An Interview with Gavriel Heine

Childhood

CH: Let’s start with your musical upbringing. Are your parents professional musicians?

GH: I would say I had half a musical household. My father is an attorney who loved music, while my mother is a concert pianist who happens to have a very strong teaching career. Because she is a pianist, my mother naturally tried to make a pianist out of her son, but that didn’t go very well. I studied the piano when I was five and tried the violin when I was seven, but they didn’t resonate with me. I felt tired standing up all the time when practising on the violin, so I asked my mum if there was an instrument where I could practise sitting down. That’s how I started on the cello, and it turned out to be the instrument that stuck with me.

My mother was a huge part of my life – not only did she put me on the road of studying music but she also put me on the road to ending up in Russia.

Moscow Conservatory

You see, my mother did more than teaching and playing the piano – she was also the executive director of a large music festival at the university where she taught. The festival frequently had opera or ballet productions, and in 1987, they decided to do a joint American and Soviet production of Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges. It was during the glasnost, perestroika times of the Gorbachev years, and my mother had the idea to invite singers from the Stanislavsky Theatre to sing the main roles of the opera, and to invite the Kirov Ballet to perform as well.

Inviting the Kirov Ballet was not an easy matter – it was in 1987, when there was no email, so my mother had to travel to Moscow and Leningrad to meet with Gosconcert, the state concert organisation. Meanwhile, I was becoming more serious on the cello, so I came along with my mother to join the Moscow Conservatory’s summer school. It was a Western-style series of masterclasses where foreign students would come to the Moscow Conservatory during the summer, and they would have an entire schedule of private lessons and masterclasses with the faculty.

In Moscow, I was very much struck by the way everyone was playing. It was so different from any style that I had been taught in the United States. Around me were cellists just like monsters, in the best sense of that word. They would sit there, and every millimetre of their bow, from the frog all the way to the tip, would have a fat, rich, open sound. Their left hands were all over the place, and they were in complete command of their instrument. I thought, oh my God, what planet do these people come from? I’ve never seen anybody around me making that kind of sound and having that kind of technique that allowed them to play so freely and… big.

During the summer school, I had lessons for five weeks privately with Stefan Kalyanov, Rostropovich’s assistant who had become a full member of the faculty after Rostropovich left for the States. At the end of the programme, Kalyanov thought that I had talent and invited me to return to Russia after my graduation, promising to teach me if I successfully passed the Conservatory’s audition. I was flattered, and that’s how I went to the Moscow Conservatory.

Into Conducting

CH: You studied the cello for six years in the Moscow Conservatory. What made you pick up conducting?

GH: I had always had a desire to be a conductor. It started when I was still in America, playing in symphonic orchestras, and the sound of a full orchestra made a huge impression on me.

When you’re a pianist, you are responsible for the entire musical material – you can play a Beethoven sonata with all the colours and voices available in your two hands. But if you’re a cellist your repertoire is much more limited. With the exception of some Bach or Kodaly, you seldom find the big picture by yourself. You often need a partner, as in chamber music, but there is still a sense of loneliness when you are sitting in your room alone, playing your one line and practising it over and over to make it beautiful. This loneliness is not just social but also musical. Sure, it is a great challenge and can be extremely fulfilling, but I wanted to be surrounded by the sound. I wanted to be part of helping all these sounds to come together, so I had a desire to become a conductor.

The opportunity came during my years at the Moscow Conservatory. Because I was already speaking Russian, I would earn some money during the summer by interpreting for the Conservatory’s summer school. One of the assignments I ended up with was as an interpreter to Leonid Nikolaev, head of the conducting department at the Moscow Conservatory.

When I stepped into Nikolaev’s conducting class, I immediately fell in love with the atmosphere. It was a masterclass, and as I am relaying Nikolaev’s remarks I am also learning from what’s going through my head, into my ears and out of my mouth. I started to see where the student has problems, where he’s fixing them and where he’s not getting them. Now, the worst thing you can ever do as an interpreter is to insert yourself into the process – you’re supposed to be transparent. But I couldn’t help myself, and I started to add my own comments to the student. “No, that’s not what he said. You’re not doing that right.”

