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  On the road with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra HELEN DALLEY, REPORTER: The staging of the Beethoven Festival by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra earlier this year was significant not just for the critical acclaim it received. It was also the moment that conductor Edo de Waart decided that he wanted to renew his contract with the orchestra and not leave, as planned, in the year 2000. EDO DE WAART, CONDUCTOR: When the time comes nearer it became more and more clear to me how much this orchestra means to me, how much this city means to me and how much this country means to me. For the first time in my life I would leave an orchestra and feel really sad that I did. SIR JOHN DRUMMOND, ARTS CONSULTANT: For a conductor like Edo to stay on in Sydney is a very very good mark for Sydney orchestra. He wouldn't stay if he didn't think that the orchestra was very very worthwhile and so in world terms his extending his contract will be recognised as "mmm Sydney's doing well isn't it?" feeling. REPORTER: Edo de Waart arrived in Australia in 1993 - a one-time assistant to Leonard Bernstein and acknowledged as one of a handful of first-class maestros in the world he came to Sydney after making his name on the international stage with the San Francisco and Minnesota orchestras. DE WAART: It was a great adventure to come out here for the first time and they had put me up in the Hyatt on the Rocks with a great view of the Opera House, so for ten days I would open the curtains in the morning and then I worked with the orchestra and they were very good. They were not a finished product, which is wonderful - I like that. I do not fancy myself as a curator of museum of old paintings and the best you can do is not screw it up. I like to be part of the process and it was very obvious that they wanted to go somewhere, they wanted to mean something. REPORTER: The final rehearsal before the Sydney Symphony Orchestra leaves on tour to America - it's a decade since their last trip there and Edo de Waart is well aware that their performances will be keenly watched. DE WAART: Touring is about the last thing where you can still go into the lion's den in Amsterdam, New York, Boston and show your stuff and while we don't have the Ashes, nobody wins or loses - it's a very heady and wonderful, exciting thing and it lifts an orchestra over and beyond what they think they can do very often. REPORTER: Fresh from the success of their first concert in Los Angeles, tonight the orchestra is playing at Worcester Massachusetts in a 19th century hall…the stage once graced by Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. DE WAART: We chose the Strauss for several reasons first of all we like it and I love to do it. It is not played very often. Of those times that it is played I did it quite a bit in the world I would think. And the orchestra plays it wonderfully well. They do great Strauss. REPORTER: Boston - home to the famous Boston Symphony Orchestra, host to the world's top musicians. They flock here to Symphony Hall with its world-renowned acoustics. JOHN HARDING, CONCERT MASTER: What it means predominantly is that instead of having to produce a sound that's going to penetrate to the back of the hall and be heard, as we spend most of our time doing in the Opera House, you can just touch the instrument and you can also do that. And when you do that it really says something - so you get a range of dynamic possibilities which goes from, not from there to there but from right down there, to right up there and that's what we all would like to have all the time. NATHAN WAKS, PRINCIPAL CELLO: This is a moment that you reach in an orchestra's development and the SSO, although it's been around for a long time, I think is now ready for this kind of challenge and I hope people will be pleasantly surprised by what they hear. REPORTER: One hour before the curtain goes up on their Boston concert and the orchestra is still fine tuning. REPORTER: The only contemporary work being featured on this tour is "Elevator Music" by Adelaide composer Graeme Kirner. It was specifically written for the Sydney Symphony. GRAEME KOEHNE, COMPOSER: I think the more dour serious symphony orchestras that you find in Europe who wouldn't touch a piece like this and wouldn't have a hope of being able to perform it because they just wouldn't have the style to do it but Edo has a great love of various types of popular music. DE WAART: It's a wonderful funny not unserious but slightly goofy piece that I think represents a lot of what I think about Australia. It's a little bit brazen, it doesn't take itself seriously, it's not ponderous. No German could have written that piece let me tell you that. DE WAART: To do a good concert on the stage at Carnegie Hall or Boston or Washington DC is a very great high. It doesn't come much better. RICHARD DYER, BOSTON GLOBE: He is an orchestra builder, that's what he does and he is really good at it obviously. And they sound terrific and he has good taste. the road to being a superstar was open to him and he chose not to take it. He wants a life in music and you can tell that from the kind of work he does. EMMA DUNCH: Hey everyone we got a fantastic review in Boston today. It says “Sydney Symphony a ticket to many musical worlds. The relatively unheralded Edo De Waart and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra attacked an audience more than double the size of the one that turned out to hear highly touted Valerie…and that's fitting because the band from Down under was at least twice as good.” REPORTER: Touring brings with it a gruelling schedule. On this tour the orchestra will play eleven concerts in nine American cities. With the big concert in New York looming over them, the musicians are headed to Long Island for a weekend of Beethoven. REPORTER: With Beethoven, the orchestra has good reason to feel confident. Back in June it performed the entire symphonies and piano concertos of the great composer. