Conductors often retire from a post with a bang. A Beethoven 9, a slab of Bruckner or Mahler, maybe. “I am not immune to that temptation myself,” says Hans Graf, departing music director of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, “But we did Mahler 2 a year ago!”
Graf crowned a 12-year tenure at the Houston SO (2001–13) with a concert staging of Berg’s Wozzeck. The Naxos record of the event won a Grammy, deservedly so. “I thank the orchestra for allowing me to do it,” says Graf, “because that says more than you might think.” His agent had told him that Berg’s opera was “the kiss of death” but Graf went ahead anyway and did his own fundraising. In the event there were excellent houses for both nights, the second fuller than the first, “because word had got around”.
Saying goodbye in Singapore with a trio of programmes in May, Graf is doing things differently. “I wanted it to feel like nothing is happening. No bombast, no Bruckner 8, no pomp and circumstance.” Encompassing music from Salieri to Szymanowski, the programmes testify to the SSO’s versatility, and to the breadth of the conductor’s sympathies. And Graf knows his audience, which includes an unusually high proportion of concert-goers under the age of 35. “They are interested in uncommon or unknown music,” he remarked to Bachtrack in 2022, “and we have to cultivate this interest. We don’t have to punish them with music that is too hard.”
When Leticia Moreno joins Graf and the SSO for the orchestra’s first programme (7th & 8th May), the charms of Szymanowski’s Second Violin Concerto should satisfy such appetites for uncommon yet sensuously appealing repertoire. Graf and the SSO also give a rare live outing to Rachmaninov’s early orchestral fantasy, The Rock, before the concert’s second half brings the familiar reward of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherezade. In turn, this serves as an enticing prelude to the final programme of the series (21st & 22nd May), featuring Rimsky’s one-act opera Mozart and Salieri.
Born in Upper Austria, Graf is speaking to me from Salzburg. As director of the Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra from 1984 to 1994, he recorded all the symphonies of the city’s most famous son. The Pentatone label has latterly capitalised on this Mozartian affinity, with a Singapore-made set of the violin concertos on which he and the SSO accompany local hero Chloe Chua. Meanwhile, on 15th May, another Salzburg resident and young violinist championed by Graf and the SSO, Chinese-Austrian Ziyu He joins the orchestra. He plays Ravel’s Tzigane and Saint-Saëns’ Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso in the central, French-themed concert of the series.
Taking the long view over his career, Graf observes a trend towards conservative programming – the commercially safe and obvious choices. And sometimes he has yielded to pressure: “I blame myself. I don’t blame circumstance. I blame my lack of insistence and my attention to other things.” Graf regrets not doing more for the music of Henri Dutilleux, for example – though he became one of the first conductors to record his complete orchestral output – and he is all the more delighted to be opening the French programme with the shimmering, nocturnal, cimbalom-enriched textures of the composer’s Mystère de l’instant.
Among the series’ soloists are young Singaporean pianists Adrian Tang and Toby Tan, which tells its own story of the increasing riches of home-grown talent in the city state. In the final programme, before Mozart and Salieri, the soloists will play concertos by Mozart, and Salieri. Then Tang returns in the second half, to take the piano solo part which Rimsky inserted into his operatic setting of Pushkin’s fantasy.
“I think this opera is perfect,” Graf says, and he has the experience of other performances behind him. Rimsky slips in and out of historical style with an astonishing lightness of touch. The noble articulation and chromatic harmony of Salieri’s opening monologue sound (to me at least) as though Gurnemanz has wandered into the wrong closet and dressed up as Don Alfonso in the dark. Then there are the deft almost-Mozart pastiches that stand up to Tchaikovsky’s Mozartiana (or the masque in the middle of The Queen of Spades).
The piece is “very intimate, very psychological,” says Graf. Its spirit of resignation reminds him of a sonnet by Michelangelo (and the dying Shostakovich’s setting of it): “To earthly service there is indifference in heaven, and to await rewards is like expecting fruit from a dried-up tree.” It is, the conductor insists, another coincidence that the opera ends with the departure of Salieri, as he says “Dosvidanya” – goodbye – to the friend whom he has just poisoned.
