An Interview with Nicholas Daniel

Transcription

1 THE DOUBLE REED 61 An Interview with Nicholas Daniel Michele Fiala Lexington, Kentucky S hortly after this year s conference, I spoke to Nicholas Daniel about his recital in Banff and his career. As one of the few oboists who have made their names as solo performers, he has traveled around the world. He is dedicated to increasing the oboe repertoire through commissioning new music and has recently added conducting to his long list of credits. In addition, he has taught at Indiana University, the Guildhall School, and the Royal College of Music. He spoke to me from his home in England. Michelle Fiala (MF): At the conference, you performed an orchestral arrangement of Britten s Temporal Variations. When did you become interested in the Temporal Variations and how did the orchestral arrangement come about? Nicholas Daniel (ND): I remember when I was seventeen or eighteen hearing my teacher [Janet Craxton] do the first ever performance of them on the radio, on some crackly old radio somewhere in the south of England, and I thought We have got a major piece by Britten. This is amazing. I ve always been an absolute Brittenophile since I sang him as a child. I was a choirester at Salisbury Cathedral, and the most exciting moments were always when we sang Hymn to St. Cecilia, Rejoice in the Lamb, Ceremony of Carols, or any of his various choral pieces. It was the greatest thing to take part in performing those pieces as a child. I loved the Metamorphoses, and owned them from age 11. I found them hard to play, but I loved trying them and love playing them now. The Temporal Variations was this huge discovery. I played them to my teacher Janet Craxton who had worked very closely with Britten (not on the Temporals because they weren t discovered until after Britten died). She d known Britten and had recorded the Metamorphoses under his guidance. In fact, it s very interesting about the Metamorphoses because they are supposed to be really quite strict in timing according to the composer. Anyway, the Temporal Variations I was also lucky enough to play to Peter Pears who had been Britten s life partner; I played the Insect Pieces and the Metamorphoses for him as well. I also had the chance to play the Temporal Variations to Witold Lutoslawski, the composer, whom I was working with, playing his oboe and harp Concerto with him conducting. He thought they were absolutely extraordinary pieces, masterpieces. I ve been playing them really constantly since about With my recitals I generally play a recital program for a year, and then I ll change all or most of the pieces, but one of the pieces I return to at least every two or three years is the Temporal Variations because they are outstanding and vivid and unlike so much of the oboe repertoire. They re really, really dramatic and have a huge political and religious and moral message, if you choose to listen to them in that way. It s possible to listen to them in lots of different ways. I have a clear interpretation of them that I feel is the way Britten perhaps felt it, having read so much about him and having spent so much time in the place he lived (Aldeburgh in Suffolk in the very East of Southern England) and with people he knew. I feel as if I ve got to know the Britten way very well. How the orchestral version came around is that in my research I discovered that in letters it was originally called Temporal Suite. That was his title in a letter to Sylvia Spencer, (who was actually the mother-in-law of Timothy Reynish who was President of the British Association of Symphonic and Wind Orchestras and is very active in promoting wind orchestras in this country and abroad). Britten loved her playing and wrote, You re nothing but a waster of other people s time, which is such a sweet thing to say. He couldn t stop writing pieces for her, and he talked about a suite for oboe and strings and then later changed the title [of this piece] from Temporal Suite to Temporal Variations. I put the idea into the head of Colin Matthews that this might have been the piece with strings, and he said, Yes, you may well be right. There s no further evidence to support it, but I think it ll work well. Colin Matthews is one of Britain s most distinguished composers. He s the chairperson of the

2 62 AN INTERVIEW WITH NICHOLAS DANIEL Britten-Pears Foundation and the Holst Foundation. He s the managing director of NMC records for which I ve been lucky enough to record a really great Oboe Concerto by John Woolrich that was written for me. [Matthews] looked at the Temporal Variations and said that there was a good case, with his knowledge of Britten, for putting it onto string orchestra. I premiered it in 1994 at the Aldeburgh festival with the English Chamber Orchestra under Stuart Bedford, with whom I ve subsequently recorded it for Collins Classics. Colin Matthews and Stuart Bedford both worked closely with Britten at the end of his life. First of all, Colin was a pupil of Britten s. Secondly he worked as his ammanuensis (secretary, assistant, right arm for a sick person) with his opera Death in Venice which Britten was too sick to conduct himself. Stuart Bedford conducted the world premiere at the Met in