UK Edition
Edward Gardner, interview: 'Opera producers shouldn't fixate on trapping the under-30s'
It’s taken Edward Gardner a surprisingly long time to appear at Covent Garden. But at 44, with his hair elegantly greying, the finest British opera conductor of his generation will command its podium for a new production of Janáček’s tragedy Katya Kabanova.
What may make this event more broadly significant is that Gardner could well be the man to succeed Antonio Pappano if his two-decade reign as music director of the Royal Opera concludes when his present contract expires in 2023.
I certainly hope Pappano will hand on the baton, and as things stand, Gardner would get my vote – not only because he has the wide experience and the personal qualities, but also because, as his mentor Sir Mark Elder succinctly puts it, “he is a very natural musician and unafraid of challenges”.
What has held him back from Covent Garden? Partly his total commitment to English National Opera, where he was music director between 2007 and 2015; partly the erasure of a number of projects that had been pencilled in; and partly waiting patiently for the stars to be aligned. That moment has come, he feels. “Working on this masterpiece with a director like Richard Jones and a fabulous cast in which the two lead singers are also making their debuts – it can’t get better than that.”
But he is not a scheming careerist or a back-stabber, and when asked bluntly if he’d want to take over, he answers candidly. “I would love another big opera-house job at some point in the future, but there isn’t any specific one I’m aiming at. All I will say is that when I was at ENO, Tony Pappano was my inspiration – a model for how a music director should lead from the absolute centre of the organisation.”
The subtext of this is that it wasn’t quite like that for him at ENO, where despite his superb musical leadership, the organisation seemed in a permanent financial and managerial crisis that led the Arts Council to put it into “special measures”.
Gardner is diplomatic. “The most positive aspect of my time there was the development of the orchestra. We made many new appointments and worked incredibly hard over a wide range of repertory. When I went back to the Coliseum last autumn to hear Salome, in all objectivity, I thought they sounded world-class. As for the other things, let’s just say that I tried to get involved in the problems offstage, but they were impenetrable, and if I do a job like that again, I will make sure that the status of the music director is as high as it needed to be, on an equal footing with the executive and management.”
Things run much more smoothly now he is happily based in Norway, where he is chief conductor of the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra on a contract running until 2021. Unlike the screaming maestros of hoary legend, Gardner’s relationship with orchestral personnel always aims at the collegiate. “But I’m not unusual in that respect: that sort of approach is just typical of my generation. You don’t need to shout to exert authority. Raising your eyebrows should be enough to register irritation or frustration.” Does he count players among his personal friends? “Several of them yes … but they know not to exploit that and they accept that once I’m on the podium, I’m in charge and it’s different.”
Gardner is especially valued because of his readiness to collaborate with directors. He has a keen interest in theatre, and in the words of Deborah Warner, who has worked with him on Fidelio, Eugene Onegin and Death in Venice, “he is passionately enthusiastic about everything that happens on the stage and understands the central balance between music and drama. This isn’t an attitude that melts as the orchestra approaches, but one that intensifies and deepens. He knows that the music will improve if the stage improves and vice versa.”
Will that magic be sprinkled over Katya Kabanova at Covent Garden? The omens are promising: Gardner is bursting with admiration for Jones, delighted with the responsiveness of the house orchestra and deeply engaged with an opera of stunning emotional impact, focused on a young woman desperate to escape from a dead marriage and social isolation.
“Once one understands that Janáček was obsessed with Madama Butterfly, a lot of things about its terrible underlying sadness fall into place – which doesn’t mean it should sound like Puccini. Janáček also shares something with Berlioz, in that his scores don’t seem to sit within the confines of five-barline notation. I’m telling the orchestra that they can’t just play from what it looks like on the page – they have to imagine it too.” Katya is also a piece he believes will have appeal beyond the hardcore of opera fans. “I’d recommend it as an entry-point to my theatre-going friends. I’m not sure I’d do that if it was The Marriage of Figaro.”
What else is needed to diversify and enliven an opera audience that tends to come largely from a middle class no longer in the first flush of youth? “There are so many different kinds of problem. I think there is over-fixation on the idea of trapping the under-30s: Nicola Benedetti said recently that it was very ageist, and she’s right. There are too many productions staged by people who are bored with the piece in question and just want to do something different with it for the sake of difference. And so many people nowadays are used to hearing music processed through headphones and microphones that their ears just don’t understand non-amplified acoustic sound – the glory of a single voice riding over a Strauss orchestra.”
On the vexed question of surtitles and opera in English (recently raised by fellow conductor Mark Wigglesworth, who suggested that a preference for opera in the original language was snobbish), he is ambivalent. “I love the immediacy you get from doing opera in English, and I wish there was some way we could finesse the timing of surtitles. But there is also something beautiful about hearing the nuances of the original, especially in French and Italian. There’s so much difference between the sound of a chorus singing ‘Sì’ and a chorus singing ‘Yes’. So for me, it’s a case by case thing.” Katya Kabanova is being performed in Czech: “I don’t regret that.”
Such is his consuming dedication to his profession, Gardner hasn’t always found his personal life easy. But he’s not an obsessive musical nerd: he keeps apace of the theatre and books, and he’s delighted his nine-year-old son Charlie (by the trumpeter Alison Balsom, from whom he is separated) shares his enthusiasm for cricket. “We’re hoping to go to India together to indulge.”
What he is most grateful for at this point is a long solid apprenticeship, which involved a superb musical education at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, followed by several years assisting such great senior figures as Elder. “I learnt so much and I hope to go on learning. I couldn’t have coped with being shot suddenly to the top. I prefer to feel that I’ve been getting steadily better.”
Katya Kabanova is at the Royal Opera House, WC2 until Feb 26. Call 0207 304 4000 or visit Telegraph Tickets