Nikolaev was sitting there smiling at me, because he understood that I understood him and that I was professionally interested in the subject. At the end of the lesson, I stayed behind and asked for a lesson of my own to showed him what I’d learnt, and afterwards he immediately referred me to the dean of the foreign students, saying that I was a natural-born conductor and should get in front of an orchestra immediately.

After my diploma, I was originally set on studying with Nikolaev, but a family friend of mine, a composer by the name of Alexander Tchaikovsky, recommended that I go to Saint Petersburg to study with Ilya Musin. Ilya Musin was a revered conductor, being the teacher of many famed conductors, Valery Gergiev for one, so I was initially reluctant to go, because I was just doing the equivalent of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” in conducting, and there’s no way I would be accepted into such a prestigious class. But Tchaikovsky was adamant: “No, go see how he teaches. Everybody starts studying conducting at your age.”

The Saint Petersburg Conservatory had six conducting professors in the faculty, but when I walked into Musin’s class I was immediately drawn to him. Musin’s teachings emphasised the complete picture; his class was a total spectrum of how to use technique in the service of making vivid music.

I understood immediately that this is the man I wanted to study with. So, after sitting in his lessons for a week, I went up to Musin and asked to show my conducting to him. Unfortunately, it failed miserably, with Musin commenting to his assistant that “Well, he doesn’t know anything. He has no idea what he’s doing.”

I was dejected, but I didn’t give up and kept sitting in his lessons. Now, the atmosphere of Musin’s class was unusually friendly – the students in the class were very willing to share their knowledge of Musin, and it became almost like this religious obligation to share the words of the revered teacher with the new person. The students took turns giving me feedback, and a week later I conducted for Musin again. This time, the audition turned into an impromptu lesson, and midway into my conducting Musin got up and showed me how to do some passages. At the end of the lesson, he directed me to register as his student, and thus started my postgraduate studies at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory.

Leonid Korchmar

Being a contemporary of Shostakovich, Musin was already 94 when I met him, and he sadly passed away one year into my study. I continued to study for two more years after that, with his assistant at the time, Leonid Korchmar. Korchmar had the same techniques as Musin but he had a bit more of a modern view on things, giving me more freedom.

One thing that Korchmar taught me was how to approach conducting. Compared to instrumentalists, conductors don’t have to train up those small muscles to be in such incredible shape. Instead, we concentrate on the structure and architecture, and we have to project each note. One of the great challenges of being a conductor is that you have to be ahead of the orchestra to lead them to where you’re going, but at the same time you have to analyse what you’ve just heard and be able to remember that and make adjustments on the fly. John Cage once said that creation and analysis are two completely separate processes, that you cannot combine the two at the same time. Yet this is what a conductor is expected to do, to both create and analyse.

Indiana University School of Music in Bloomington

CH: Why did you go back to America after Saint Petersburg?

GH: It wasn’t my goal to spend my life in Russia. I went there for a specific reason, which was to learn music, and after spending nine years in Russia I felt that it was time for me to see how music works elsewhere, lest I only got one side of the story. So, I went to my mother’s university, the Indiana University School of Music in Bloomington, and got my master’s degree studying with Imre Palló, Thomas Baldner and David Effron. They were the three conducting professors at Indiana University in those days, and they all had different ways of teaching. Baldner was an old-school German who appreciated flexibility and romanticism, while Palló is a very experienced specialist in opera. David Effron was more symphonic, but he also worked in the New York City Opera a lot, so I was getting a lot of operatic and symphonic experience from this international faculty.

Kharkiv Symphony Orchestra

I stayed in Indiana for two years and got a master’s degree, but I was always looking to do something more. When I was still in Saint Petersburg I had guest conducted an orchestra in Kharkiv, Ukraine. It was in 2001 and I conducted a concert there with Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony on the programme. For some reason, it was a huge success, and the orchestra was very enthusiastic to continue to work with me. Even when I was in Indiana, I kept going back to them, and eventually they asked me to be their chief conductor.

