"On the evidence of their first collaboration together, Benedict and Melba Recordings seems like a musical marriage made in heaven – a meeting of minds as well as of hearts, that has produced what will surely be one of the year’s best recordings."

 

IAN PERRY: Roger, tell us about the various roles you have as a soloist and orchestral player.

ROGER BENEDICT: Well, with the Sydney Symphony, I’m the orchestra’s Principal Viola, that’s one of my roles. Another I have is as the Sydney Symphony Fellowship Program’s Artistic Director. That’s the training program for young professional musicians under the age of 30; it’s a kind of orchestral academy. They do lots and lots of chamber music, we commission new works for them to play, and we try to round them off. We’re polishing them up to be the best possible performers. It’s real on-the-job training. I think there are just things you can't learn at music colleges or conservatoriums; there are things you have to learn when you’re in this context, sitting next to a professional player, on the Sydney Opera House stage. You can't replicate that at a music school. 

We sort of assume, as musicians, that people will learn through osmosis. In fact they don’t, a lot of the time. So we bring these young musicians into the Sydney Symphony and we mentor them. We give them feedback, we do audition-workshops, mock auditions, all those kind of things. We work on performance anxiety. We work with a theatre director, we talk about performing presence, we try and encourage them not just to walk on stage, sit at the back of the second violins and forget there is an audience there (which I think can happen). You know, they have to walk on stage and realise that they are performers even if they are at the back of the second violin section.

IP: What does your typical week entail?

RB: I’m probably not a typical musician, and I try to fit more things into my working week than I probably should do from a health and safety point of view. But a lot of my week is involved with the Sydney Symphony, so if I’m on that particular program, we’ll be rehearsing from 10 to 4, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday morning, and then a series of concerts, maybe Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday - four concerts of the same program. The rest of the time, I’ll be practicing the music on my own and I’ll be doing some teaching at the Sydney Conservatorium (I’ve got a class of eight or nine students there). Then I’ll be coaching the Sydney Symphony Fellows in the evenings after rehearsals with the orchestra. Weekends, of course, happen as well; maybe a chamber music concert at the end of the week. This week I’m doing one with the Sydney Soloists, which is a group of musicians from the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, playing Schubert’s Trout Quintet. And then of course, there’s a lot of research that one has to do. So I’m listening to recordings, editing some music…  

IP: How did you come to work in an orchestra?

RB: After I finished studying, I was really keen to get a job in an orchestra. Actually, the first thing I wanted to do was become a conductor! That’s what I really wanted to do, and I thought the best thing to do is get a job in the best orchestra I can. I’d sit at the back of the best orchestra and learn from all these great conductors. So when I was 22, I joined the London Philharmonic and it was an amazing time for the orchestra; Klaus Tennstedt was the principal conductor (whom I adore – I think he’s the most amazing – was – the most amazing conductor). Carlo-Maria Guilini was there, Solti was there, Haitink, and just a whole range of amazing conductors. So I sat there in awe of these people and the more I watched them and worked with them, the more I realised I wasn’t ready to become a conductor. I stayed in the LPO for five years as a tutti player and then I was ambitious and wanted to move on to a principal job. So I became principal viola in the Liverpool Philharmonic for a short time, and then the Philharmonia, and I was there for nine years. 

IP: One often sees professional musicians who are jaded or disillusioned. How have you kept your energy?

RB: There are lots of ways of avoiding becoming stale as a musician. The first is to keep your love for the music alive. I can honestly say there are no pieces of music that I can't stand; that I don’t want to play again. I’m still amazed at how little I know about some great pieces! 

The second thing is you need to look outside the orchestral environment – doing chamber music, solo playing and teaching really keeps you alive and gives you a reference point, gives you a context. Just to play in an orchestra all the time, if you’re not doing anything else, can be quite difficult. But it’s also to do with the repertoire: if you are playing Brahms symphonies and you’ve never played a Brahms string sextet or quartet or viola sonata, then you’re missing out on the whole experience. Just to play a Brahms symphony without that context makes it much harder. And, again, teaching students to play Brahms sextets or Brahms viola sonatas just gives you much more, it feeds you in your own orchestral life, too.

IP: There seems to be an artificial pigeon-holing of musicians as “orchestral player”, “soloist” or  “teacher” – do you agree that the reality of musical life is very different from this perception?

