BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
Are you a young muso living in Queensland? Get this – the Queensland Symphony Orchestra wants you to rock up for a workshop and performance.
For a weekend in October you could be a part of the QSO Community Orchestra led by internationally renowned conductor Jessica Cottis. Cottis talks us through what you’ll get out of taking part in the experience.
If you’re too pumped to continue, register for the program here – but come back for a read once your name is down to learn about Jessica’s own experiences and prepare for what lies ahead.
This is a fantastic opportunity for young musicians to perform with a professional orchestra. What was the best opportunity you were given when you were emerging?
The biggest life-changing opportunity for me actually happened at the very start of my conducting career. I had been forced to stop playing organ due to an overuse injury which failed to respond to treatment. Although devastating at the time, it also gave me the headspace to consider conducting, something I’d always harboured in the depths of my mind. I’d gone to Vienna to visit a friend, and we managed to get last-minute student tickets for a performance of ‘Der Rosenkavalier’ at the State Opera. I could almost have eaten the sound that came emanating from the pit and from that moment I knew I had to do everything I could to conduct. With barely no conducting experience at all, I researched the best places in the world to study conducting and pigheadedly applied to the postgraduate course at the Royal Academy of Music in London. There I was accepted, studying with Colin Metters and Sir Colin Davis for three incredibly fruitful years. Their sheer encouragement and enormous belief in me stay with me to this day.
What do you expect will be the biggest challenges for musicians who will participate in music making in a setting like this?
This will be a breakthrough orchestral experience for many of the players. The rehearsal process will be intense yet rewarding, and the level of music-making high. There’ll be a lot responsibility and a lot to assimilate in a short period of time. Every single player’s notes are just as important as all the others around them. In this way, the emerging musicians will be on exactly the same level as the pros. I think it will be exhilarating and extraordinarily powerful in terms of musical satisfaction.
I always maintain that young and emerging musicians can, with the right attitude and commitment, make music at the highest level of sophistication. I have no doubt that our talented group of musicians chosen for the project will achieve this. I find the prospect really exciting. We will all have a fantastic few days where we enjoy tackling head-on the technical and musical challenges together in order to bring some wonderful music fully to life.
What are some of the immediate differences between performing in a community or university orchestra, and performing in a professional orchestra like this?
The most immediate differences will be the intensity of speed at which professional musicians work and the extraordinary refinement of playing and musical artistry. Much is instinctive. Have a listen, for example, to the woodwind section play a chord: if you focus your ears carefully, you’ll hear, if need be, one or other of them swiftly almost imperceptibly change the tuning of their note to fit better with the chord around them. In fact, it’s the quality of listening that often defines a top symphony orchestra like QSO and this comes through years of training and perfection of skills. It’s as though all the players join together to become one instrument. When you have this, in any orchestra, a deep mutual trust develops and the sky really is the limit as to where you can go.
How will you guide the community musicians through the rehearsals and concert?
Sir Peter Hall once said about theatre directing that rehearsing is not about practice, it’s about finding. And that’s exactly what I’ll be doing with the community musicians: as a conductor my job is to discover the strengths in their musical personalities and to enable everyone to play the best they possibly can.
Everything we do will be at the service of making great music together. Of course, this means we’ll go into a lot of detail. Phrasing, bowing and articulation, blending with other players in a section and across the orchestra, knowing when to play out and when to hold back, understanding exactly what a sound can represent, all the different means of expression, what we can do with dynamics, with speed, with intensity, and most importantly of all, how all these factors interrelate to one another.
What do you hope participants will take away from this experience?
Music is all about connection: once you start playing, there is a connection between every note, between sound and silence, amongst the performers themselves and with their audience during the magic of a live concert. When people from many different backgrounds unite through music, the connection is even more profound: it’s as though this contrapuntal experience of making music together represents our ideal for life. It’s incredibly powerful stuff. Often experiences like this serve as a reminder of why we became musicians in the first place.
Image supplied. Credit Timothy Jeffes Sydney Symphony.
