Wielding baton for Beethoven

Conductor Roy Goodman says he has been entranced with Beethoven since the age of 8. Photo / Adrian Malloch

Roy Goodman has just returned from a European summer for Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra's Choral Masterpieces concerts next week.

The APO's dynamic principal guest conductor tries to avoid the festival circuit there, preferring a life on the waves in his Delphia 37. "But," he confesses with a twinkle, "I did get drawn into Leipzig's Musiksommer, and conducted two concerts with the MDR Symphony Orchestra."

On the way over, there were appearances with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, working with pianist Angela Hewitt and conducting Haydn's Symphony 99. "Haydn's is the very best music for communicating with string players. It's so earthy and I feel a real affinity with it."

I suggest it is not such a leap from the adventurous Haydn to his pupil Beethoven, whose Eighth Symphony opens next Thursday's concert.

Goodman first met Beethoven's music at the age of 8. "I used to stand in a room on my own with the Violin Concerto coming from a little LP player," he says. "Waving my arms about because I knew that that was what a conductor did, revelling in the power and strength of this music.

"It entranced me - there was something consequential about it. It was clear, direct and obvious. I liked the way everything flowed, the way the development happened. And that rhythm, especially when the downbeat was lost, wow!"

He winces slightly at Gramophone magazine's latest cover, with a headline shouting: "Beethoven: How Nine Symphonies Changed the World."

"We're going a bit far there," he admonishes. "Although it is amazing how this music did reflect the great events that the world went through at that time, including the French and Industrial revolutions."

The Eighth Symphony was not so popular in the 19th century. Schumann noted audiences were prejudiced, "in spite of the fact that scarcely another Beethoven Symphony equals it in profound humour".

Goodman agrees and can hardly wait to take his baton to what he describes as "the most profane and bucolic of Beethoven's symphonies, a score that's very rhythmic from start to finish".

These are qualities he feels it shares with a major offering on next week's programme, Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, featuring soloists Penelope Mills, Benjamin Makisi and 2007 Lexus Song Quest winner Phillip Rhodes, as well as the voices of Auckland Choral.

Although this is the first time Goodman has conducted this choral masterpiece, the score is "absolutely in my blood", he says.

"In the 70s, when I was a schoolteacher, a lot of the neighbouring grammar schools did it. Later, when I travelled around as a fixer of orchestras in Berkshire, I led the violins in lots of performances.

"I know the music inside out," Goodman says, although the copious text, taken from poems and texts ranging from the 11th to the 13th centuries, presents more concerns.

"Thank goodness we live in times when you can do a Google search and find translations and pronunciations."

Goodman relates easily to Orff's work. "There's a sense of humanity that connects with the Haydn that I love." He warms to its frank theatricality.

"It's got all the intrigue you could wish for. It's about love, power and the human situation, which everyone can react to."

When I bring up the notorious secondment of Orff's O Fortuna chorus on The Omen soundtrack, Goodman assures me that "there is a strength to this music that overrides any danger of it seeming hackneyed".

Performance

What: Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, Choral Masterpieces

Where and when: Auckland Town Hall, Thursday and Friday at 8pm