New York. In the end, Colin Matthews helped Britten do the major orchestrating of it and he s been thought of as the living voice of the dead Britten. He s brought to life, for instance, the Concerto for Violin and Viola (the Sinfonia Concertante) that was discovered only 3 or 4 years ago, which is a massive piece. The Britten estate has got a long line of pieces in their stocks that they don t release. Nobody but the select few know where or what those pieces are. Temporal Variations was one of the first pieces to be released after Britten died, along with the Insect Pieces. I think it was thought of as being one of the strongest although the Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola is a very strong piece. [The Temporal Variations] is early Britten and I think in the string version it fits very well into the Britten canon. It fits well between Our Hunting Fathers (which is a fantastic cantata and again very pacifist and threatening in a way) and the Frank Bridge Variations for string orchestra (variations on a theme of his teacher Frank Bridge which is a wonderful piece). Some of the Temporal Variations sound very much like that when you hear it on string orchestra. MF: Do you have any idea why the Temporal Variations weren t published in Britten s lifetime? ND: I went to several of the newspapers that would have reviewed the first performance in 1936 and I found reviews in several major national newspapers. They were very negative about the piece. They said that it was cacophonous and overly difficult and taxing. Britten suffered with bad press for a lot of his life. He was either thought of as being too much of a step backward or as too much of a step forward. What many of the critics in this country didn t realize was that Britten was in many ways a combination of both those things. He was somebody who went forwards by looking backwards. He was probably the greatest master of 20th-century sonata form, for instance. Britten s recapitulations take the art to a height only ever scaled by Schubert s. I think many of the critics resented him. They were suspicious of his homosexuality, which was still illegal in the 1930 s in Britain. They were suspicious of his political affiliations. Those suspicions, to those people, were confirmed when he fled Britain just before the outset of the Second World War to go to America because he was a pacifist and a conscientious objector. There was a lot of bitterness later on. Sir Michael Tippett, another one of our great 20th-century composers, stayed in the country and actually served prison time for refusing to fight, whereas Britten had escaped rather conveniently to America, or that was how it was seen. The Temporal Variations was way ahead of its time in its writing for the oboe and the piano. It was a form that sat inside a gentle Wigmore Hall recital like a bolt of electric lightning on a summer s day. Even now it s quite a shock for audiences as a piece because it has this very powerful admonition -- a warning message to people. There are religious and military connotations to it and the clear pointing to the buildup of storm clouds before the Second World War. It was a huge shock and, although in [Britten s] diaries he says he was pleased with the work, I think it got accidentally on purpose left on one side. He wasn t a great one for digging up pieces from his past. MF: Moving on to the other piece that you played at the conference, what were the circumstances of the composition of Richard Rodney Bennett s Seven Country Dances? ND: I m the Associate Artistic Director of an orchestra called the Britten Sinfonia. This is an extremely fine chamber orchestra that is based in Cambridge (the university city in eastern England) but it is an international-caliber orchestra. My wind ensemble, the Haffner Wind Ensemble, plays as the wind section of this orchestra. Our previous president was Sir Michael Tippett, and he very sadly died. We were thinking of whom we would like to become our president. We wanted to have a president who would be a very active performer and musician, and we thought that there couldn t be anybody better than Sir Richard Rodney Bennett. He had been recently knighted; he is a fantastic, flexible composer of all sorts of music including film music and really fabulous, serious classical music, and he s a jazz singer and pianist of incredibly high standard. He s an absolutely amazing artist in so many ways, and he was an ideal choice for us as president, as this orchestra plays everything from Frank Zappa to Albinoni! When we asked him to be president, the orchestra said, You can choose to write any piece you like for the orchestra and we will commission it and perform it. He said, What I really want to do is write a cor anglais Concerto for Nicholas Daniel. I

