Secrets of good conduct

As he takes the baton with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, Scottish composer James MacMillan talks to MICHAEL DERVANabout 'the complete mystery of conducting'

TEN YEARS AGO it was a work by Scottish composer James MacMillan, his Confession of Isobel Gowdie, which crowned the first concert in the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra's Explorer Series. That new music series transformed in time into the current Horizons series, and MacMillan has come to seem almost a member of the RTÉ fold. He was the artistic director of last year's RTÉ Living Music Festival, which focused on the work of Arvo Pärt. And he has also broken through the boundaries of the new music scene to feature both as composer and conductor in the NSO's subscription series.

Conducting is something he has always done. “I’ve always wanted to be involved in organising little concerts, even in primary school, standing up in front of friends, forming little bands, little choirs,” he says. “But I never consciously thought about it as something really serious until the last seven or eight years.”

Initially, he just conducted his own work. “But then I was invited to conduct other contemporary music. And I certainly have an instinct or an empathy for a fellow composer’s work. I love bringing their ideas to life. I feel as if I’m on their side a lot of the time, and I think they appreciate that. It’s not to say that non-composer conductors aren’t on-message or on-side. They are. And of course they do performances brilliantly. But there’s something about composers’ insight into another composer’s work, which I’ve always been interested in.”

He lists Oliver Knussen, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Thomas Adès, George Benjamin and John Adams as leaders in the resurgence of the composer-conductor, and says he always follows their work with especial interest.

It was back in 2000 that MacMillan became composer-conductor with the Manchester-based BBC Philharmonic Orchestra; a blossoming conducting career has since seen him conduct, among others, the Los Angeles and Munich philharmonics, and the symphony orchestras of Baltimore, Birmingham, Toronto, Melbourne and the NHK broadcasting service in Tokyo.

And did he ever train for this eventuality? "Not at all. I've never had a lesson. I've sat in on master classes by Martyn Brabbins, just to see what he was doing with his fledgling conductors." He did also seek advice at the top. "I also asked for a consultation with Colin Davis, once we got friendly, which was great. It was interesting, very funny, and very different to Martyn Brabbins's approach. There wasn't a lot of practicality or technique discussed at all, just very, very quiet observations made now and again about scores. Then I realised one of the real reasons he wanted to see me was that he was doing my Confession of Isobel Gowdie, and he wanted to know how I did it. So it was a two-way process. He's since recorded it, and he conducts it beautifully."

CONDUCTING IS ONE of the most mysterious of musical activities. “It’s a complete mystery. I can understand why it’s a mystery to the public at large. Because they see this person moving his hands, they just wonder what he’s doing. But even when you become involved in that world completely, I still watch and wonder at really great conductors and wonder what on earth are they doing that’s different to what I do or to what some Joe Bloggs is doing. It’s a black art, as they say, and a real mystery. But there must be something to do with the personality that’s communicated in gesture, in look, and in the person himself that makes all the difference.”

It’s often been said that the relationship between an orchestra and a conductor can be decided during the walk between the door and the podium at the first rehearsal. MacMillan doesn’t dispute this. “I feel that, yes. It’s terrifying. They’re just watching you, observing you, calculating what kind of person you are, even before you open your mouth. It’s amazing.” He no longer experiences the fears he had when he started. “I’ve kind of settled into a groove where I am confident of what I’m doing. But I suppose perhaps about 10 years ago when all this was kicking off I was a little unsure, not so much of repertoire, because I did prepare pretty well, but until you do a piece a couple of times you are going to be quite fresh and it’s going to sound that way.

“If you’re touring around, working with musicians that you don’t know, you’ve no idea how they’re going to react to you. And it’s a terror of those few minutes before a rehearsal starts, or at least the first half-hour of rehearsal, wondering how on earth the communication’s going to be, or the relationship’s going to be. And the delight if it works, knowing you’ve got a few days ahead of you where it’s going to be really happy. Or that dead feeling in the pit of your stomach, when you realise it’s not going to work and there are some real personal issues going on that just won’t resolve themselves over the next few days. It’s a great way of strengthening up your character, throwing yourself into the deep end like that, and just finding out how you do cope with orchestras in many different parts of the world. ”

The unpredictability of a relationship with an orchestra doesn’t just affect young or inexperienced conductors, he says. “Some great conductors hit it off well with bands one week, and the next week they’re in some other city with another orchestra and it’s hell on earth. Some musicians go out of their way to make life difficult so that the management won’t invite that person back again. You never know what it is that’s going to make them go one way or the other.

