Picking up the baton

Diane Nottle

• Last Updated: October 21. 2009 4:20PM UAE / October 21. 2009 12:20PM GMT

Alan Gilbert, pictured at Carnegie Hall, is the latest in a long line of visionary music directors at the New York Philharmonic. Chris Lee / AP Photo

Shortly before 10am on September 16, Alan Gilbert quietly wove his way through the New York Philharmonic’s musicians, who were assembling on stage for an open rehearsal at the Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall. Dressed in a black polo shirt and slacks, he was barely noticeable until first a trickle, then a torrent of applause from the audience made it clear that he had arrived. As he approached the podium, he looked out into the hall, grinned and raised his hands at his sides, palms up, as if to say: “Hey, can you believe this?”

Not quite 10 hours later, Gilbert took the stage again, this time in white tie, and headed straight for the podium to make his debut as the Philharmonic’s 25th music director. In the two-hour gala opening-night concert that followed – featuring Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, Messiaen songs and a world premiere by Magnus Lindberg, the orchestra’s composer in residence – he looked every inch the maestro: a genial host, yet fully in command.

“The thing that was gratifying, and a little surprising is that I was actually able to enjoy it,” he recalls. “It was an unusual run of concerts and events that we had, and what I tried to do leading up to it was to be as well prepared as possible, so I could focus on what was happening.

“I didn’t think anything special about the concert while it was happening. It wasn’t that I was able to step out of myself and feel a certain way. I didn’t have ideas going through my head, like, ‘Oh, wow, this is the first night, there are 150 media people in the audience.’ None of that even entered my head, and that was a good thing.”

These days it is not easy to catch up with Gilbert. When he finally found time for an interview after conducting 11 New York-area concerts in less than three weeks, it took place not in his office suite at Avery Fisher, but by mobile phone from a hotel room in Seoul, South Korea.

The orchestra had just landed there for the second stop on its five-city Asian Horizons tour, after three concerts in Tokyo. The final stop brings the Philharmonic to Abu Dhabi and Al Ain this week for two performances presented by the Abu Dhabi Classics series. On the programme for Friday’s concert at the Emirates Palace auditorium, are Mahler’s Symphony No 1 (Titan) and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 4, with Emanuel Ax as soloist. Saturday’s concert at Al Jahili Fort in Al Ain consists of Beethoven’s Symphony No 7 and the Brahms Violin Concerto, with the German violinist Frank Peter Zimmermann.

What people tend to notice first about Gilbert can be summed up by a comment overheard after a New York concert. “He’s so young! I think he’s only 42!” exclaimed a woman decades past that. He is in fact 42, and a boyish 42 at that. Generationally, he stands somewhere between Gustavo Dudamel, the 28-year-old Venezuelan who took over the Los Angeles Philharmonic this month, and his two immediate predecessors, Kurt Masur and Lorin Maazel, who led the Philharmonic well into their seventies. Gilbert follows a long and celebrated line of music directors, among them Gustav Mahler, Arturo Toscanini, Bruno Walter, Leopold Stokowski, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Leonard Bernstein, George Szell, Pierre Boulez and Zubin Mehta.

“The greying of the audience” worries every classical-arts presenter in New York. Was Gilbert’s relative youth a determining factor in his hiring as music director? “No, not at all,” the Philharmonic’s president and executive director, Zarin Mehta, empathically stated by telephone from the Singapore stop on the tour. “He’s an extraordinarily fine, detailed, in-depth musician. He has great technique and evident leadership qualities – all things we look for in a great conductor. We had absolutely no qualms when the time came to go after him; everybody said, ‘Go for it.’ It was a happy choice, and after three weeks in New York and two weeks on tour, boy, did we make the right decision. Or I should say he did.”

That said, Mehta added: “The fact of his age, that he’s younger, does give him a perspective that’s very enlightening.”

Gilbert is still very much in his honeymoon period, and reviews have been generally positive. In New York, a city where everybody is a critic, the worst I’ve heard about him came from one not-so-grey concertgoer: “His arrogance is on behalf of the music, not himself.” And that sounded like a compliment.