RB: It’s changing. When I was a student, there was still an emphasis on over-specialisation, and you were either going to become an orchestral player or a soloist or a chamber music player or a teacher, and, you know, the teacher is always considered the least of those professions. It’s a very unnatural and artificial categorisation. If you only go back 50 years, if you were a touring soloist, you would write your own music for yourself to play. You’d certainly play chamber music regularly, and you may even lead an orchestra. If you look at Adolph Busch, for example, he led an orchestra, he played as a soloist, he had his string quartet, and he wrote music, fantastic music. And it’s only, maybe, with the advent of the recording industry that we became more specialised, and now we don’t specialise in doing orchestral playing, we specialise in doing period-instrument playing or contemporary music. It doesn’t always help us as musicians to be so specialised.

IP: As an orchestral player you are a small part of something quite monumental, but as a soloist, or in chamber music, you are more the musical protagonist. Can playing one form of music bring qualities to the other?

RB: Chamber music, in a way, is the ultimate music making. Four people playing a string quartet: you’re complete equals, you’ve got some of the most amazing repertoire to play, it’s such an amazing discipline because you get so much from the experience of playing the music but also the experience of playing in such an intimate way with those colleagues. It’s something that we try and replicate in the orchestra, which really should be a large chamber ensemble. The challenge is making the orchestra work with the same kind of intimacy and exchange of ideas and balance of opinions that you get in a string quartet. There shouldn’t be a difference between a string quartet of four people and an orchestra of 104! 

IP: Can you talk about your relationship with conducting and conductors?

RB: Because I have always wanted to be a conductor I think it’s a good job I didn’t start conducting when I was young because I would have just joined the hordes of hopeful, rather naïve and arrogant people that go into conducting. There are amazing young conductors, but not many. It’s really very rare to find someone like Gustavo Dudamel, whose name is on everybody’s lips at the moment, and who seems to have all the qualities, all the leadership ability, all the musicianship and inspirational ability that’s needed. The key to conducting is not under-estimating the collective musical intelligence in front of you. For me, the greatest conductors have not been the sort of the big, controlling, high-powered conductors; they’re the ones that actually know how to work with the orchestra, that know how to draw things from the orchestra, know when to listen and when to learn from players in the orchestra. And you have to understand if you’re a viola player playing with the bassoon, how the bassoon articulates those notes, how he starts those notes. If you’re playing with the timpani note, how are you going to play together with that, because you’ve got a completely different attack. A conductor has to understand how all those different instruments work.

IP: Some conductors have learned to move beautifully yet are empty vessels musically, and, on the other hand, there are some wonderful musicians who don’t seem to be able to make a successful transition to conducting. What gets in their way?

RB: I think there’s a problem with some instrumentalists – they think conducting is about interpretation and they don’t think about the technique involved. Every gesture you make as a conductor, every single movement you do has to mean something to the players. There is as much technique involved in conducting as in mastering any instrument. Some instrumentalists tend to go into conducting without really working enough on their technique and understanding how they come across to other musicians.

It’s a mysterious thing, conducting. You can get one great conductor that works with one orchestra and it clicks and there’s an immediate trust and sense of willingness to play, and then with the same conductor going into another orchestra, there’s nothing; it doesn’t work, it’s a disaster. I remember in London, we would have a conductor come to the Philharmonia that we would absolutely adore and then, a few months later, they might go to the London Philharmonic or London Symphony and they ate them alive. Why is this, how can it be? It’s chemistry. It’s how you click with a group of individuals; how you make some connections, build trust with an orchestra. It’s hard to work out what leadership qualities you need as a conductor because it’s different for different groups. Some orchestras need more leading than others, some like to have more freedom. Conductors don’t like talking about it very much because I think it’s a bit of a mystery to a lot of them. When you ask conductors, they change the subject. They’d rather talk about something else.

IP: Tell us about your time as a beginner in music.

RB: I came from a pretty unmusical family, it’s fair to say. My parents were very working class – my dad worked for the bus company, my mother was an Avon lady selling cosmetics door to door. There was no music at all in my family until my father bought some Gilbert and Sullivan LPs, and that started a relationship with music. He started getting into bel canto operas and had recordings of Bellini and Donizetti operas. So there was that much music, but when I was growing up, I felt quite isolated. I was just lucky that my local education authority was quite enlightened and decided to offer every child free instrument lessons. Someone came to my primary school and asked ‘Who wants to play the violin?’, and I put my hand up because it sounded like a fun thing to do. I was given a free violin and free violin lessons, and that was the start of a long love affair.

