The young tend to get a bad rap these days. Noses buried in phones, attention spans decimated by social media, seemingly succumbing to a collective attention deficit disorder. Mark Elder is here to tell us otherwise.
The chief conductor of the Halle orchestra in Manchester has an enduring interest in young people; in training them, encouraging them, helping develop their careers. He thinks they’re far from flighty.
“To be a young musician, you have to have an incredible ability to concentrate and to focus,” he says. “If you’re trying to play the cello or the violin, the finger can’t just go anywhere. It’s got to get to an absolutely precise place that is governed by your ear. And the development of your ear is something that has to start very early. The dedication required is just the same as for a young ballet dancer or, indeed, a sportsman.”
In fact, it’s a double concentration, he says: the hard slog of training motor skills that any athlete goes through, plus, for classical musicians, the intellectual rigour of understanding the history and aesthetics of styles spanning hundreds of years. Add to that the emotional component – feeling the music – and you can see that a musician’s concentration must reach Zen-like levels.
Elder is in Melbourne rehearsing with the Australian Youth Orchestra, which is about to give concerts in Melbourne and Sydney. He has worked with them before. In 2010, he conducted a more extensive tour that culminated at the Proms in London.
This time he’s putting them through their paces with Mahler’s Symphony No 6 and Debussy’s La Mer, which are sound worlds apart. Mahler’s massive symphonies give every musician – even the percussionists – a demanding part to play, he says. In addition, the sturm und drang of the music, together with Mahler’s own turbulent life, makes him fascinating to the young.
“Mahler was slow to be accepted by a wide audience, and in England his music came quite late into people’s hearts,” says Elder. “But then after the second world war, with the advent of long-playing records, young people found so much to identify with in this music: his tortured, neurotic temperament, his multifarious backgrounds, partly Jewish, partly Germanic.”
The composer was very theatrical, very operatic, Elder adds. “The sense that these big works of his are so relevant, something that can really get into the guts of young musicians, is still very powerful. And the journey you have to make in order to put it across to an audience is immense.”
Alongside the monumentalism of Mahler, the orchestra will be playing Debussy, a very different discipline. “Debussy is in many ways harder,” Elder says. “It’s much, much shorter, but the play of sounds, and the subtlety, and the delicacy of the music, requires them to stretch their ability to play in a large ensemble.”
Elder works with the National Youth Orchestra in Britain too, but the set-up is different from the AYO’s. There the upper age limit is 19. Here it is well into the musicians’ twenties, when many of them are already segueing into professional life. One of the benefits is that a mentorship system forms automatically within the orchestra: the younger teenagers look up to older players and have their technique stretched by the older musicians’ experience.
Elder was a very young man himself, fresh out of university, when he first came to Australia and it was here he got his break. “I owe this country my career,” he says with genuine feeling. The British conductor Edward Downes was music director of the Australian Opera and also worked frequently at Covent Garden. Downes was present when Elder auditioned there and was clearly impressed.
Covent Garden offered him a job, but Downes made a better offer: would Elder like to come to Australia to work with the opera here? “The only thing I had to agree to do was not to come back in less than two years. If I agreed to that and signed on that dotted line, it meant that the Australian Opera would be able to get me out on an assisted passage.”
The adventure was irresistible. “To begin with it was difficult because I had so much to learn about everything – about myself, about life, about conducting,” he recalls.
Once here, however, his ascent was rapid. He signed the contract in 1971, arrived at the start of 1972, and conducted the second performance at the brand new Sydney Opera House in 1971. He had already made his conducting debut in Melbourne, with the opera company. He remembers exactly how many performances he conducted during that early stay: 160.
Since the end of the 70s, he has returned regularly to conduct what is now Opera Australia, as well as the Sydney Symphony, and he has formed close personal links. He and his wife have many friends here now, he says, and for a while he had a sister living in Tasmania and an aunt in Sydney. That early experience of adventure, of getting out into the wide world, seems to inform his advice to young musicians.
“Because of this particularly tight groove they have to be in, in order to get mastery of their instrument, it’s important that they have the capacity to go outside, physically and metaphorically. To develop an awareness of something bigger than just where they’re going to put their fingers on the string.”
In part, he means getting out literally, into the fresh air. “But also,” he says, “to be an artist in the broadest sense, you need to think not only about how to perform, but how to communicate with an audience, why you do it, what you believe in, what you are going to do to help the next generations, how your own development as a human being is going to impact your ability to put over the music that you love so much.”
Change a few of the words and that’s sound life advice for the tone-deaf too.
- Mark Elder conducts the Australian Youth Orchestra at Hamer Hall, Melbourne on 17 July and at the Sydney Opera House on 19 July