Gilbert’s résumé reads like a recipe for success. Education: the Ivy-League-prep school Ethical Culture Fieldston in New York; Harvard; the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, a leading conservatory; the Juilliard School. Professional experience: chief conductor and artistic adviser of the Royal Stockholm Orchestra; principal guest conductor of the NDR Symphony Orchestra in Hamburg, Germany; first music director of the Santa Fe Opera in New Mexico. Before his appointment in 2007, he had guest-conducted the Philharmonic on more than a dozen programmes. This autumn he also took the first William Schuman Chair in Musical Studies at Juilliard.

But perhaps his most important step in preparing for a career as a conductor was to be born to two Philharmonic violinists, Michael Gilbert (now retired) and Yoko Takebe. “It’s a bit ridiculous, actually – we all play the violin; my father’s father played violin,” he said. His sister, Jennifer Gilbert, is concertmaster of the Orchestre National de Lyon in France.

“I’ve been lucky that I’ve been around music so much for my whole life… I’ve grown up not only in a musical family, but a family of orchestral musicians. I’ve been able to play violin in Philadelphia and spend time around the Boston Symphony. I’ve gotten a true firsthand feeling of how orchestra musicians approach their jobs. Having that kind of ability to identify with musicians in the orchestra comes from having lived it. It’s nothing you can just invent.”

In preparing for a specific performance, he said: “I try to get to a point where I kind of have a test for myself. I open the score randomly, to any page, and make sure that any point in the music that I accidentally come upon immediately provokes a -visceral and powerful reaction about how it should go, how it should feel. If it’s a score I’m not ready to conduct, sometimes I’ll open it and get no impression. I don’t even know where in the piece I am.

“Finally, you have a sense of how you want the music to go, literally every moment. When you get to that point, where it’s possible for the music to unfold naturally, you almost don’t have consciousness of how your body moves. When I know a piece well, it just inevitably flows.”

Case in point: Mahler’s hour-and-45-minute Third Symphony, which he conducted in his second subscription programme without a score. “I’m lucky I can conduct a lot of pieces without a score,” he said. “I don’t make myself do it. I’ve spent a lot of time with that score. It’s an enormous effort, since it’s so much about form, the long arc.” He also likes “the contact I have with the musicians” when working without a score.

Gilbert’s initial contract is for five years, but his vision for the orchestra goes beyond that. “There are some projects whose trajectory will certainly span longer than that,” he said. “I would say that, at the meetings we have to discuss the future of the orchestra, probably the most time is spent on the next year or two; we have to decide what we’re going to play and get all the details in place. The farther away you get, the more philosophical you become.”

“I don’t walk around thinking I have a programming philosophy,” he added. “Programming is one of the important ways this orchestra can provide a human experience for audiences. What I like to do is make programmes that are consciously created to produce the best possible context for a piece. That can mean a lot of things: providing a contrast, or pointing up similarities, or showing how the music historically developed over time. Some programmes can have a theme, or a name. The point is to be sure that we never programme by accident, or just because we think people want to hear Beethoven, so we put Beethoven on the programme. We should play Beethoven. He composed some of the greatest orchestral music ever written.” But that’s not necessarily enough. The same applies to guest artists. “Some will say, ‘I’m only playing the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2 this season.’ That may work, but it has to come into the organic conception of the entire programme. It’s a little bit of a new way for our guest artists to think, but the kind of guest artists I want to have are all interested.”

Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony was on the programme for the last Tokyo concert, on October 10, along with Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. “Throughout this music, the orchestra was playing with incredible refinement, detailed sculpting of phrasing,” he said. “I was really blown away. A lot of the musicians came offstage saying it had been really fantastic. That’s the best possible thing I could have heard from the musicians. It’s really what it’s all about.”

If programming for the Asian Horizons tour seems heavy on the Romantic and the Germanic, there are reasons. “There are so many factors when you programme anything, really, but especially tours,” Gilbert said. “You want some pieces you’re prepared to play; this is music that has been done in the period leading up to the tour. You also have to consider what the presenter has this year, what other orchestras have played or are about to, what the soloists are prepared to play.”

