It is not, one suspects, how the NZSO wanted the announcement of its new music director to go. Within days of German conductor André de Ridder being named for the top job, British music writer Norman Lebrecht was quoted in the Sunday Telegraph predicting chaos. “New Zealand is the other side of the clock. Basically, you can’t communicate,” Lebrecht said, failing to understand modern technology. “The whole position is absurd.”
De Ridder, somehow managing to communicate with the Listener from Germany, appears unfazed at the prospect of travelling between New Zealand and the UK, where he has also recently accepted the position of music director at the English National Opera. Both roles begin in 2027.
“It’s completely normal,” he says, rattling off a list of conductors who hold two or more jobs on opposite sides of the clock. “It was planned with the awareness that these two things were happening; it’s been well thought through.”
It would be astonishing if anything de Ridder does is not well thought through. His interpretations show the meticulousness of someone who spends hour upon hour thinking about music. Perhaps that’s why each time he’s visited Aotearoa, it’s been to conduct the NZSO’s Immerse winter festival. It has allowed him the luxury of developing a deeper relationship with the orchestra than a hit’n’run guest conductor is usually afforded. It’s also given him a sense of where the NZSO might go under his stewardship.
“I’d like to look at some repertoire that hasn’t been done a lot recently,” he says. “I come from the German core repertoire, but I have a keen interest in contemporary music. I try to combine these things; I don’t see them as separate.”
We’ve experienced that already. De Ridder has presented music by Mozart and Beethoven, but also jazz great Wynton Marsalis, and Bryce Dessner, who as well as being a contemporary composer is best known as the guitarist in rock band The National.
This year’s Immerse concerts, three each in Wellington and Auckland, are less musically adventurous. Salina Fisher and Jerome Kavanagh Poutama’s Papatūānuku gets a welcome airing, but the headline acts are Stravinsky and Schumann. However, the kid-targeting Creepy-Crawly Carnival matinée shows feature face painting and a bouncy castle to complement works by Roussel and Saint-Saëns.
“I’m very open to what works for a younger audience,” de Ridder says. “I think of these things as a way of spreading the gospel of classical orchestral music. We need to bring people to us so that they can [see and hear] an orchestra for the first time. Whenever I’ve managed to get people to a concert, 99% of these audiences were in awe of what they’d just experienced.”
NZSO with André de Ridder, Rumakina Immerse Festival. Wellington, August 8, 9, 10; Auckland, August 15, 16, 17.
