new things, always watchful of the dynamics of relationships he finds himself in. His family’s musical history goes back a long time and it’s clearly no accident that his musician father became a politician too.

Alan Buribayev conducts the RTÉ NSO in a programme of work by Elaine Agnew, Rimsky-Korsakov and Rachmaninov at the National Concert Hall tonight, and takes part in a meet-and-greet session after the concert