3 THE DOUBLE REED 63 fell over and was overwhelmed thrilled. We set the date and, as sometimes happens with composers, he had difficulty writing the piece. He had a dry patch, as he described it. While he was supposed to be writing that, Faber published Playford s Dancing Master, which is a book of sixteenth and early seventeenth-century fiddle tunes. Richard saw these, and in rather the same way that Britten discovered Purcell and Stravinsky discovered Pergolesi, Richard Rodney Bennett discovered Playford. He s made a large number of arrangements of these fiddle tunes for various instruments. His first thought was oboe for me, and he arranged originally four of them. They just came through the post. I was sitting at home the summer before last, and these pieces just came through the door. I thought, What on earth s this? I sat down and played them at the piano and I thought, Oh, these are absolutely gorgeous. Then three more arrived with orchestra, and the first four were put with string orchestra. I was absolutely thrilled. In January we were supposed to premiere the cor anglais Concerto and it was obviously not coming. I said, Let s do Playford instead, and we did. The first performance was broadcast live on Radio 3. (By the way your readers can all hear BBC Radio 3 live on the internet: It s fantastic quality, no advertisements, just wall-to-wall, 24-hoursa-day classical music.) Actually I had an from [Bennett] the other day, saying that he s started working on the cor anglais Concerto and he d love to know if we would still do it. I m absolutely thrilled to say it could come into existence in the next 2 years, which is very exciting. MF: Do you also play with the orchestra (the Britten Sinfonia) of which you are Associate Artistic Director? ND: I often play if I can find space for a project. My time is very well-filled with all the things I do, but I m very committed to [the orchestra]. I conduct them quite a lot. I play in the orchestra sometimes and it s always wonderful, because my very closest colleagues as wind players are there. It s a unique system, really; an existing wind quintet was asked to join a very good string group. We ve played together as a wind quintet for 20 years so we re very, very used to each other and we all get on quite well. We re used to asking things of each other in a way that doesn t offend, but not having to go round and round the mulberry bush trying to suggest that somebody might be sharp or flat. You just say it and you adjust and if it s not correct, then you keep working at it. Things are just so much easier. It s a very fine orchestra. When I can I like to take part in the education work the orchestra does, which is of a very high quality. Today I was listening to an education project in Cambridge with 8- to 13-year-olds, which was absolutely superb and very funky and improvisatory. I believe that you should give something back to the area that you live in. I live very close to Cambridge, where the orchestra s based. I give something back because I love this place where I live, and I feel very committed to it. The East of England is a very special place, and rather undiscovered. The orchestra is so fine and they ve given me so many wonderful opportunities to commission new pieces. The players have asked me to conduct a lot, which has got me much more into conducting. They ve asked me to do it, so I realize that they really do mean it. I was very suspicious about starting to conduct when I first did it because I had observed that with others it was a big ego trip. I fought it for about 10 years, then I realized that I d got a talent for it the same as I d got a talent for playing the oboe, and I m working hard at developing it, as I ve done with my oboistic talent. I really love doing the two things. I ll often conduct a concert and play a concerto directing it from the oboe in the middle. That s really wonderful and I ve done everything from Martinu and Vaughan Williams, all the way back to Baroque pieces with no conductor. I find that aspect of it amazingly easy, actually. MF: You have a great deal of knowledge about many of the pieces that you play and their composers. How does this inform and affect your performance of the music? ND: The more you know about a composer, the more you can decide whether their life informs their music. It doesn t always go hand-in-hand. If you look at Mozart s life, it s not really true that at his most tragic moments he was writing his most tragic music. It is often the opposite, and that in itself is interesting. I think it s true of all composers who are opera composers that if you know their operas and you know the arias that correspond to the pieces that you ve got to play in the repertoire, then you ll understand [their instrumental music]. [With] any composer who is an opera composer, you ll find probably their greatest music in the opera. I think that is true of Britten; I think it is true of Strauss; I think it is true of Mozart. I think it is to a certain extent true of Martinu as well, and perhaps of Poulenc, certainly of his songs. Opera is one major key to the composer. It s very important and respectful to be informed about a composer s life. As the time period increases, from Baroque to Classical to Romantic, things that were in their lives affected them more, as if they allowed themselves to be more influenced by emotion as they came to the Romantic period. In the 20th century, there s no doubt that it s absolutely crucial to know the background of many pieces that we play. For instance it s crucial to know that Martinu spent his childhood living in a bell tower. All the piano sounds in the slow