It didn’t take long for me to decide, because I felt that it was also the right time for me to start conducting as a living. Practical experience beats studying – you can’t only theoretically study all the Beethoven symphonies; you have to conduct them and see how they work musically. You have to understand how your gesture affects the music, how it affects the players, to know what you should do and what you shouldn’t. That’s experience you can only gain when conducting a real orchestra.

So I accepted their offer, and from 2003 to 2007 I conducted around 40 programmes with the Kharkiv Symphony Orchestra.

Valery Gergiev

Then, in 2007, I met Valery Gergiev when he was in America for two months, working on a production of Eugene Onegin at the Metropolitan Opera. Operatic production is a long period, so his manager organised some concerts for him in between, and it was on one such trip to conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra that I went up to him after a rehearsal. I asked if he needed any conductors for the Mariinsky Theatre, and he asked me to come talk to him after the concert. That’s how I got Gergiev’s personal mobile number.

Gergiev was a busy man, and he would ask me to “come talk to me here, come talk to me there”. So, during Gergiev’s stay in America, I was travelling back and forth to New York to see him. Near the end of the Onegin production, he asked me to come to Saint Petersburg to listen to the premiere of his new production of The Love for Three Oranges at the Mariinsky Theatre. It was a long way from New York to Saint Petersburg, but as luck would have it I was actually conducting a concert in Kharkiv the day before, so I rerouted my return plane ticket and instead flew to Saint Petersburg to catch the second night of the premiere. Gergiev’s secretary had a ticket waiting for me, but unfortunately Gergiev had the flu and didn’t conduct that night.

The next day, Gergiev called me again. “Gavriel, I want you to go to tonight’s performance of Lucia di Lammermoor. I want you to listen, and I will call you back in intermission and you will tell me what you think.” So I went to the opera, and in the intermission I gave him my thoughts. It was like that for the remaining days of my stay, with him calling me on the phone and directing me to do this and that. I was starting to think that I would not be able to see Gergiev in person, and then suddenly on the last day I received an invitation to go to the maestro’s apartment. There, Gergiev introduced me to his family, his wife, Natasha, and their children, and we drank tea and ate Ossetian cheeses from the Caucasus. A few rounds later, we talked about Tosca. I mentioned that I recently also worked on a production of that, and Gergiev perked up. “Good, we also have a new production of Tosca, and you can be my assistant.” So that was how I became assistant conductor to Gergiev.

Assistant Conductor at the Mariinsky

After signing on as an assistant conductor, Gergiev didn’t give me any conducting to do for the first month and a half. Instead, he gave me tasks to do and questions to think about, all related to music. I was introduced to the orchestra, helped Gergiev put together programmes, and was involved to keep him on track.

One project I did was coordinating a contemporary music festival. It was the first time that the Mariinsky would be doing a contemporary music festival, and someone was selling Gergiev the idea of a festival with Thomas Adès. Gergiev was warm on the idea, but he needed a name for the festival. I thought about it. “How about New Horizons?” I also helped him design the programme booklet cover. The initial design actually came to me in a dream, if you can believe it, in the form of what they call a “tableau” in the airport, with all the flights’ information listed, and I replaced all that with the composers’ information and performance dates.

Working with Gergiev was a fascinating experience. With him, everything was unexpected, and he would take you left or right. It was always interesting and even enlightening.

I once needed his signature on a programme but he couldn’t give it to me because he was too busy. So they decided to send me to Moscow to talk to him. When I arrived in Moscow, there was already a driver waiting for me, but Gergiev was not in contact, so we drove around Moscow all day until we got a call to quickly go to the airport, to the business terminal. At the airport, the first thing Gergiev asked was if I had my passport. “We are going to Salzburg,” he announced. He would be conducting Benvenuto Cellini that night at the Salzburg Festival.

It was a great performance, and the next day we flew out again, this time to London, where he would conduct the London Symphony Orchestra at the BBC Proms in two days. After that, we took a private jet to St Moritz, where Gergiev was there for the presentation of some new, fancy, art-related festival. The next day we travelled by car back to Salzburg, where he had another performance of Cellini, the last of the run, and then we took off in another private jet, this time to Vladikavkaz.

