Almost every season for the past nine years, French conductor Stéphane Denève has bounced up to the podium at Roy Thomson Hall to make memorable music with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He’s back tonight and Saturday with violinist James Ehnes to present a varied programme that includes Britten as well as Beethoven.
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
I caught up with him before rehearsals yesterday. Because of the nice weather, he was standing out in the sunshine on Wellington St W. laptop satchel in one hand and, in the other, the score to Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto, written during the composer’s early-wartime exile in the United States, in 1940.
If a tall man in his early 40s can be said to be radiant, that was Denève yesterday — beaming at the weather, at being back to work with one of his favourite orchestras, at returning to the city where he met his Swedish wife, at being able to make music.
Here is someone who clearly relishes every opportunity to share his overflowing cup of enthusiasm.
On Tuesday, he’d conducted a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert with Yo Yo Ma. Denève waxes rhapsodic about Ma’s ability to make magic with the simplest of gestures, even in a severe work like the Shostakovich Cello Concerto.
That provides the perfect excuse to ask him about that magic ingredient that turns a performance from the ordinary into something special.
“I have to take you back to the time when I was working as the assistant conductor to Georg Solti,” he replies. “Here was this 82-year-old guy, working with Renée Fleming, spending 20 minutes working on one single passage of a piece. The musical fire that resulted was spectacular. I told myself at that moment that this is how I had to work as well.”
Denève goes on to explain how each performance of a piece needs to be a little different — to suit the occasion or the orchestra. “Each time, it’s a different adventure,” he says. “So far, I haven’t ever had to go look for things to keep me interested, or to keep the music sounding fresh.”
The maestro, who has been getting raves for his work as music director of the Stuttgart Radio Orchestra and Royal Scottish National Orchestra (where Peter Oundjian is now music director), says that the real art is in how a conductor communicates intentions to an orchestra.
“The art of the conductor is absolute proof of telepathy,” he insists. “I’m Cartesian, I’m French and I know that two plus two equals four, but, there’s a real mystery here.”
Thanks to two decades of steady work, Denève says he now uses fewer large gestures on the podium and has developed more shorthand ways of explaining what he wants to hear. “But even so, the orchestra will often do something I haven’t even spoken about, but have been thinking. It’s fascinating.”
There are so many younger conductors these days getting a lot of attention through the heightened drama they bring to their interpretations. Denève applauds their efforts, but says that he trusts what the great composers have written down for him to interpret.
“I adore natural musicians — people like [the late Carlos] Kleiber — who let the music come out naturally, who follow the natural patterns of musical phrases as they sing. That is what I look for,” he explains.
“I believe in the tempo giusto [the notion that there is a speed at which each piece of music sounds its best], in an inner logic to a piece that insists that it sounds natural.” He mentions another late, great conductor, Carlo Maria Giulini, “who held the music by his hand” — like a parent gently walking her child.
“Oh, the love of music needs to be childlike,” he says. “I love artists in whom I can see the little girl or the little boy inside. There is an underlying simplicity to making music that I find sublime.”
As the conversation continues, we turn to the unnerving simplicity of Britten’s music.
“There’s almost nothing there,” exclaims Denève regarding the composer’s spare orchestration. He flips open the score to reveal page after page where white spaces, not black dots, dominate. “Yet somehow this music works — very powerfully,” he adds. “This is the writing of someone who was supremely confident in his craft, of knowing exactly what he wanted, of what the design needed to sound like.”
The conductor’s love of childlike simplicity returns in an anecdote about Britten he was told many years ago by a choral conductor who had worked closely with the composer.
Britten has gone down in music history as a bit of a cantankerous personality — contrary to the impressions of people who were intimate with him. This conductor was touring with a group that included Britten, and were staying in a very traditional English hotel with striped carpeting in the lobby.
One morning, the conductor noticed Britten in the lobby, thinking he was alone and unobserved, trying to place one smartly shod foot in front of the other on one particular line without losing his balance.
Denève laughs. “That little scene, of Britten like a little boy playing, represents everything that means something to me about music.”
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This week’s Toronto Symphony Orchestra programme also features Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, the “Eroica” and the Canadian premiere of Three Interludes from the opera The Sacrifice by contemporary British composer James MacMillan. performances are Thursday and Saturday at 8 p.m. Details here.
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
