One of Australia’s most talented classical musicians, Nicholas Carter, has returned from Berlin to take up the baton as Adelaide Symphony Orchestra’s new principal conductor. On the eve of his first Carter Conducts concerts, he talks about working with his many mentors including Richard Gill, Simone Young and Vladimir Ashkenazy, the differences between German and Australian orchestras and what it is conductors actually do:
You must be excited to take on the role of principal conductor at Adelaide Symphony Orchestra?
The reaction has been overwhelming, not only from friends, family and the industry here in Australia but also internationally. It’s been a long time coming for Australia, for an Australian orchestra to appoint an Australian as the artistic head of the organisation. I found myself at the right stage in my career to match the Adelaide Symphony, and they’re at a certain stage in their evolution as an orchestra, so we thought we could really make something from this. We’re in the processes of finalising programs for next year – we’ve got the right kind of balance of different kinds of musicians and different types of repertoire so it’s really quite thrilling.
Mark Elder compared young Australian musicians to young athletes in terms of their focus, training and hard work. Do you think we should be shouting louder about their talent?
Absolutely. Sport obviously has an incredible stranglehold over the Australian public imagination and that’s not a bad thing. I’m a sport lover, and a cricket and tennis fan. But as Mark Elder quite rightly pointed out, some of the world’s finest orchestras have many Australians in their ranks, and their focus, dedication and the ambition take them everywhere. I think that’s got something to do with the fact we are so far away from Europe and from America and there’s that little bit of extra ambition that we’re seen to be doing the music that belongs to Europe justice. We’re also lucky to have great teachers at the national academy. The more exposure these young musicians, and classical music, has in the public eye, the more we’ll realise that we’ve got some of the world’s most greatest talent here under our noses.
As a conductor, how do you describe what you do to those who don’t understand?
A lot of people say the conductor keeps time, and that’s true to an extent. But most orchestras that I conduct these days can keep time themselves, to a large extent. The way that I see it is that a conductor brings an interpretive unity to the music they’re conducting. For example, if we’re doing a Beethoven or Mozart symphony, orchestras can get by perfectly well playing the symphony without a conductor because they know the repertoire well. When we get into more complex late repertoire, you need a conductor there to shepherd everybody in the right direction, but that doesn’t have to be someone who is running the rehearsal and making the decisions on what you’re trying to express through the music. As the conductor I come into the rehearsal with specific ideas as to how I want the music to sound but I try to listen to the orchestra and hear what they’re offering. You’ve got to weave all the different ideas and talents together for a common goal. In that sense, when people ask me what does a conductor do, I say we make sure there’s a clear message being expressed in the music, with some unity.
Where do you fall on the controversial topic of to baton or not to baton?
Sometimes I use it, sometimes I don’t. I tend not to use it for classical repertoire because the orchestras are smaller. An orchestra listens to each other as much as they follow the conductor and, if the orchestra is smaller, then if I’m conducting with my hands there’s no reason that they can’t acknowledge the flow of the music from me without a stick. If it’s a larger orchestra, sometimes it does help to have that one pointer so you can catch their gaze [while they] focus on the music. Some conductors make a career from using the stick their whole lives and some conductors don’t.
You don’t come from a classical music family. Why do you think you fell so hard for classical music?
I’m not sure. I was lucky enough to go to a school where instrumental lessons were offered, so from an early age I learnt violin and piano. I remember hearing the National Boys Choir performing at my school and deciding at age seven that I wanted to join this choir. Which I understand not every seven-year-old in our society wants to do. But I was lucky enough to get in and this was the children’s choir that often performed with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. I was exposed to more orchestral music and I thought this is what I wanted to do. And for some reason I decided I wanted to be the guy up the front waving the stick. I didn’t really comprehend what on earth that meant. I’ve spent an enormous amount since then trying to work it out myself.
You’ve worked with conductors like Vladimir Ashkenazy, Simone Young and Richard Gill. Who had the biggest influence on you and your career?
That’s a difficult one to answer: what’s the saying, success has many fathers. Richard Gill was my first real mentor who took me under his wing and taught me an enormous amount. There were big holes in my musical education when I started studying with him and he invested an enormous amount of his time filling those gaps in and broadening my mind, not only to all the music, but also to literature and poetry. These days, I often go back to his words when I’m standing in the pit in Berlin or on stage here in Australia.
From there, I went up to Sydney to work with the Sydney Symphony. Ashkenazy was the chief conductor and he’s one of the most naturally gifted musicians of the last half century, so you learn a lot just from his instinct for music making. Sitting and talking with Ashkenazy about music and seeing how he would work with the orchestra, you learn a huge amount in a different way. Then I went to Hamburg to work with Simone Young, one of the most gifted opera conductors on the circuit. Suddenly I was in a German Opera House system where you do 36 operas a season. That was demanding because there was such an enormous amount of repertoires I hadn’t yet learnt. I would be assisting Simone and also conducting my own operas as well. I didn’t get much sleep for about three years but I learnt an enormous amount.
What is the key to success in the collaboration between the conductor and the orchestra?
I think you’ve got to have a very developed emotional intelligence and be able to judge and gauge the character of a certain orchestra at any given time. When I go into an orchestra, of course I’m myself, but I’m myself with that orchestra as well. So the musicians in Australia are generally more chilled out than perhaps they are in central Europe where there’s a different work ethic. Not a better work ethic or worse work ethic, but a different kind of work ethic. In Germany you find that you’re there to rehearse and you need to be efficient. It’s not that they don’t want you to be friendly, it’s the different things that they value. In Germany I find there are techniques of taking the rehearsal that I adapt to that situation and then coming to Australia there are different techniques again. In any given circumstance you need to find the key points for the musicians are and how you can inspire them that week.
• Nicholas Carter will be in performance with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra for Carter Conducts at Adelaide Town Hall on 7 and 8 August. He will also perform Mozart at Elder 3 at Elder Hall on 2 December
