Still on the beat

Werner Andreas Albert, who has brought up 50 years on the conductor's podium. Photo by Peter...
Werner Andreas Albert, who has brought up 50 years on the conductor's podium. Photo by Peter McIntosh.
Werner Andreas Albert's conducting career started with a bang in Mannheim, Germany, on February 26, 1961. He was studying with Herbert von Karajan, who organised the young conductor's first professional concert.

"I was an unknown name, of course, and he said you have to get a good soloist. He talked to Yehudi Menuhin, who was at the peak of his career and he played the Beethoven violin concerto. The concert was with the Radio Symphony of Frankfurt and it sold out within a few hours," he said.

Since then, his career has taken him around the world, and on Saturday he will conduct the Southern Sinfonia in the Dunedin Town Hall.

It will feature Brahms' first symphony, which he conducted at that original Frankfurt concert; the Russian pianist Nikolai Demidenko, with whom he has worked around the world, including Dunedin, who will play Rachmaninov's third piano concerto; and a contrasting French impressionist piece, Ravel's Ma Mere l'Oye (Mother Goose Suite), which was written the same year as the romantic Rachmaninov piano concerto.

In the half-century since his first professional concert, Albert has seen many changes in the world of orchestral music. Orchestras have got better mainly because of the recording industry, he says.

A musician could live with a mistake in a concert, but if the concert was recorded, the mistake had to be heard repeatedly.

"There was this demand for perfection and that meant orchestras developed, although, like anything, if you stay with it and train more and more, you get better, of course."

This striving for perfection led to a trend of playing faster to show how brilliant an orchestra could be, before realising this wasn't the way to go, he said.

"Playing fast is not the answer to any good interpretation. The most important thing is to listen to what you do and think what the composer really meant and did he mean to play as fast as this? It might be with some Paganini that you can play very fast, but with Brahms symphonies and Mahler symphonies the sound needs to be beautiful."

The number of orchestras around the world, and of people becoming professional musicians, have increased, which gives a wider base and higher standards.

It also means musicians move around more, and especially people from Australia and New Zealand, who feel they have to go overseas to get experience.

"Me, coming from Europe, I wasn't used to that at all. You had a position and stayed there and tried to develop it, like my father, who was 50 years in the same firm. The world is much more open and there are many more possibilities now," he said.

Another trend has been the research into early music and the realisation it was performed differently and some orchestras' specialising in that period.

"When I was a young man we played baroque music in a romantic sort of style, a lot of rubato [flexible tempo], a lot of sound. But when they did more research into old music they realised they used different bows and didn't do so much rubato.

"Today we have orchestras that play baroque music in fantastic style as we know much more about the development and what instruments would do and how it would sound."

Composers have introduced more instruments into orchestras, too. The percussion section used to consist of timpani, side drum, bass drum and cymbal, then came xylophone, vibraphone and numerous other instruments.

"These days you can count to 50 and you still have another instrument to come," he said. While audiences were slow to accept contemporary or avant-garde music and orchestras reluctant to programme much of it, little by little it became accepted.

Tchaikovsky's violin concerto was reviled when first performed but was now considered one of the most beautiful romantic pieces and easily drew audiences, and people were starting to enjoy Schoenberg's music 70 years after it was written, he said.

Albert has a theory why the acceptance of contemporary classical music is decades behind that of other contemporary arts.

"When you have modern art in painting or sculpture, you can go to a museum and look at it and take all the time you need, and you can come back and look at it again and go and have another cup of coffee and you come back again.

"But music - a half-hour piece of modern music gives you so much information and you have only a fraction of a second to listen to what has happened, so at the end of 10 minutes you wouldn't possibly remember how it started. But if you make the effort consciously to listen to this music over and over again, you would understand it much earlier," he said.

Albert has helped make modern music familiar, recording the complete orchestral works of neglected composers like Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) and Erich Wolfgang Korngold 1897-1957) among his more than 100 CD and 600 broadcast recordings.

As many of the works had never been recorded, he had to learn them. The 15 Hindemith CDs took 10 years and four orchestras - those of Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Frankfurt - to complete.

Now 76, Albert says he is not slowing down. He calls both Brisbane and Nuremberg, Germany, home, basing himself in each place for part of the year and working around the world.

Last year, he was awarded an honorary doctor of music degree from the University of Queensland, where he is an adjunct professor.

"As you get older, you have such a lot of experience and it's easier to walk in front of an orchestra. You are secure in what you are doing and you feel good working with people and passing on what you experienced in your life.

"It's not a matter of being on a high horse. It's a matter of being grateful and thankful for what you have to give and the experience you've collected in your life and can pass on to other people," he said.

After 10 years' working with the Southern Sinfonia, he considers it one of his favourite orchestras.

"Some orchestras do wonderful concerts because they are professional musicians, but they don't need to put their soul in there any more, but in Dunedin you get the feeling everyone is looking forward to the next concert and that makes an orchestra very special."

As principal guest conductor for the Sinfonia for the past five years, he advises on the programme and soloists, and how to develop the orchestra.

But if he had one wish, it would be that the orchestra would do more than five subscription concerts a year and include some youth concerts, perhaps playing part of the weekend's concerts for a school audience on the previous Friday, he says.

"If you don't give young people a chance to go to concerts and experience it, very often it's too late. It's unbelievably important. I come from a musical family but I got all my first musical impulses from orchestras and opera when I was 12-13-14. I mention it every time, and sometimes I think I'm on a treadmill, but I don't care, because it's so important."


Hear it

Werner Andreas Albert conducts the Southern Sinfonia's last subscription concert for the year in the Dunedin Town Hall on Saturday at 8pm.

It features Russian pianist Nikolai Demidenko playing Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No 3, Ravel's Ma Mere l'Oye (Mother Goose Suite), and Brahms' Symphony No 1, which Albert conducted in his first professional concert 50 years ago.


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