BY LAURA BIEMMI, TRENDS EDITOR
Perth ensemble The Orchestra Collective has had an impressive year of music making. Tertiary students, early career musicians, and established pros have all come together under the baton of founder and conductor John Keene. Not only do they tackle big repertoire, but they go to the next level, memorising entire symphonies or preparing whole concerts in just a day.
And the OC isn’t even a year old. With one more concert to go before 2022 rolls around, we speak to John (pictured below) about his ensemble, what it means to bring students and professionals together, and the OC’s upcoming Brahms and Dvorak performance.
Hi John, thanks for chatting with us today! Tell us a bit about how The Orchestra Collective got started. What inspired you to create this ensemble, and how did you go about getting it up and running?
The Orchestra Collective started with its first concert in January 2021. I moved to Perth in 2019, having joined the West Australian Symphony Orchestra as the Associate Principal Double Bass, and once I had settled into my role, I decided to start the OC. Unfortunately, COVID pushed it back a year!
The inspiration to create this ensemble was derived from seeing the lack of professional-level opportunities for music students and aspiring professional musicians. I was fortunate enough to gain experience through several professional development programs — Sydney Symphony Orchestra Fellowship, Australian Youth Orchestra Fellowship, Australian Chamber Orchestra Emerging Artists — but these are highly competitive and limited in space each year. So I wanted the OC to be another opportunity for a greater number of students.
How would you define your artistic vision for the OC?
The artistic vision is to provide opportunities for aspiring music students and young professionals to engage in high-quality, professional orchestral experiences by sitting alongside professional mentors.
The orchestra sounds and functions like a professional ensemble, but students get to actively contribute to this. So this produces a rapid and intense learning experience for the music students as they are brought up to the level of the professionals they are surrounded by in the orchestra.
Essentially, the OC’s goal is to train the next generation of professional musicians in challenging but achievable orchestral projects.
What makes the OC different from other ensembles involving tertiary students and young professionals?
Based on the artistic vision, the key difference between the OC and other ensembles is that students get to sit side-by-side with professional musicians. All of our concerts so far have featured every student literally sitting next to a professional musician, so they get to learn first-hand what it’s like to play, rehearse, and behave in a professional ensemble.
Further differences also include the OC’s aim to deliver unusual presentations of music, which I’ll speak about later on!
In addition to your conducting work with the OC, you’re also WASO’s Associate Principal Double Bass. You must be flat out! How do you negotiate not only the headspace required for two separate orchestral roles — instrumentalist and conductor — but the extensive preparation and time management that goes into each?
Firstly, I’d like to acknowledge that I have a wonderful wife, Bri, who helps me out in so many ways. She helps with managing my time for both of these roles, both logistically and managerially. Bri has done all of the graphic design for OC, and has helped to organise the player lists.
Beyond that, I don’t think there’s much difference between my roles as one might think. I prepare for WASO by reading through the scores as well as playing my own part, and I treat the understanding of the music not just from my bass line perspective but holistically.
I know the pieces that OC performs quite well, already having played most of them in my career as a bass player. So it’s just a matter of refining my understanding and knowledge of the works through some deeper, more intentional score study.
The OC has had some amazing concerts in the last year or so; Symphony in a Day (pictured above) and Mozart from Memory (video below) spring to mind here. Which concert has been the most rewarding to you?
Tough question! The Mozart from Memory was definitely the most rewarding project because it was a wild card that could have gone either way – highly successful, or a complete failure; thankfully, the former. I was really impressed and proud of everyone for hustling together and making this happen!
Symphony in a Day was also rewarding in another way, because we learnt and performed Beethoven’s Third in three hours. That’s impressive on its own, because the symphony is almost an hour long itself!
The next OC performance is a big one; the Brahms Violin Concerto with the incredible violinist Shaun Lee-Chen, and Dvorak’s Seventh Symphony. How did you go about selecting these specific works to perform, and how did the collaboration with Shaun come about?
The program is almost the same from a concert I played with Adelaide Symphony Orchestra a few years ago, bar the overture in that concert. Dvorak’s Seventh is relatively unknown and unplayed in Australia, but is widely considered his best symphony. It’s also incredibly challenging, so I wanted to introduce the OC musicians to this important work from his opus.
Brahms is also a challenging concerto for all parts involved — rather than solely being a feature for the soloist to show off — and is stylistically important to learn.
Shaun and I met through our work with the University of Western Australia. I had previously heard about his amazing playing and energetic musical personality, so I thought that showcasing Shaun’s playing would be incredibly inspiring for all of the students and professionals involved in this concert, as well as being a fantastic experience for the audience.
So what do you hope the young musicians involved in this concert will gain from this specific orchestral experience?
In this specific concert, I’m hoping they will gain experience in professional etiquette and playing expectations — coming with a prepared part, matching desk/section partners, active listening — as well as greater stylistic understanding of how to play Brahms and Dvorak’s works to equip them for professional practice. Though the works are written in a similar era, they are stylistically very different. So it will be an opportunity to diversify the skill set of the players involved in this concert.
What does 2022 have in store for the OC?
At the moment, we have a concert planned for January, which will be a ‘classical aesthetics’ concert, and another one later in the year which will hopefully utilise a much larger orchestra and some late-Romantic/early 20th-Century works.
See John Keene conduct The Orchestra Collective in Brahms and Dvorak, 7pm November 30 in the Richard Gill Auditorium, Mount Lawley. Keep up to date with the initiative on Facebook.
WATCH: The Orchestra Collective performs Mozart from Memory. CutCommon’s very own Laura Biemmi can be seen here with oboe!
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Images supplied. John captured by Keith Saunders.
