John Storgårds Q&A

ACO: The music on this program will be unfamiliar to most people. What can they expect?

John Storgårds: This surely is a program of broadly unfamiliar pieces (or even composers, except Lutoslawski and of course Sibelius), but absolutely something to come and listen to. The audience can expect a nice bouquet of wonderfully colourful, communicating and exciting music of (more or less) our times.

Some audiences might approach a program of contemporary music a little nervously. What would you say to them to allay their fears? Why is it important that they hear this music?

The only important thing is to relax and open your ears. There is nothing to be afraid of in this program, also if many of the composers´ names might be totally unfamiliar and hard to pronounce… all the compositions are full of life and beauty in their own ways. And I do think there is always an important point in giving yourself a chance to listen to something you haven’t heard before, as the world is overfull of familiar music and too many boring ways of approaching it, both as a listener and sometimes performer.

What links these works together?

There is a sense of almost hypnotically rhythmical ‘flow’ in both the minimalistic piece by Juozapaitis and in the bigger Hämeenniemi work, with its improvisational elements and influences from India. Interspace by the Japanese composer Ichiyanagi is in this program concept exactly what the title of it says, as I think in a beautiful way, and the great Lutoslawski work simply has everything in itself, in an absolutely gripping and most communicative way. The little Sibelius piece at the end functions actually already as a nice traditional encore.

Eero Hämmenniemi’s Chamber Concerto instructs the soloist (and at one point the whole orchestra) to improvise. Is this confronting for a classically-trained musician? How do you approach pieces like this?

First of all I think classically-trained musicians – as any possible musicians – should definitely have a natural ability to improvise, with or without ‘composed’ rules. Something goes totally wrong in such classical education which takes this kind of music making away from you, and sadly this is still often exactly what happens in too many kinds of ‘serious classical education’. If you look at the history of classical music, improvisation has always been a major part of it all, except for some sequences of the 19th and 20th centuries. My Finnish close colleague Eero Hämeenniemi gives certain rules and scales to elaborate with for the improvisational parts of his Chamber Concerto, as does also Lutoslawski in Preludes and Fugue in a slightly more controlled way! Actually Hämeenniemi advises (in the score) that finally the answer to all questions of “am I allowed to?” is “Yes, you are.”

What inspired you to become a conductor? How is the experience of conducting different to being a violin soloist?

I feel myself as a fullblood-musician, and that’s what I want to stay for the future too. Conducting is nowadays a big bit of it all, but this definitely also goes for playing, especially as a chamber musician. Being a soloist is not that important, but I enjoy it as long as it feels possible to do it on top level. I never planned to become a conductor, it really just happened little by little, and when it did, I also went through serious studies in that field, not wanting to become one of all these great instrumentalists who are conducting as bad amateurs, no matter how interesting they are musically. Now I feel that I’m still developing both as a violinist and as a conductor, on proper grounds, and, above all, being a musician.

There are 30 professional orchestras in Finland (pop. 5.3 million), in Australia (pop. 20 million) there are nine. What can Australia learn from Finland about creating a more vibrant musical culture?

I don’t know enough of the differences between Finnish and Australian music education to really answer this. I do think that Finland really has achieved a lot of wonderful and high level things in the music field, as a result of effective education systems and also in some great individuals. But I’m as worried about the future there as anywhere, because of the increasing stupidity and overall wrong priority thinking among top politicians and media of today. Rebelliousness among artists, musicians, writers, intellectuals and any independently thinking people is as much needed today as ever!