Interview: Mark Elder of The Hallé Orchestra

I don’t think there is now. The Halle - which is the only orchestra in the world named after its founder - was the first professional symphony orchestra and that was more than 150 years ago. Way before any other orchestra was founded in London. During World War II the Halle disbanded, the business of putting it together afterwards fell to John Barbirolli. There are thousands of people all over the world, not just in Britain, who were introduced to ‘classical music’ by Barbirolli’s recordings. Before I came, at the end of last century - if I can put it that way - the Halle nearly went under and there was a sense of real tragedy for many people. 

 

The Royal Concert Hall, as I never tire of saying, is one of the great jewels of our country. It needs a bit of paint and some love, when the money can be found, but it’s got a marvelous audience and a wonderful acoustic. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra were resident prior to us, but when the management wanted a new regime, it appeared to us that it would be a wonderful chance to have a base away from Manchester that wasn’t London. We wanted to develop something with the concert organiser in the hall and the with the public. 

 

I believe an orchestra is a very creative part of a community. That should go way beyond trying to sell tickets. We have a responsibility to bring music, enthusiasm and passion to the next generations. If you can get children young enough, you can excite them by the experience of live music. In my experience, children have music in them naturally, and it’s up to the primary school level of teaching to awaken this and show them their own creativity. All these things, as we know now, improve their work in other, non-musical fields. 

 

It’s also reminiscent of Leonard Bernstein, who did these television programmes called The Joy of Music. He made an enormous impact on America by the way he communicated his passion and, knowledge for music. He opened people’s ears and hearts, and I’m just trying to do that in my way. I’m the only British conductor of an English symphony orchestra, which is very significant. I teach and am very interested in helping young conductors to have the best chance they can to get started. One of the things that I’ve done since coming to Manchester is to insist on there being an assistant conductor, who changes every two to three years. 

 

Last year we started doing one of our concerts on a Wednesday afternoon - people actually quite like the idea of a concert in the afternoon, rather than the evening. We’re experimenting with the orchestra just wearing suits to those concerts, and a lot of people think it’s a good idea, a few don’t. But you can’t achieve anything without people being ruffled. I’m also the only music director in the country who takes the whole orchestra into schools. We do that a couple of times a year and entertain kids who have never seen a symphony orchestra, and certainly never seen one in their school. Their reaction is amazing -  really exciting.

 

Hours and hours. Sometimes these hours happen a month before the first rehearsal, sometimes a week before, and sometimes they happen twenty years before. Sometimes when you’re young, you don’t have the possibility of conducting as much as you’d like but you’re absorbing music all the time. You have to if you want to be a conductor. There are many pieces that I now conduct with the Halle, that I have thought about for thirty years. On some level or other these pieces live in you, I call that marinating. You have to have thought about it, you have to have absorbed it to the point that you know how you want to conduct it. 

 

Each concert has a different set of qualities attached to it. It depends what series it’s part of or which orchestra I’m with. Very often I propose a programme and they say, “You can’t do that piece because we’re going to do it next year, or we did it last year.” You have to negotiate, but it’s very important that the repertoire you conduct is one that really believe in. If you don’t, it can’t go well because you’ll feel it’s music that was forced on you. 

 

It’s difficult to answer that. I love Wagner’s music. I love the process of getting an orchestra to play it beautifully. When you have good singers, it’s one of the most fulfilling things a conductor can do. I’ve conducted The Ring, but never as a cycle, and there’s one opera, Siegfried, that I’ve never conducted. So, I would love to be able to finish The Ring, and do the four operas in a week. That, for me, would be an incredible opportunity. 

 

No. I wouldn’t retire from it because it was something that was given to me when I was born. It’s a part of the tiny baby that I was, and gradually the years of my growing up revealed that to me, so by the time I was a young adolescent I knew that somehow or other I had to spend my life and earn my living through being a musician. 

 

It’s deeply related to your development as a human being. I think about this a great deal, about how a human being is able to draw from an orchestra an interpretation that I feel deeply inside me. I’m still conducting pieces I’ve never conducted before. I might be conducting a piece I haven’t done in twenty years, but now I’ve got twenty years more experience inside my soul, but you need to restudy this piece in the light of all that, to make sure that what you do now is better than what you did before. Although words play a part in the process, in the performance you have to do it without speaking and the idea that a conductor’s gestures can influence the way people breathe, the way they feel relaxed or not, their own ability to trust their own talent, that all can be influenced by a conductor. And the more experience, and hopefully wisdom, that you acquire, the more you are able to impart that to the people that are making music with you. You need their trust and you must trust them, and you need to help them to take wing. 

 

I enjoy other forms of creative work, witnessing other people’s disciplines: II love looking at pictures and sculpture, I love going to theatre, I adore the cinema, much more than going to an opera. An opera performance or a concert is so bound up in work... I love walking, going up onto the Downs. 

 

It is indeed. It’s the concentration that’s so demanding, you need to clear your mind before you get on with the next project. I love reading, modern novels particularly. 

 

You don’t need to know anything at all about music to get some excitement from it. Have confidence that whatever you hear or feel in the music is right, everybody takes different emotional responses away from a concert. The experience of a live concert has no equal; witnessing people sharing in musical expression and turning on an audience is something immediate that can’t be reproduced. What were doing - me and the orchestra together - is to create a living organism of different parts and temperaments, where everyone’s talents come together in order to make something better than all of us. When a football team plays really well, you get that feeling, and when they play badly, it’s upsetting. Manchester United, please note. But when an orchestra plays badly it’s horrible because there’s no harmony, no balance, no beauty. But when they play well together and they really send the music out, it’s gorgeous, it’s thrilling.