12 minute read
The Interview
Vivek Raman (2016-21) talks to Herbert von Karajan Young Conductor Award Winner Joel Sandelson
(2007-12)
In January, I met Joel Sandelson in the Wathen Hall, after his prestigious win of the Herbert von Karajan Young Conductors Award, Salzburg Festival 2021. I wanted to gain an insight both into the world of conducting and professional music, but also to hear about his grasp and understanding of music, which I found to be deeper and more profound than I could have imagined.
I started by asking about his hobbies other than music. He argues that “music, as a rule, expands to fill your whole life, but I’ve always been very interested in literature.” He is interested in the relationship between “music and the other arts generally”, arguing that music “feeds off” other arts, concluding that the “broad education” that you receive at St Paul’s contributes most significantly to growth as a musician. We talked about his professional life – he is now a conductor working in the UK and Europe, but he “started off as a cellist”, which was the “foundation of my musicianship”. He was in the final of BBC Young Musician of the Year and says that it is “really important to have that bedrock of playing an instrument to a really high level as a conductor”. He started conducting just before university, when Mr Stratford, a piano teacher at St Paul’s asked him to conduct a wind octet – this was “the first time I had properly conducted”. He felt that conducting fulfilled his need for a “bigger canvas than the cello” and that it “really synthesises performing with standing back and reflecting about music”. This year he leads various major orchestras around Europe, including the Philharmonia, Vienna Radio Symphony, Staatsorchester Stuttgart, and several orchestras in the Netherlands.
We went on to discuss the Salzburg Festival Award in more depth, where I learnt that 250 people entered and it was narrowed down to eight semi-finalists. Joel explained that the semi-final involved rehearsing an orchestra for 30 minutes before a jury. Three competitors were then chosen for the final and each had a concert in the main festival last summer, with the Camerata Salzburg. He said this stage of the competition was “really nice, because I could choose my own programme, within limits” – he chose “one of the famous later Mozart symphonies”. The prize was some money and a concert with the Vienna Radio Symphony this summer, but “more informally, the recognition that it brought me means that opportunities of guest conducting have opened up – it was a big boost.”
We then began talking more broadly about music, in particular the relationship between music and literature which particularly intrigued me, as a student of both. He commented that “music is too often thought of as outside the cultural mainstream. It is a slight outsider in the humanities. But music has a really central place in the history of ideas, art and culture generally.” Upon discussion of opera, he notes that he is “more interested in musical meaning and opera sometimes feels like it is giving you an excuse not to think about that. Music without a text does not constrict its meaning, it opens it up, only limited by your imagination.” He thinks that there are broad parallels between the evolution of literature and music, especially apparent from the 18th century. “You can think about the rise of the novel in the 18th century, and simultaneously in music, you begin to get a sense of linear time and a sense of perspective, almost like the depth of perspective in visual art. I am also particularly interested in early modernism, and how writers and composers began to find new ways of representing perception”.
I next decided to quote Professor Mark Bailey, former High Master, from Joel’s Valedictory Report, “every now and then, even a special place encounters a very special talent”. We start to discuss the impact the School had on Joel’s growth as a musician. He explains that he is “very grateful for everything that St Paul’s gave me. The main benefit of going to a school like St Paul’s is getting that rounded education, because it is quite easy as a musician to be somewhat insular, and the more well-rounded you can be, the more meaningful music becomes, so just being in a climate where people were interested in ideas and broader concerns was very important.” He remembers Robin Wedderburn, whose “off-hand comments about music” would “open up new perspectives”; Tom Evans, who helped Joel look at “serious music theory” and Ryan Hepburn, whose passion for American minimalism and Steve Reich led to an “enormous concert” performed for Reich himself, who gave a masterclass at School. “A legendary event”, according to Joel. He calls Hepburn’s “love of that repertoire … infectious and inspirational”. His best memory was “playing the Elgar Cello concerto with the orchestra in the
Upper 8th” which was “probably the culmination of all the performing I did at St Paul’s”. He remarks that he “came into school every day for 5 years at quarter past seven to practise, so to finish my time here with a big concerto in the hall was special.”
I asked Joel what advice he would give a 4th Form Pauline who was eager to become a professional musician. “Don’t specialise too early. I think school is the time to be trying lots of different things and throwing yourself into whatever opportunities come up. Go to lots of concerts – we are in one of the best and busiest musical capitals in the world. Have a go at conducting, composing, listening, just immersing yourself in it. It is not an easy life, but I would go for it, with your eyes open.”
I acknowledge that some readers, like me, may not be particularly well-versed in what Joel terms “the Classical Canon”, and so I inquired about some of his favourite composers and modern artists and asked for some recommendations for those wanting to gain more of an appreciation of classical music. Surprisingly, he does not “ever listen to any music that wouldn’t be defined as art music or classical music”, which he notes is “quite rare amongst musicians”. He puts this down to “a lack of understanding” rather than “any sense of dislike or disdain”. Many of his colleagues love jazz, “something that’s quite different but also really interesting and rather complex”, but he argues that “what we call classical music is really 800 years’ worth of culture, so even just listening seriously to all of that takes several lifetimes, so he “just doesn’t have time”. The Canon, he says, has “sheer variety and diversity that you would find among a dozen popular, contemporary genres – it is a huge space to explore”. However, he does suggest that “there is probably no more exciting place to start listening than the late 19th, early 20th century apex of the symphonic tradition – Mahler, Sibelius, Strauss and even Elgar, Bruckner, as well as early modernists like Stravinsky and Debussy. Don’t be put off if you feel you don’t understand anything about it. You just have to dive in and experience it.”