Vladikavkaz (in North Ossetia, in the south of Russia) was Gergiev’s hometown. On 1 September 2004, on the traditional first day of school, there was a horrible tragedy in the nearby town of Beslan where terrorists took school children hostage, and they blew up the school gymnasium with all those children inside. It was the third anniversary of that tragedy, and because Gergiev is one of the special sons of Ossetia he went there and spoke at a memorial ceremony.

We finally flew back to Saint Petersburg on the sixth day. I still didn’t get all of my questions answered on that trip but at least I toured five countries in six days!

Operatic Debut

In 2007, shortly after I started working at the Mariinsky Theatre, Gergiev gave me my operatic debut.

It was actually a double debut. The first thing on the calendar was Macbeth. Gergiev had asked me which operas I knew, and I named Macbeth. Gergiev said that he had just fired the usual conductor for Macbeth, but he didn’t want to lose the production so I was given the job. Two weeks later, Gergiev’s secretary called and ask me if I could also conduct the Marriage of Figaro the week before Macbeth. I didn’t really know Le nozze, but I had two months of advance notice, so I could learn it in time. That was my double debut at the Mariinsky.

In the beginning I was employed as an assistant conductor, but at some point Gergiev decided to put me on the staff in a salaried position, because I had been conducting a lot. As an assistant conductor, I got paid per performance, which quickly got expensive, but if I was put on a salary then they can ask me to conduct as much as they wanted. It was fine for me, as I was happy to conduct as much as I could, as much as I thought was appropriate and sometimes even more than I thought was appropriate! You know, if you don’t take risks, you’re not going to get any reward.

Academy of Young Theatre-Goers

CH: You are the co-author of the Mariinsky’s first subscription series for young people – the Academy of Young Theatre-Goers. Did you initiate it? Why did you do that, and did you achieve your goals?

GH:  The series was actually a big success for the Mariinsky Theatre and for me personally as well. It started before Gergiev even hired me. I remember I was at Lincoln Center with him, and he had been the music director of the London Symphony Orchestra for a year already at that point. He was intrigued by their educational outreach programmes, and he wanted to do something similar for the Mariinsky’s newly constructed concert hall.

Fast forward a few months, I wrote him a four-page prospectus on what I thought educational programming could be and put it on his desk. There was no reply for months, and then a year later I hear people saying that the Mariinsky Theatre is bringing back subscription series, complete with an educational section. But when I look at the programme it is the complete opera of Ruslan and Lyudmila!

I knew that is not what Gergiev wanted, so I called an emergency meeting with the administration, and told them Gergiev’s thoughts. I told them that we needed to do the greatest hits of opera and ballet, in order to engage with the young people. If we wanted to do a single opera, we could do highlights or digests in 45 minutes, but we can’t make the kids sit there for 3.5 hours. We need to be interactive, to have someone talk to the children, asking them questions and bringing new ideas to them.

When selecting the repertoire, I purposefully stayed clear of symphonic pieces, and focused exclusively on the Mariinsky’s opera and ballet repertoire. There are many symphonic orchestras already in Saint Petersburg, where they can do all the classics like Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra or Peter and the Wolf. But what they can’t do is Sleeping Beauty, nor can they do Love for Three Oranges for children in 45 minutes. So, we put together a set of greatest ballet hits, I found a narrator to interact with the children, and we also used lighting and costumes. We made a show out of it, and it was very well-received. We even did Wagner’s Ring, with full orchestra onstage, in an hour!

We had a set programme of two years of educational programming. The first year was an introduction to how an opera or ballet works, using the greatest hits of the genre. The next year we did “the magical world of opera and ballet”. All of these were taking place in the concert hall, but at the end of the year they got to go to the historic Mariinsky Theatre, where we gave them a little kid’s gala concert, with opera and ballet. We had all of the best Mariinsky dancers, and as the educational programme was my idea they asked me to conduct the ballet part. I didn’t know how to conduct ballet, so that was my debut in ballet.

Ballet Debut

In most places in the United States, with the exception of our annual Nutcracker tradition, ballet is not a normal thing for a child to grow up and see on a regular basis, but every Russian city has a ballet company. It may be good, it may be bad, but every Russian child has seen Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty and La Bayadère and Giselle. But I’m not from Russia, so when they asked what my ballet repertoire is I could only say The Rite of Spring and Petrouchka.

