BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
Daniel Dean, Max McBride, and Sam Torrens wanted to play Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony so badly that they started a 75-piece orchestra just to showcase the work.
The result is the Musician Project, and since the three co-founded their orchestra in 2013 they’ve provided a professional platform for young musicians and have pulled mentors on board from most major symphony orchestras across the country.
Daniel tells us how it all began, and what it’s been like to start up the orchestra.
What made you think to start the Musician Project, and what did you most want to achieve when you first set out?
Like most ideas, Musician Project originated at the pub over a few glasses of red. Originally Max McBride, Sam Torrens and myself just wanted to play Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony, it being a favourite work of ours which almost never sees the light of day in this country. It was also a test for Sam and myself to see if we could put together a performance based on how we felt one should be organised. So it was a very simple beginning of: “Let’s play this awesome work and do our best to make it a good experience”. We didn’t really intend to make it anything more than that!
What steps did you take to set up Musician Project?
When we first had the idea, we polled the potential musicians who we felt would like to be involved – no sense in putting together a concert and having no one to play it! We felt from that response, we had enough interest to field an orchestra, so we hired a venue, bought the music and invited musicians to join us. Due to time and budget constraints on us and the players, we ended up having to knock the program together in about eight-and-a-half hours of rehearsal (Bruckner’s Fifth takes about one-and-a-half hours to play).
What was your biggest challenge along the way?
Our biggest challenge in the beginning was presenting our project as something that people would want to be a part of. I’ve seen a lot of great ideas wind up being poor events in practice due to a wide variety of issues, which we worked extremely hard to avoid. Eventually, we ended up with an orchestra of about 75 players, nearly all of whom were still students. After the first rehearsal, we all realised that this was something special. After the concert, I remember a particular musician commenting: “This wasn’t nearly as s*** as I thought it would be!”. High praise for us!
Other challenges have generally been logistical – for me I was learning on the job all about recording, filming, marketing, ticketing – you name it, I found out the hard way how to do it!
How has Musician Project evolved since it was conceptualised? Has it taken any unexpected directions?
Originally, we had styled ourselves on the Bruckner Orchestra Sydney – our one goal being to play Bruckner 5 (and maybe some more Bruckner later on if we felt like it). But after that first performance, and how much we enjoyed ourselves and the audience and musicians appeared to appreciate it, we decide to re-brand ourselves as Musician Project and begin to plan more concerts, not necessarily with Bruckner involved! We’re now loosely based on a model pioneered in Melbourne by Fabian Russell and Peter Tregear with The Orchestra Project. Fabian has since come to Sydney and conducted our Mahler 9 performance earlier this year as well as Max having been involved as a bassist with his projects in Melbourne – so it’s all in the same community with similar goals.
I’m sure as we progress and new opportunities become available, Musician Project will change direction or expand into other areas. We’re pretty flexible!
How does it provide young musicians with opportunities?
How long is a piece of string? There are so many different things the musicians could take away from our projects, and not just the young ones! For example, we’re proudly responsible for many professional musicians playing Nielsen’s Third Symphony for the first time.
The largest benefit, in my opinion, is the opportunity to play in a very high quality orchestra. The demands on the players are pretty intense – we have less rehearsal time than most professional orchestras, but this has led to very successful and efficient rehearsals. It’s a joy to see some of the younger players rise up to the challenge – and from experience, I know it’s a very rewarding feeling to hear yourself contribute to such a refined sound.
At the end of the day, you’d have to ask each musician what they got out of it. I’m sure there would be a very wide response!
So what’s your role like and how do you help run the orchestra?
The general split is: Sam handles the winds, brass and percussion roster and I take care of the strings. All the other duties, like marketing, music hire, venue hire, website etc., we divvy up between ourselves based on who has more interest in taking care of it. We’re very much a team, and we’re jointly responsible for the operation of Musician Project. Max, Sam and myself also jointly choose the programs that we present. Nothing goes forward unless all three of us agree to it.
What are your hopes for the future of Musician Project?
We’ve had such overwhelmingly positive feedback from audience and musicians alike that we’re committed to running new programs in the future. What I’d personally like to see is Musician Project branching out into larger programs, those which are much more difficult for professional orchestras to program – either from a logistic or artistic perspective. I’d very much like to stage an opera (one outside of Opera Australia’s pool of repeats), and also tackle some of the massive works like Mahler 8 or Schoenberg’s ‘Gurrelieder’.
The Musician Project Orchestra takes to the stage once more at 5pm November 15 in the Verbrugghen Hall, Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Max McBride will conduct the Incidental Music to Schubert’s ‘Rosamunde’, followed by Brahms’ epic First Symphony. We’re also introducing a “Pay-What-You-Think” ticket method which allows the audience to pay after the show what they felt their ticket was worth. Bookings Essential through Trybooking: http://www.trybooking.com/JGWS
Image supplied. Credit: Lucien Fischer.