“I’ve talked to musicians about what they’ve liked about a conductor, and a conductor who has such a positive experience and good reputation with one orchestra is hated by the orchestra down the road. I just can’t work out what it is. Sometimes it’s the relationship between the conductor and the leader, the concertmaster. If that’s poisonous, then the whole thing is wasted. It communicates. I know one concertmaster who liked to think of his band as a harem, a personal harem, basically. With the arrival of an equal, alpha-male figure, it was just a clash all the way, and that person was never invited back to that orchestra.”

Yet MacMillan is of the view that conflict can be avoided. “It all comes down to your own strategy, your own personality. I’m not confrontational, I never get into rows with people. Sometimes I’m told that I’m too nice, but I believe in consensus and I’ve got my own way of dealing with people. And generally it’s worked very well.”

Conducting has specific benefits for a composer. It’s made him be a bit more practical about some of the demands he makes on players. “Comparing some of my early music when I wasn’t conducting so much, I know now what orchestras and ensembles find tricky to cope with. It’s not to say that I’ve simplified my scores. I haven’t. Sometimes the early chaos is relevant for certain directions that the music has to take, but I’m now aware that there are different ways of handling that.”

For his concert with the RTÉ NSO, MacMillan conducts a programme of 20th- and 21st-century music: Irish composer Fergus Johnston's Scenes and Interludes from The Earl of Kildare(the orchestral premiere of sections from a new opera); US composer Jennifer Higdon's Percussion Concerto (with Colin Currie as soloist); some operatic excerpts by MacMillan himself, three interludes from The Sacrifice; and Georgian composer Giya Kancheli's Fifth Symphony.

The Johnston, he says, is “a very dynamic piece, though there are some rhythmic intricacies at the beginning which are giving me a few headaches at the moment, but we’ll get there, I’m sure. Then it settles into something of a groove.

"The Higdon is one of the lightest pieces in terms of what people mean when they say it's accessible. It's a very well-crafted piece for Colin and the orchestra. It's happy music, very invigorating, very American; there's something of that joie de vivrethat's existed ever since Copland and Barber.

"The Kancheli is the very opposite kind of piece. It's a dark piece, in many ways one of the strangest pieces I've ever conducted. It's all high contrast, with little quotes, or what seem like quotes or allusions, to music that you know – little harpsichord phrases that keep coming back. You're never quite sure where you are with the music. It's full of tension, then, which is why it appeals to me. But it's a fully, traditionally tonal piece for all that. But it doesn't have the sense of recognisability that you normally have with tonal music, because of the stark and dramatic juxtapositions. My own piece is a couple of fillets from an opera, from The Sacrifice."

MacMILLAN, OF COURSE, can make the headlines for more than his composing or conducting. Last year he hit out at “metropolitan arts, cultural and media elites” for their hostility to faith. His own Roman Catholic faith runs both deep and open. So I asked him for a perspective on the current recession and then about its impact on the arts.

“It is human greed that led to it. Perhaps, on spiritual levels, it gives us an opportunity to reassess our predicament, and perhaps in the long run, in purely ethical and spiritual terms, it might be a good thing for the world to realise that materialism and that kind of fetishisation of money can actually be bad for us. There has to be a better way, a more equitable way, a way that values our humanity more than our possessions. Certainly, some of the recent reports that are coming out in this country seem to be flagging that analysis up. It seems a valid analysis. And it may have a long-term impact on our deeper thinking about how we cope with our obvious wealth and what we do with it.

“There’s always been doom and gloom spoken about the arts at every turn in my short life. If you look at classical music, for example, the doomsayers have been out in force for decades, talking about the end of classical music. And it hasn’t happened. Something in the dynamic of how classical music fits in society does change. But it’s not always for the worst. It can sometimes be a good thing. You sometimes see flowerings in the most unexpected places. You can’t justify the pessimism. I’m beginning to realise that the pessimistic default position is not a realistic one, and that creativity will flourish. To be honest, it doesn’t matter to me a damn what happens out there, I’ll still keep writing. And if there are people like me all over the place, then that means that culture and the arts will be thriving and bubbling on.”

James MacMillan conducts the RTÉ NSO at the National Concert Hall on Feb 27, and can also be heard in a pre-performance (6.45pm) conversation with percussionist Colin Currie