Having conducted operas before, I knew how to work with singers, but working with dancers was another matter. I knew that it would be something very serious, but I just didn’t know what I needed to concentrate on. A crash course was needed, so they assigned somebody to me, a pianist from the ballet company. All ballet companies have their own special ballet pianists, who play the repertoire and know it backwards and forwards, so I went to one, who saw the list of my programmes and took me to the audio and visual library of the Mariinsky, where they have archival recordings of everything that the theatre has ever done. She put this DVD in and asked me to watch closely. “This is your number. Watch where she jumps. You have to make sure that when she jumps and then she lands, you have to time that with the music. And you see this other dancer, how she’s doing her pirouettes. Hold the music until she finishes the pirouette and does a pose.”

Her advice put me on the right path. Immediately, I understood that the music needs to work with the stage. A lot of the ballet numbers were not great musical numbers but they were fun dance numbers. As a conductor, you weren’t so concerned with the musical phrasing but you wanted to get it right for the stage, because that’s the reason this number exists. These are little choreographic miniatures that are nice for children to see, but it’s not the greatest music you’ve ever heard in your entire life. Instead, I thought that there was a sport element to ballet conducting. Can you see what the dancer is doing, and make the music go bang right where they need it to be? I liked that challenge. It’s almost like somebody was throwing you a ball, and you have to catch the ball and throw it back.

There are a few stages that I had gone through as a ballet conductor. In the beginning, I really wanted to make the music match the stage, but then a few years later, I started to rebel against that. Wait a minute, I thought, why am I always serving the stage? What about the music? What about the composer? As I thought about that, I tried to conduct in ways that may not be too comfortable for the dancers but which I think expressed the music better. But then at some point I realised that music and ballet really have to work together.

The reality is that there are physics on stage. If somebody is jumping, they’re going to go up and they’re going to come down. You can’t just ask them to pause in the air and drink coffee and then come down later. It’s physics, and the music has to work with that. Ultimately, you go through these different phases of understanding about how to conduct ballet and connect that with the reality. As a conductor, you need to make great music but you also need to make great music that they can dance to.

Russian vs French Ballet

CH: What is the difference between Russian and French ballet?

GH: If you talk about the classic answer, it is that there’s a lot of speaking going on in Russian music. Maybe because of my Russian training, I always take a declamatory approach to phrasing, da, da-da, daa-DAA, da-da. In every sentence, there is an inflection about the most important part. You stress a certain part of the sentence and then it comes back. That’s true for all music, but especially true for Russian music, with Tchaikovsky, with Glazunov, with Rachmaninoff, and even with Prokofiev, even though Rachmaninoff is much longer in his phrasing.

In terms of orchestration, the Russian romantics mainly compose in blocks, like blocks of winds, blocks of strings. It becomes more varied later in the 20th century, but for most of the Russian repertoire that I’ve worked with (especially for Tchaikovsky, because there’s so much of his ballet music), it’s very meat and potatoes – it’s beautifully orchestrated, but it’s very solid and very clear. Compare that to the French, for example Sylvia, then immediately the aesthetic is different. You can’t play it with a heavy string sound like in the Russian style, you have to do it with this beautiful panache and elegance.

To best serve the music, you have to speak the musical language of the composer. When people speak a language with a bad accent, it loses an internal logic, and it just doesn’t make any sense, so you really have to be very careful about the language that the composer is speaking, and to speak in an accent that will best help the words and the language come out. If someone makes a beautiful chateaubriand, maybe don’t dump a jar of mayonnaise over the top. Just leave it the way it should be.

Living Composers

CH: Have you worked with many living composers?

GH: I have worked with some. At the New Horizons contemporary music festival at the Mariinsky, I was very fortunate to meet some living composers, like Thomas Adès, who came and conducted some of his own music. I find his language extremely interesting. And then there are also some Russian composers at that festival, like Vladimir Tarnopolski. I conducted the rehearsals for a piece of his called “Foucault’s Pendulum”. It was a really great work, with some Stravinsky elements, but then there are some other more modernistic elements as well.

