Music is in the blood of Canadian conductor Julian Kuerti. Charmian Smith talks to the man in charge of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra for its ''Fireworks and Fantasy'' tour.
Born into a musical family - his father is a pianist and his mother a cellist - the young Kuerti played violin, but his parents told him not to make a career in music unless it was the only thing he could do, he said in a phone interview from Montreal.
Now in his mid-30s, he said he knew from deep down he was not a violinist, and as many of his relatives were scientists, engineers and doctors and he enjoyed and was good at science, he decided to study engineering and physics.
However, his heart wasn't in that either and he would have scores of Beethoven symphonies open on top of his textbooks while he was meant to be studying for his exams.
''Music seemed to be the life for me but I didn't realise it until I'd spent a year composing and playing in ensembles. I thought I wanted to be a composer and wrote a film score for a horrible film that never got past post-production,'' he said.
But something clicked when he was conducting an ensemble of his musical friends to record the film music.
''It seemed natural for me and wonderful, so I decided to become a conductor.''
He studied in North America and spent a year as assistant conductor in Hamilton, Ontario. Although he was offered another assistant conductorship, he decided to study in Europe and went to Berlin. For five years, he immersed himself in the cosmopolitan city with so much music at the highest level - Simon Rattle at the Berlin Philharmonic, chamber music, and, of course, studying, he said.
''What I had done before was instinctual, in a sense my innate musical sense, but I didn't have technique or method for learning a score. I just opened the page and started at the beginning.''
While in Berlin, he helped establish the avant-garde Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop and was its musical director and principal conductor. They invented strange ways of performing; one concert was in pitch black, and another with special lighting design and set, he said.
''The idea was not to be exclusively contemporary but to present every type of genre, a bit like an iPod shuffle: Yanakis, Haydn, Schlutz, Shostakovich, young composers, Britten, Schoenburg, Bartok, Ligeti's Poème symphonique for 100 metronomes.''
When he moved to Budapest as assistant conductor for the Budapest Festival Orchestra, he would return to Berlin to work with the group, but once he moved back to North America in 2008, as assistant conductor with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, it was too far to go and it was also time to move on, he said.
Since leaving the Boston orchestra in 2010, he has been freelance, and is now principal guest conductor for Orquesta Sinfónica de Concepción in Chile. He spends six weeks with them twice a year working on operas and concerts.
He also often works with Orchestre Metropolitain de Montreal.
''It would be nice to focus on a few groups but I have an innate curiosity and love meeting new people and travelling to new places,'' he said.
This is the first time he's been to New Zealand, and in the orchestra's
''Fireworks and Fantasy'' tour he will be conducting Benjamin Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No 1 and Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique.
Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra is subtitled ''Variations and fugue on a theme by Purcell'' will be a version without the narrator. It's not necessarily just for young people but is a virtuoso display of the orchestral sections, he said.
''Britten manages to get to the heart and soul of the instrumental groups in their own variations. Uncannily, he strikes the character of the instruments and everything they can do in eight bars. It shows his power and skill, and at the end Purcell's theme comes as they come together in a fugue.''
Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto is played often, but we tend to forget that what makes such works so popular is that they are very good, Kuerti said.
''It's an amazing vehicle of display for a soloist and it gets under the skin. These pieces are played so often, it's easy to make them into a caricature, so we have to be careful. But the piece will die from an academic approach; it needs to have spice or it becomes just a show piece for piano.''
Kuerti has not worked with Bulgarian pianist Plamena Mangova before and says he is interested to see what she will bring to the piece.
The last work in the concert, Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique: An episode in the life of an artist is also one of the composer's most famous works. First performed in 1830, the ''March to the Scaffold'' section was a big hit.
At the time, this broke new ground, with a bigger orchestra than usual, inventive orchestration, an off-stage oboe, an E flat clarinet which was a new instrument then, two tubas, two tympani. It was forward-thinking and reckless, he said.
''There are moments when it seems he has stuck things together like a collage, but as a whole it's exciting to perform. It was a few years after Beethoven died and it blows the top off the classical period. It's an incredible work in term of effects and reach and you don't get tired of it.''
Catch it
The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Julian Kuerti, will be giving a concert in its ''Fireworks and Fantasy'' tour at the Dunedin Town Hall on November 12 at 6.30pm. They will perform Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No 1 with soloist Plamena Mangova, and Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique.
