Theatricality, Humanity, Humility
The Manchester Camerata is visiting Hungary for the first time. Since 2011 its artistic director has been Gábor Takács-Nagy. A good few years ago he exchanged his violin for the conductor's baton. He is an artist who shrinks from all the allures of stardom. We took the opportunity toask him about the behind-the-scenes secrets of the English ensemble, about star soloists and star conductors.
- The Manchester Camerata appears to be a very ‘cool’ ensemble, because your activities include opera film concerts and stage performances with fireworks.
- We have to reach out to young people. There is a problem all over the world of what will happen to serious music concerts as audiences inevitably age. We have to win over the young generation differently, with special attractions. Besides the very successful break-out points that you mentioned, theManchester Camerata aims to develop a very close relationship with local youngsters: the orchestra members visit schools to hold musical activities, and youngsters learning instruments can even spend a whole day sitting in an orchestra alongside professional musicians.
- Your guest in Budapest will be István Várdai, recent winner of the ARDcompetition. Does it not bother you that the audience is coming to hear the soloist?
- In István's case, it certainly does not bother me because although he is much younger than I am, I regard him as a good friend. Additionally, our tastes are quite similar: he represents the same kind of profound, colourful music making as I do. The music is what is important; but it is not a problem when a great star brings along an audience. But you have to trust that you are not going to shrivel into being the fourth official in a football match.
- We tend to envisage star conductors as authoritarian personalities,bellowing from the podium.
- When a conductor allows his ego to come to the fore excessively, it derailsthe orchestra. The musicians will bend physically to the conductor's will but not their souls, and the audience can sense that. Of course, you can't make an orchestra from a bunch of mates where the musicians are playing as a favour. The conductor must be the boss, but he must remain a human being, moreover, a human who loves music a hundred times more than he loves himself. He must be grateful at any given instant to the musicians struggling with a thousand individual problems to make his concept a reality. One of the most important things for a conductor is, in my view, to liberate the musicians' souls, to free any inhibitions. We don't have to feartiny errors of intonation, as the audience is not concentrating on that. In a concert the goal is not technical perfection – leave that for the recording studio – but experiencing music as flesh and blood theatre. Mattheson wrotein 1722 that “everything which expresses human feelings and which affectsus, is theatrical. So all true, frank and profound music making is theatrical.” Leopold Mozart – and I never walk onto the concert platform without sayingthis to myself – wrote a few decades later that “the first duty of a musicianis for the player to enter into the mood and effect that prevails in the work, thus gaining the listener's favour and stimulating in him its passions.” That is what it is about! The concert is also theatre and must broadcast human feelings towards the audience. A power-hungry conductor merely suffocates the necessary creative energies in the musicians.
- Often the garnishing surrounding star conductors who are marketedas world brands can seem like drama…
- Sadly, today's world is susceptible to false talents. If a lady musician is attractive and wears a mini skirt, she is a potential winner at the box office. That is how it is. But we know classical music stars whose true knowledge is about as big as the bubble that surround them.
- In a recent interview I read by you, you quoted Bernard Haitink saying that conducting is 51 percent dependent on socio-psychological sensitivity. What percentage is humility?
- I would not like to put a figure on it, but Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Bartók and all the great composers put their heart and souls into those pieces whichwe perform. If they once radiated humanism – well how can we approach them differently? Martha Argerich said last year after our Beethoven concert, “I will never understand arrogant musicians. These composers are a hundred times greater than we are, so how does someone dare think they know what they wrote better than they did?” Although we, the performers, go out on stage, it is the composer and the music that are caught in the footlights!
Interview by Dániel Végh, originally published in the January-June 2015 issue of the Liszt Academy Concert Magazine.