Working with living composers has its perks. One time in Rotterdam we were doing a performance of a suite that Boris Ivanovich Tishchenko created from his ballet Yaroslavna, and there was this passage where it begins with a weird glissando on the piccolo that nobody could figure out how to do. So, during the break, the piccolo player came into the composer’s rehearsal room and asked the composer how to do that. Tishchenko said, it’s supposed to sound like gagaku, Japanese court music, and they tried some techniques. Eventually, the piccolo player took the instrument off, leaving only a head joint, and she put her hand there and moved her hand away from the joint, creating a glissando. “Yes, that’s what I want!” Sometimes, composers only have an idea but don’t exactly know how to achieve their sound, so it’s always nice if you can ask the composer.

Live Hiccups

CH: Has anything weird or embarrassing happened on stage in your concerts?

GH: There was one time when I was conducting Puccini’s Il trittico, consisting of three one-act operas that are meant to be performed in the same evening. It was my first time conducting it at the Mariinsky, and I was under a lot of pressure. Even though each opera is only one hour long, they are three completely different worlds, and each opera is its own challenge.

The first opera has a watery kind of feel, almost Debussy-esque in the way it circles and undulates back, like water or sand. There was this section where the singer on stage had similar music. He would sing some verses, there would be a musical interlude, and then that same music would come back but with different verses. So, section A, section B, and then section A again, but with different words.

All is well in the performance until he gets to the first section A. There was a moment of lapse, and suddenly he is singing the words from the second section A! I was immediately stressed. Oh my God, what’s going to happen? I knew the music would be fine for another 45 seconds and then it’s going to diverge, and I can’t do anything about it because there is no prompter box for the singer for that production. So, we get to that point in the music, there’s a big fermata in the orchestra, and we are waiting for an upbeat from the singer to continue, and he stops… because he realises that he’s completely in the wrong place.

And then there’s silence. I tried to signal for the orchestra to continue, gave an upbeat, but they didn’t move because they also knew something was wrong. They’re waiting for this word to come from the stage, but there’s no word coming. I was like, oh my God, it’s going to stop in the theatre and it’s going to be my fault and I’m going to be fired. Suddenly, I heard a shout from the wings of the stage, where somebody yelled out the word. The singer goes, “Oh”, he sings the word, and we could finally continue. The opera was smooth afterwards, but at that moment my heart literally stopped. It was so scary.

Another time, I was conducting La Boheme, with a scene in Act 2 where an offstage band has to come in while the pit orchestra is already playing. The responsibility to come in on time falls to the offstage band conductor, who is supposed to listen, count the correct amount of measures, and then follow the drummer.

The problem was that that evening the main conductor of the offstage band was busy on another stage of the Mariinsky Theatre, doing another production, so there was no one really experienced enough to do this important job. They gave this task to the assistant chorusmaster, who only barely got it right in the rehearsal. It is a bit precarious because in the actual performance you can’t hear the band start their music offstage because the entire chorus is singing right in front of you onstage, and you can only hope that everybody’s doing their job properly.

The time arrived at that part of the opera, and I hear this offstage music eventually come through, but it’s somehow not exactly in the right place. They are supposed to play this fanfare three times, with a response from the chorus, but – as far as I was concerned – they stopped after the second time. I tried to cue the chorus in but they wouldn’t come in because they didn’t hear their music the way they expected. The whole theatre was waiting, with only the snare drum drumming along in a torturous solo. After what seemed like an eternity, I just turned to the orchestra and cued them to finish up the last few measures of the act. I was so angry and upset, and it was on my birthday too. It wasn’t my fault. But that’s life.

Conducting Advice

CH: Any advice for anyone who would like to follow your footsteps to be a conductor and music director?

GH: You need to love music very much, more than you love yourself, and you need to understand every aspect of the conductor.

It starts with an excellent conducting technique. You need to have your hands in a form as perfect as possible, so that you can communicate in a clear way to the orchestra. I think of each conducting technique as a tool; if the first tool doesn’t work, you pull out another tool that you think might help. If that still doesn’t work, then you pull out a third one. You need to have a comprehensive toolkit to be able to conduct, and that’s what a good conducting teacher will give you.