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is of course considered one of the masterpieces of Western music. It also serves to show this orchestra and its conductor at their best. DE WAART: When you play his music you have to live up to an incredible quality which is good. When you do something for 30 years like I do, there is a danger that things are going to get too easy, and certain things do get easy, that nice's but I am very happy still to find that when I conduct Beethoven that you really have to go to the depths of your being to find the stuff that you think he asks for. And it is indeed a wonderful thing to have done the Beethoven cycle together and I wanted to build on that by taking quite a lot of Beethoven to America because I think for a big symphony orchestra which we play Beethoven very well. SIR JOHN DRUMMOND: When you hand very big things to do to Edo, like the Beethoven cycle, he rises to the challenge and the orchestra rises with him. You can feel the orchestra and conductor on a wavelength. REPORTER: Just as in Sydney and Los Angeles, the orchestra wins over the Long Island audience with Beethoven's Ninth. VOXPOP: I've heard Beethoven's ninth in many many places. Tonight it was just brilliant and my heart was pounding. VOXPOP: I don't know how people can stay in their seats. It took everything in me just to stay in my seat. I wanted to jump up and dance in the aisles. It was great. REPORTER: De Waart's impact on this orchestra has been profound - soon after his arrival he insisted on increasing the size of the orchestra and boosting musician's salaries in a bid to be more competitive with those overseas. JOHN HARDING, CONCERT MASTER: People often ask - what is it that he's done to the orchestra that has made a difference…and I think simply said, is that he works like crazy on details sometimes until you could strangle him. MARY VALLENTINE, SSO MANAGING DIRECTOR: He has the capacity to be direct. To be brutally honest. To engage in a very vigorous exchange. To admit that he's wrong and I think because the musicians can actually hear the results of the work that they're doing of the group he has their respect. REPORTER: Not all orchestras have been quite as responsive to de Waart's demands. DE WAART: I once walked off the stage in Sweden. I had a rehearsal, Brahms 3 and these…are not your most abundantly you know people who are…They were sitting there and I had asked a few lines play it, play and nothing happened much. And I said, ‘I didn't fly 3000kms to make you like your job, I am going home. Goodbye.' And I walked out of the rehearsal after half an hour and the orch committee poured into my room and they said, ‘Maestro we're Swedish you have to realise that we love our job! But we're Swedish and we are like this!' REPORTER: De Waart's commitment to an international career has come at a personal price - by the time he was 34, he'd been married four times and there have been a couple more since then. The 57-year-old, dubbed by one newspaper as a "serial groom" is now seeing 26-year-old American mezzo soprano Rebecca Dopp. DE WAART: The way I was raised or not raised in the way I had in my youth, didn't set me up for a calm domestic life let me put it that way so I have always been a searcher for a real calm fulfilling personal life that is not a good thing. For an artist's life who has to find truth and soul in pieces it is probably a very good characteristic. REPORTER: The orchestra is on the road to Manhattan and that mecca for musicians, Carnegie Hall. DIANA DOHERTY, OBOEIST: The idea of playing in Carnegie Hall is a peak in a career I guess. It's the first time I will perform in Carnegie Hall. I've been there before for rehearsals but not part of a performances so that's really exciting. SCOTT KINMONT: One of the hardest things about touring is staying in physical and mental shape because you are in a city like New York, what are you going to do - stay in your hotel room and practise all day? But on the other hand you've got Carnegie Hall tomorrow night so you've got to do something sometime. REPORTER: It's not only the musicians who are daunted by the prospect of Carnegie Hall. Kirner's elevator music heads the program. GRAEME KOEHNE: Having a piece played in New York is about as good as it gets for an Aussie composer I think and a premiere in Carnegie Hall it doesn't get much better than that. DON HAZELWOOD, CONCERTMASTER EMERITUS: When you walk onto the stage of Carnegie Hall or Boston you're very aware of the fact that so many great artists have performed there before. And you feel as if their ghosts are surrounding you on that stage. REPORTER: The concert concludes with Strauss' Symphonia Domestic, first conducted by Strauss in Carnegie Hall 94 years ago. JACK SULLIVAN, MUSIC CRITIC: I thought it was very gutsy to do that piece. It took a lot of nerve to do that piece on tour, it's a hard piece for an audience and an orchestra and I thought they delivered the goods at the end. LEO SCHOFIELD,SSO CHAIRMAN: I come to New York a lot and I see a lot of New York audiences and mostly they are out of the door before the curtains are down and to get the number of calls we got, and the reception I think was exceptional. REPORTER: With a hugely successful American tour behind him, Edo de Waart is now looking forward to at least another five years with the orchestra he now calls his own...and the chance to bring it into the top echelon of world orchestras. DE WAART: I think at 57 I am more happy than I have ever been in my life, calmer and more grounded than ever before and part of it was this was one of the necessary pillars, Sydney Symphony. That's also what I felt. ENDS. Click here for a printer-friendly version. |
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