Gilbert is sharing his broad knowledge of the repertoire with audiences. Echoing Bernstein in the 1950s, he has added two Young People’s Concerts With Members of the New York Philharmonic to the tour schedule, introducing children in Asia and the Middle East to European classical music. “We just did a hugely successful one in Tokyo,” he said. “The kids were incredibly concentrated. Whenever possible when we tour, we dig a little below the surface. Symphonie Fantastique [performed at the Tokyo Young People’s Concert] is fantastic, but is it possible to make it even more moving?” The Abu Dhabi Young People’s Concert, at the Emirates Palace auditorium on Saturday at 11am, will present music of Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn, conducted by Daniel Boico.

In New York, Gilbert broke recent precedent by giving short introductions to two works, Arnold Schoenberg’s late-Romantic, pre-12-tone Pelleas und Melisande and Lindberg’s EXPO – a taste of Young People’s Concerts for audiences who are less young and, in many cases, have considerable knowledge of classical music. His remarks displayed spontaneity and a sense of humour. Relating a Schoenberg theme to one in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, he said: “It’s not important for you to know that, but you can put it in your back pocket.” A bit later, his tongue slipped when he said, “Now we’re going into Pelleas,” and the audience settled in, thinking the piece was about to start, while he actually meant the character’s leitmotif. “You’re going to have to sit still for a little longer,” he said.

“I don’t know if this falls under the rubric of educational outreach,” Gilbert said of his talks, “but I like to speak to audiences when I feel this kind of contact will help the audience’s perception and understanding. For EXPO, a brand-new piece performed with the composer present, it seemed obvious.” He said the feedback he had received on the talks was “95 per cent positive”.

“Over the last two years since I was appointed, I’ve spoken to a lot of people – professionals in business, audiences – and gotten a lot of suggestions about what I can do, ways I can serve, that they think would be interesting,” he said.

“The number-one comment and request I’ve gotten is that they would like to hear conductors of concerts speaking more.” He agrees with the rare dissenter that the music should be able to speak for itself. “I can’t say it’s something that needs to happen for an audience to understand what’s going on,” he said. “I don’t claim to have the answer to how a concert should go. But if people don’t like the talks, they’re not telling me. New Yorkers go ahead and tell you what they think. I get a feeling a lot of people like it.”

He had not, to date, spoken to tour audiences except to introduce -encores, although he certainly could have done so in Tokyo. He has never lived in Japan, but his parents made a point of taking the children to his mother’s homeland nearly every summer. He learnt the language while growing up, later studied it in college and refined his knowledge on many working visits over the last 16 years. It was “an amazing experience,” he said, to begin his first tour as music director there, “partly because I’m half-Japanese, partly because I’ve played so many concerts there. The Japanese audiences – whom I think I know very well – were unusually excited and vocal. It makes the orchestra feel happy as well”.

He did not have a chance to scout the Abu Dhabi and Al Ain venues before the tour, although he did travel to Hanoi, the third stop, to check out the Opera House, whose proportions are very different from the classic shoebox-shaped hall at Avery Fisher. The Philharmonic’s debuts in Vietnam and the Emirates follow its groundbreaking 2008 trip to Pyongyang under Maazel, when it became the first American orchestra to perform in North Korea; the concert drew worldwide notice as a possible first step toward improving strained relations between the two countries. This month, the Philharmonic lost another opportunity to practise diplomacy: it cancelled an impending trip to Cuba after the US Treasury Department refused to allow the 150 donors financing the trip to travel with the orchestra.

“We worked very hard to try to make it work,” Gilbert said. “It was so close to happening, but it finally became a diplomatic and political impediment. It seems a shame – it would have been a very meaningful connection. Perhaps music really does transcend borders. It’s really time for this relationship to happen.”

When the orchestra returns home from its tour, Gilbert will turn it over to guest conductors in November.

So, what will he do with all his free time? “It’s not even close to free,” he said. First, the Havana concerts have been replaced by three in New York with Emanuel Ax as piano soloist and Gilbert picking up his violin for Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E-flat major. There are the administrative tasks and paperwork that follow a music director everywhere, even onto a plane from Tokyo to Seoul. There is his sister’s wedding in November. And there is a two-week engagement in Hamburg, where he will conduct the NDR Symphony and perform in Bach’s Double Violin Concerto.

None of this should come as a surprise. After all, Gilbert was back onstage at 9.45 the morning after the gala to rehearse Mahler’s Third -Symphony, which he would conduct that night – without a score.