The second week I was learning, I went to the library, looked through the violin music and saw Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. I took it off the shelves, went home and was determined to learn this piece. You can imagine how it sounded, but from two weeks after I started, I wanted to play. That was all I wanted to do, and I have never looked back.

I was a late developer, not a natural player at all. But I had enormous determination. When I auditioned for music colleges, I got a reserved place at the Royal Northern College of Music (in Manchester, England). Years later, I became a professor there, I used to sit on panels for the new students coming in, and I remember one particular player came in to play. She wasn’t great, she was struggling a bit, and the Head of Strings said ‘Why do we have to listen to these people? We’ll give her a reserved place but nobody has ever made it who has had a reserved place here.’ And I said, ‘well, I shouldn’t really admit it, but I got a reserved place here and I’ve done quite well!’

IP: Do you see a common thread in the backgrounds of classical musicians?

RB: All around the world, there’s a tendency for musicians to come from well-educated, private school backgrounds, certainly middle-class/upper middle-class backgrounds. It’s a problem, because for those of us who didn’t come from that background, it’s very easy to feel alienated and not part of the whole community. Being a musician is part of being a real community.

In Australia, it’s the same thing. Most of the students at the conservatorium would come from North Shore private schools, music scholarships, and have followed a pretty narrow path to get to the Con. I might be wrong, but I think that’s generally the case. My parents were supportive in their own way but they didn’t understand what I was doing. They were worried because they could see how keen I was, and they tried to discourage me. Every time I said I want to go to music college and make recordings, they said why don’t you go to university and study something else, and do this and this and this. They were terrified that it was going to lead nowhere.

I realised only later that I’m very different from many musicians who have had incredible support at every stage along the way. That made me very conscious of why I wanted to do it. It’s just something that was really deep within me that I wanted, felt a need, to do, a burning desire to do.

I certainly didn’t have good technique when I started and I had to do a lot of remedial work later on but it got to the stage where I had to do a lot of work myself. If we are fed too much on the plate, we just accept what we are taught, and we replicate it and we just spit into that mould. The danger is that you stop asking questions if you’re not used to asking questions when you are younger. That’s a common path because music education is extremely prescriptive and narrow. There’s not enough curiosity in young musicians.

But this thing about the English system is interesting because the choral tradition is so strong and still informs so much of what happens in England, and the sound of English orchestras even. There’s a slightly more mellow singing sound that English string quartets and orchestras make that comes from that choral tradition, however indirectly. It’s a shame that wasn’t imported here. For whatever reason it got lost on the way.

I was talking to some students this morning who auditoned recently for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and are all upset because they didn’t do well. I said: ‘Well, what did you go into it expecting? You’ve got a 95%, maybe 99%, chance of failing at an audition.’ In this case, it was 100% because nobody got the job. You can't go into an audition expecting anything more than that. You’ve got to build up resilience as you go through auditions because you might do ten before you get a job. It is really tough. When it comes to getting a job or getting a big concert, that’s really difficult, and you’ve just got to have a very philosophical view that you will bounce back.

IP: In an ideal world how would you change the education curriculum to include music?

RB: Every child should have music at primary school, and there should be a specialist music teacher in every primary school. Anybody that wants to play an instrument should be able to. It’s great to encourage children to play an instrument; it’s such an education for life. And it creates an audience for music as well. In China, there are 30 million kids playing the piano. They won’t all end up being pianists, but they’ll end up being audiences and buying recordings and downloading music. You should encourage kids to appreciate good music and what it can do to enrich their lives, just as you should with art and dance and theatre and everything else.

I worry that there aren’t enough boys playing instruments in Australia. It’s a big problem. Boys, for some reason, are not encouraged or are not feeling encouraged to play instruments and long term that’s a big problem. I don’t know if there’s enough chamber music at a very early level. As soon as you’re playing an instrument, you should be playing simple quartets. Music is a collaborative act. We all think we just lock ourselves away on our own, learn our skill and eventually we can play with other people. But we should be playing with others from the very moment we start. It’s a collaborative act. That’s the most important thing.