I was particularly struck by his word “understand”, so I probed deeper, asking whether one can ever fully “understand” music in a philosophical sense. “No”, he answers, “but there are as many ways of understanding music as there are listeners, and there are as many paradigms of understanding as there are interpreters. The more time you spend with music, and the more you learn about it, whatever form that takes, in general, the more rewarding that gets. Imagination is what music depends on for its meaning, so it doesn’t really matter what imagination you have – everyone has a different imagination – but you need to bring something to it to get something out of it.”
I also asked a question that I am sure many have pondered when attending a concert or opera; what is the role of the conductor? Surely, one interpretation of one Rachmaninov concerto cannot be too dissimilar to another. Joel refutes this, insisting that “there are as many ways of understanding conducting as there are conductors – it depends on what you as an individual bring to it.” On the surface, conductors simply “oversee how the orchestra plays, bringing everyone together, making sure they’re all playing in the same way, correcting mistakes, making sure the orchestra as a machine is functioning properly.” However, with professional orchestras, these issues largely come pre-resolved, so the art of conducting has more “nuance”. These orchestras look for someone “who can really get under the skin of the music, bring it to life in a particularly vivid way. The way you do that is by influencing the sound of the orchestra – the energy, rhythm, balance, articulation and all the other tools that we have at our disposal. Through those things, you are answering much bigger questions about the music. You’re thinking about the structure of the music, the style and the expression.” He implores those who are still “mystified by conducting” to “go to different concerts or listen to different recordings and get a sense of the various atmospheres in a concert hall with different conductors, and the details you hear in different recordings of the same piece. That’s the kind of difference at a professional level that you can make.”
His argument, though clear, is essentially founded on the basis that a conductor
Joel at the Salzburg Festival 2021
must have excellent musicianship, and as a piano teacher, I wondered whether you can teach this quality. “You have to inspire a love of music in whoever you are teaching”, he answers, “for students to be able to figure it out for themselves. You can teach a technique that is capable of expression. As a cellist, you can teach people, if they work hard enough at it, to find different sounds in the right hand, different kinds of vibrato, and how to shift in a certain way, but you can’t necessarily teach the inner understanding of music – that is a personal journey.”
We then moved on to Joel’s “personal journey” and his goals for the next ten years. He has “ambition”. He does “want to have an orchestra of my own, be a chief conductor of an orchestra in the next few years.” What he really wants to do is “to find orchestras that share what I want to do with the music, and who are open to ideas and are versatile. Conducting is something that you really have to teach yourself and you never stop developing, and I want to explore a lot of different repertoire.” He is interested in composition, but is self-deprecatory, admitting he has “no ability or talent for it at all, and sometimes it is hard enough to understand someone else’s music, so it’s not really the way my mind ends up working.”
I closed the interview by posing the questions from the BBC radio show Desert Island Discs but limit Joel to five discs. Joel’s records were “The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky because it’s probably the most miraculous piece that I can think of, in the sense that you just can’t believe that one person could have the idea for a piece like that and then also realise it in such detail – it is just completely mind-boggling and revolutionary.
Daphnis et Chloë, the ballet by Ravel, which is hard to listen to structurally without the ballet, because it can kind of feel like there is a story going on that you cannot really grasp, but it is just the most sensual piece of music I can think of, and the detail of the surface combined with the richness of the harmony is just unique.
Symphony No.9 by Mahler – this is Joyce, Woolf, Seurat, all these modernists, feeding into this huge 80-minute symphony. It takes the archetype of a late romantic symphony but really challenges it in very interesting ways and questions the coherence that the symphony in general is built on. And the last movement is the most beautiful and other-worldly piece of music”.
He then asks for “a CD with the last three Mozart symphonies”, justifying picking what are ostensibly three pieces of music through Nicholas Harnoncourt’s “theory that they form one big work”. “He wrote them very close together”, he explains, “and the first one has this big, grand opening and the last one has a very complicated finale. They could form one big trilogy. Mozart took the symphony single-handedly from being a sort of trivial curtain raiser that you played at the beginning of an opera, to where Beethoven took it afterwards – he took it to being the prestige genre of instrumental music, and that achievement is incredible.”
His final record is Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich a tribute to Ryan Hepburn and his time at St Paul’s. “The minimalists came along in the 60s and 70s, in a climate of very thorny modernism, and completely swept away all our assumptions about music, and Music for 18 Musicians is a piece that really challenges your sense of time passing when you listen to it. It’s so repetitive, but it doesn’t sound like it – it is just leading you through its structure. Listening to it can be a very profound experience.”
His book is Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky, and his luxury item “would be a cricket bat and bowling machine.”
To quote from Joel’s chosen author, “The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for”, and it seems Joel has found just that. For me, this was a fascinating interview that was perhaps more educational in terms of comprehending music than any of my Music studies.