4 64 AN INTERVIEW WITH NICHOLAS DANIEL movement of the Martinu Concerto are actually related to the sound of church bells resonating. These kinds of things make more sense of what is quite often an elusive repertoire. Rather like Britten, Poulenc was a homosexual in a time when, although it was easier in France [than] Britain, it was still not legal or thought of as nice in polite company. Both of them were also deeply religious, and even today we have huge clashes between homosexuality and Christianity. It s a very interesting and difficult discussion a whole well to draw water from on that subject. It produced some absolutely magical music in both Poulenc and Britten. The last movement of the [Poulenc] Oboe Sonata is called Déploration, which means lament or lamentation, like in the Lamentations of Jeremiah. Poulenc in his letters describes it as a religious chant and once you know that about it, it becomes a totally different piece. The opening phrase sounds like the choir in the stalls moaning with the incense burning. Then all of the sudden there is a soprano soloist way up in the stratosphere, or a boy soloist. The pictures that come into your head can make the music clearer for the listener. What is so important is that whenever we have a chance to play an oboe concerto or to commission a composer, it is a really vivid experience for the audience. It is not the most popular thing in the world, an oboe concerto. So every time we have a chance to do it we have to be up there, we have to be if possible playing from memory, we have to be absolutely in command of all the facts and the knowledge that we need because then it can be an experience that people will want to repeat. MF: You mentioned finding the arias that correspond to the pieces that we play. What did you mean by that? ND: If you take the last movement of the Mozart Oboe Concerto, there s an aria in Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Welche Wonn Welche Lust, and it s exactly the same tune as the last movement of the oboe concerto. If you take the slow movement of the Mozart Bassoon Concerto and you compare it to the first countess s aria in Figaro, you can find the tempo, the feel, the general harmonic environment. The second subject of the Strauss Concerto, with all the descending scales, is very like the music of Zerbinetta in Ariadne Auf Naxos. If you wanted to find some of the more threatening music of the Temporal Variations inside Britten s music, you might look into Turn of the Screw or the War Requiem. It s not always possible, but often by looking at the use of the words [in the arias] you can get something of a window into the wordless part of a composer s music, which is his instrumental music. Sometimes it s not necessary; you have an instinct and a feel for how something should go. I ve played these pieces so often -- the Mozart, the Strauss, the Martinu, and the Haydn Concerto -- that I want to refresh my ideas, so I will research around the subject. For instance when writing cadenzas I will look at the cadenzas that Mozart wrote around that period how long approximately they were, what kind of harmonic changes they made, whether they used material from the movement (which they often didn t). There s all sorts of ways around looking into a piece, but I think often with an opera composer, like Strauss, Britten or Mozart, you will find that the operas are the heart of the composer. Therefore it s worthwhile trying to find music in the operas that correspond to the music that we have to play. MF: Though you do a bit of everything, what influenced you to pursue a solo performance career as your primary interest? ND: When I was 18, I won a national competition [BBC Young Musician of the Year] that was broadcast to 14 million people live on television. It led me to the ability, in terms of audience awareness, to pursue a solo career. I was very lucky because I am to my fingertips a soloist and to my fingertips not an orchestral player! I did some some orchestral playing: I was offered a job in Germany. I did two very good chamber orchestras in this country: the London Mozart Players and the City of London Sinfonia. I was very grateful for that experience. They were chamber orchestras and I still felt it was a soloistic kind of playing. I ve done lots of orchestral playing in the past when I was younger because I thought I ought to, rather than because I wanted to. Sitting in a Bruckner symphony for 25 minutes while there s the most enormous racket all around you, and all the sudden a four-note solo falls out of the sky in the most terrifying way now that is hard. I can play the Strauss from memory to 6000 people at Royal Albert Hall and once the first 2 bars are over, I m on. I m doing it, and I don t stop until the end, and then it s finished. That s what I call playing. These drooping, terrifying things in Bruckner symphonies are so hard to do well. I recently had the very enjoyable experience of playing Tchaikovsky s 4th Symphony in Symphony Hall in Birmingham with the wonderful Birmingham Orchestra, and there it was again minutes of inaudibility at the end of the first movement and suddenly the hardest, most long-breathed solo in the repertoire. Quite terrifying! I enjoyed that experience a lot. I was a singer before I was an oboist I sang as a choir boy and I had a very good voice. I was often asked to do solos, and it was the highlight of my life at that time. It gave me a feeling of not only working in a group but also being a soloist. I went to a specialist music school in London, the Purcell school, and rather than play oboe solos, I used to sing Schumann songs and other fine music. I used to do oboe solos

