Old friends celebrate 60th anniversary

In a "happy" coincidence, when Nicholas Braithwaite steps up to the podium to conduct the Dunedin Symphony Orchestra on Saturday it will be to direct the very same piece of music he conducted in 1992 in his first-ever concert in the city.

Back then, the DSO was known as the Dunedin Sinfonia and Australian-based Braithwaite did not yet know he would return to the city five years later as principal guest conductor, a role he held for 10 years until 2007.

The piece the Englishman conducted back then was Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll. Also on the programme was Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture, Beethoven’s Symphony No 2 and Shostakovitch’s Piano Concerto No 2.

As this weekend’s programme features New Zealand Symphony Orchestra flautist Bridget Douglas, the orchestra will also be performing her choices of Poulenc’s Flute Sonata and Arnold’s flute Concerto No. 1 as well as Haydn’s Symphony No. 88.

"I’m very happy indeed, because both the Siegfried Idyll and the Haydn 88 are, as you might say, love children of mine. I did them first probably 65 or 70 years ago. And I’ve done them often since and they’re always wonderful, fresh masterworks," Braithwaite says.

He has also previously conducted the Arnold and Poulenc pieces with Douglas’ predecessor Alexa Still and recorded the works with the New Zealand Chamber Orchestra.

"So that’s a nice thing to revisit. Bridget is a fantastic player; I’m really looking forward to working with her."

For Douglas, who grew up in Dunedin, the DSO was the first professional orchestra she played in, so it had an important role in her development as a musician and, in the long term, enabled her to do what she is doing now with the NZSO.

"I learnt so much from listening to it and being in it with all the more experienced players at the time when I was a very young, developing musician. I’m incredibly grateful to the orchestra for what it’s given me and so it’s nice to go back in a different way and collaborate and see old friends and make music together."

It will be her first time performing this orchestrated version of Poulenc’s original flute and piano sonata, written for the top flautist in the world in 1957, a piece she has long wanted to do.

"Poulenc was just one of those composers who had a real gift for writing music that really moved people and, yeah, he was a very, very special composer."

The Arnold piece is very technical and demands a lot of the performer but is balanced by the "lovely emotional core" to the music, she says.

"He’s a very, very clever, witty man. Apparently he had a great sense of humour, quite sardonic, very sort of British, dry wit, I think. And you can really hear that in the music. There are moments of real tenderness, like especially in the slow movement, but then the two outer movements are very virtuosic, very fiery, very witty and very listenable."

She still has her copy of the music from her university days with all her markings on it.

"The way you think about a piece of music changes. The relationship with the piece of music deepens the more you come back to a piece and think about it. It feels like there is always more to discover and learn."

To Braithwaite, who has conducted orchestras in the United Kingdom, Australia, Norway and Japan and more than 80 operas, it is a programme fitting of the DSO’s 60th anniversary and of the "incredible achievement" for the city to have retained a symphony orchestra, maintaining its presence and building its standards.

"That’s extraordinary."

One of the joys of working with the orchestra over such a long time is the dedication of its players, especially as the DSO is not a fulltime professional orchestra, says the conductor, who also returned to Dunedin to celebrate the orchestra’s 50th.

"You can find with some fulltime professional orchestras that life is a bit hard for them. They’re a bit bored with doing Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony yet again, and so on. That’s never the case with the Dunedin Symphony Orchestra. The players are always 100% on point and committed to working really hard to make a really good concert. And that’s a great joy, and it’s not as common as you might expect."

That has meant they have been able to perform some great works such as Beethoven’s No. 9 and Shostakovich Symphony No. 5 but also a lot of modern music.

For Braithwaite, one that stands out is Dunedin composer Anthony Ritchie’s 1997 oratorio, Southern Marches, based on original 19th-20th century texts selected by historian George Griffiths. Braithwaite led the sinfonia and City Choir, Southern Consort of Voices, Southern Youth Choir plus soloists Ana James, Deborah Wai Kaphoe, Ian Fraser and Jonathan Lemalu to celebrate the 150th anniversary of settlement in Otago and Southland.

"It’s been just a really solid period of musical journeying, you know, through the great works that are available to us."

Braithwaite is looking forward to reacquainting himself with the players who remain from his time as guest conductor.

"It’s going to be great fun to see these people again. The relationship between the conductor and orchestra is interesting, because the things they care about are so much affected by what the conductor does. If there’s a meeting of minds, then it’s a very great plus for everybody concerned."

Being able to develop those relationships during his time as guest conductor was a "wonderful thing" for a conductor who often only gets a short time to build a rapport with an orchestra before moving on.

"When you come in with players with whom you’ve worked a lot before, you’re already three-quarters of the way down the road to the result, because you have a working method."

This trip is also the first time his wife will join in him Dunedin, a place he has always had a special attachment to as his father was born in York Pl in 1896, the son of a bookseller who was to become mayor of the city. He emigrated to England in 1916 and spent his life and career as a conductor there.

"I’m really looking forward to coming to Dunedin again. For me, visiting Dunedin is extraordinary because I didn’t go to Dunedin until after my father died."

TO SEE:

"Bridget and a French Connection", Dunedin Symphony Orchestra, King’s and Queen’s Performing Arts Centre, April 18, 5pm and April 19, 3pm.