Through the course of our conversation, several openings present themselves for Graf to play football manager, and he deflects or declines all of them (although in doing so he reminds me of Jürgen Klopp – no nonsense, and no false modesty either). How has the SSO evolved during his tenure? “Oh, that’s a question of vanity. The orchestra was good when I came. My goal was to at least keep the orchestra up to this standard. To build a collective responsibility: to play well no matter who is on the podium. We play well for our own dignity.”
Changes of personnel make a more practical impact than the guy (or girl) at the front waving the stick, often a longer-lasting one too. Graf compares the orchestra to a human body, “shedding cells every day and making new ones – though it’s a lot less seamless than that. Individual players can change the mind-set of an entire orchestra. A couple of years ago, we got a new horn player. He is fabulous without playing loud or having a big ego, he just does a wonderful job. And he serves as a role model.”
After leaving Houston on a high, Graf had decided to take a break. “For the second time in my life, I had the idea not to lead an orchestra any more. And both times it was the wrong idea.” He took on the Singapore SO in 2019, with some misgivings – “not that I didn’t like them” – which were brushed aside when he began to make music with them regularly. The last seven years have been “fun, rewarding – quite emotional” years, notwithstanding the painful caesura of Covid.
Graf is now 77, and a serious oenophile. Is he leaving Singapore to spend more time with his wine cellar? He laughs off such an impertinent enquiry. “I have a very good wife,” he replies, “and she keeps me from doing the wrong things. When I have to work, wine is a distant friend. When I have a little less work, the distance might dwindle, which is not good for my health, but – it’s all fine. I want to see things in many cities where I only know the hotel, and travel to beautiful places without the burden of attention, knowing that jobs await me there.”
Graf is candid about the “ongoing egotism” of his profession. “I hate the phrase ‘work-life balance’, because work is life. But how many years are left to me, to spend more time with the people I love? I’m under no illusions: the burden and the tension will continue, only in a diminished way. At the age I am now, some say it’s the beginning of a conductor’s career!”
More conservatoire and university orchestras will gain from Graf’s change of focus, and from his decades of experience. After USC and Peabody (in Baltimore), he anticipates going to the Jacobs School of Music (Bloomington) and to Houston in this capacity. “It’s a completely different atmosphere. I feel a responsibility to do something for young people.”
Graf was working in Houston a decade ago when a young horn player approached him. “He had done Berg’s Op.6 Pieces with me, and told me that it changed his life. A similar thing happened in Oregon, where a student told me how life-changing it had been to play Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler Symphony. These are the seeds I want to plant. And I am sure that in Houston, Wozzeck had a similar effect on the audience.”
Does he find a refreshing lack of cynicism in working with younger musicians, and perhaps in Singapore too? “Partly, yes. But you can’t avoid it if musicians have 20 years of their own experience. The SSO musicians are technically very well trained, but they are still curious and have an open mind. It’s up to me, to be clear: what do I want, and how do I want it? But not to be absolutist. Conducting itself is not really a pleasant thing. And I don’t have that much respect for most conducting, including my own. What I respect is a deep love and respect for music, and this can be communicated without arrogance. You are serving the music, not commanding the musicians.”
Graf recalls going back to Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, last June. “I sat down with the score and completely revised my approach. I marked up lots of new bowings in the string parts, respecting old hesitations and trying new phrasing. You write in all these markings, and then you wonder to yourself – have I done the right thing? Will this work? And I am not a trained string player. Doing this kind of thing is like a violon d’Ingres as the French say, an obsessive hobby – but a view from outside can often get results.”
Otto Strasser was the head of the musicians’ board of the Vienna Philharmonic, and leader of the second violins, when Graf was working with the orchestra. “Strasser came to me, and remembered how Clemens Krauss used to bring them bowings which were designed to fit the music, not to suit the players. I’m not Krauss, but I can try.” This fund of wisdom, both inherited and original, will make Graf a tough act to follow in Singapore.
Hans Graf’s Farewell Series with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra runs from 7th to 22nd May at Victoria Concert Hall, Singapore.
See upcoming performances by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra.
This article was sponsored by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra.