The next thing is to learn to communicate, not just your desires of ensemble but also of phrasing and direction. Oftentimes, when a conductor focuses on ensemble, ensemble is the one thing they don’t get. But when you concentrate on direction and on phrasing the ensemble magically just appears, because professional musicians don’t need your help to count time. If you show them where the music is going, they will understand you. It’s scary because you have to relinquish some control over each beat, but that’s a lesson that every conductor eventually needs to learn.

Then there’s also the question of what to communicate. Everything starts with the mind. Your mind and your thoughts really inform everything that you do physically. You can have the greatest hands in the world, the greatest manual technique and muscle reflexes in the world. However, if you don’t have a thought to inform them, there’s no use for them. Nothing great will ever come out of your instrument if you don’t first have a great thought, or at least recognise the composer’s great thought.

So how do we train our thoughts? First, you have to become as high level of a performer as you can be. You really have to be a professional at something. The piano is an incredible instrument because it trains people from a very early age to have the entire sound picture at your fingertips. My instrument is the cello, but every instrument has its advantages and disadvantages. So, learn something, play at the highest level possible, then find a great conducting professor who will work with your hands and put your hands in correspondence with your mind and your ears, so they all start to work together.

Go to as many live performances and rehearsals as possible, and watch how music gets made. Assist a good conductor, not just for putting his name on your resume but because it is a good place to understand how a professional solves problems.

Much of what you’re going to be doing in your professional life is going to be solving musical problems. Not the mechanical problems (which you are expected to solve yourself) but when some sound is not working the way you want you need to know immediately what the problem is and be able to do whatever will make the sound better. You need to have strong harmony and solfege skills. You need to know your musical history. You need to learn to play an instrument extremely well. You don’t have to be Heifetz but you have to be professional. Find a conductor, then go get in front of an orchestra, hopefully under the tutelage of a conducting professor who will help you, because there’s no point conducting your friends who are also playing together for the first time – it will be like the blind leading the blind.

Listening is also an important skill for a conductor. Young conductors often think that they’re supposed to have all the answers, and they often talk when they should listen. But sometimes the problem isn’t for you to solve – it’s for other people to solve as well. But you have to recognise this.

After you’ve mastered listening, then the real challenge begins, which is to both lead and listen at the same time.

Leonid Korchmar once compared conducting to swimming. Imagine that you’re swimming in a stream. The stream has a current that’s going in one direction. You’re swimming and you think everything is great and you stop swimming, and within 15 seconds you realise that you’ve drifted away. You didn’t even notice but the current will sweep you away. So, you never stop swimming ahead. As a conductor, you always have to be leading. Everybody is playing for us, so it’s very easy just to stop conducting and expect that everything’s going great. But, if you do so, then you will be swept away, because you haven’t been swimming along with everybody else. So, always be leading ahead, because that’s what they’re expecting from you.

Next Steps

CH: One last question. Is there anything you want to achieve in the near future?

GH: I’m very much involved in ballet these days. Since leaving the Mariinsky, I have been doing a lot of guest-conducting for ballets, and I’m seeing that some of these organisations really need a music director.

In the ballet world, oftentimes we have to make do with preexisting choreography. Sometimes, it’s a production which already existed, and the theatre might have a history performing this choreography. It might be your first time conducting it, but they might be doing it for 30 years already, maybe even with an established tradition. But not all traditions are necessarily good habits. In some places where they don’t have a music director, sometimes the ballet dictates the tempos of the orchestra, which is absolutely acceptable in many situations but sometimes to the detriment of the music because nobody is challenging the ballet to do this in a different tempo which is better for the music and maybe is very technically possible for the ballet.

A music director would have that power. That doesn’t mean that a music director comes in and destroys the ballet but these are serious conversations that a music director can facilitate. Sometimes, the production starts to suffer and gets a layer of dust on it over many years of what we would call tradition, and it would be good if I could get the chance to do something for some of them. 

Interview written by Chester Leung.