5 THE DOUBLE REED 65 as well, but until I was about 14 I don t think I ever did any practice. Then my voice started to change. It didn t break, it just changed, fairly slowly over about 6 months, 12 months. I thought, What am I going to do? I can t sing anymore. My teacher started saying, Well, you could practice. [Laughs] Then I really, really did practice. I remember when I was about 15 spending easily 2 hours a day just doing intervals, to get the technique clear. I wanted to have absolute finger hygiene. I developed my own way of working. There were a few technical things that I was taught by a couple of different people embouchure things and hand-position things. I was taught much more in a musical way than a technical way. I was told I had to practice, but I developed a technical system of my own that I also teach, which is really successful. I learned a lot more about technique when I met my wife when I was about 19. I learned a lot about how to practice from her. She had a very rigorous training from a famous Israeli clarinetist called Yona Ettlinger, who taught her in London. He taught real technical systems. I incorporate a lot of that into my own teaching. I m very grateful to him. Unfortunately he died around the same time Janet Craxton, my teacher, did. I was lucky to go on to Celia Nicklin. At the Royal Academy we used to go to all the different teachers and they all had different things to offer. Evelyn Barbirolli was a fantastic teacher for breathing. Michael Dobson had great things to say about embouchure and why we should all use half hole on the C plate rather than lifting. I have been very lucky from that competition win and some other competition wins [for instance the Fernand Gillet and Munich International Oboe Competitions] to be able to pursue [solo playing] as I do. The only problem is that if you don t have a Romantic repertoire (which basically we don t) it s very hard to fill concert halls with only Baroque or 20th-century or 21st-century music. I imagine that if I had gone on as only an oboist for the rest of my career, I might have got quite tired of the same pieces that people always ask for. As it happens, I might conduct a concert where I play the Strauss Oboe Concerto but also do Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme by Strauss or the Metamorphosen. Then life is much more interesting. I m very lucky to have discovered that I have a conducting talent and I m working very hard at it. I m very lucky to be exposed to very fine orchestras so that we can explore great music together. That s a huge privilege and it makes my life very rich. I find the combination of conducting and playing to be incredibly stimulating. To me, playing the oboe is an instinctive thing, and that s how it should be. I don t really think about it anymore, it just happens. I assess things technically but I don t stress out about it. Conducting is so much more brain-oriented. It s also very strange and wonderful not to have the responsibility of the vibration, but to hand that responsibility over to the players. I also have a music festival of which I m the artistic director, in Osnabruck, Germany, which is great. I m in my second year of that now planning. We re having Bach as the father of the festival next year. His will be the guiding presence and his music will appear in all the concerts. I m really thrilled that the extraordinary Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina is joining us. We shall be performing her work with her guiding us through it, which is very exciting. I ve also just taken over the artistic directorship of the Isle of Wight Oboe Competition, which is quite a challenge because the whole thing is run on such a tight budget. [Incidentally, the competition will now be moving to the Isle of Man.] I felt very keenly that I wanted to scrap the idea of a cassette tape first round because I want to have a real festival feel to it. There ll be chances for people to play in masterclasses, the chance for people to talk to the judges about their performance and how they could improve. There ll be lectures, films, dances, chances to go sailing. There ll be exhibitions; there ll be a reed-making room with coffee and cake all the time things like that. It ll be a chance for people from literally all over the world to get together and compare notes. I m very excited about that and I m very grateful to Lady Barbirolli for asking me to do it. She founded it 10 years ago and it s been very successful in producing really fine players, the last one of which was actually an exstudent of mine, Alison Teale, who s been in the Hong Kong Philharmonic. So, life s so busy with that and the playing and the conducting and everything else, and most importantly the children [Alastair, 8, and Patrick, 6.]. Life is mad!