Laid back intensity: Ryan Bancroft at the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra

The setting for our interview is casual (the West Hampstead branch of Gail’s bakery, near his London home). Our clothing is casual. And 34-year old American Ryan Bancroft is the most friendly and approachable of interviewees. But make no mistake: the Chief Conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra is an extremely intense musician who has imbibed knowledge from a thousand places and is determined to deploy all of it.

Bancroft’s Swedish adventure had its roots across the Øresund Bridge in Copenhagen, where he won the Malko Competition in 2018. “Obviously, there was a monetary prize,” he relates, “but there was also a prize of being able to conduct 24 different orchestras around the world. One of those 24 happened to be the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic. I was booked for a summer concert in 2019 and had a fantastic time. For me, conducting the RSPO was like ‘this is one of the first really big orchestras that I listened to ever since I was a kid. Don’t muck this one up’.” Clearly, no mucking up occurred, because just two years later, CEO Stefan Forsberg announced Bancroft’s appointment as Chief Conductor, describing the “fabulous chemistry and truly sparkling energy between Ryan and the Orchestra”.

Since the selection process involved a vote by the musicians, I ask what he thinks worked so well between them. “I tend to be a bit laid back in my own style. That doesn’t mean I’m not detail-oriented, but because of how I grew up – which was in a household that didn’t have classical music everywhere – I’ve always been able to approach classical music from trying to get other people that didn’t know much about classical music into it. My approach has always been quite down to earth. I didn’t grow up next to cathedrals or huge churches. But I did grow up with a lot of people listening to folk music and going to smaller churches. So I tend to approach music in a very human, personable way, with a lot of detail at the same time.”

I’m keen to know more about Bancroft’s take on Bruckner, since I’ve just seen him conduct an impressive Fourth Symphony in Stockholm. “I think of Bruckner in three different ways, actually. First and foremost, in the most clichéd way, Bruckner is simply Bruckner. He is what he is. He is a doubtful composer. He is a deeply insecure composer. He’s a deeply devout composer as well. But he also was a normal man that enjoyed playing in pubs. I also think of Bruckner as an extension of Schubert: for me, his Fourth Symphony is Schubert’s 15th Symphony – had Schubert kept writing, I bet you there would be a similarity.

“I also think Bruckner is like Bach: the music shows everything you have. It shows if you make a slight mistake, if you don’t have intention, if you don’t know what you’re doing. When you’re conducting, it shows if you’re going in the wrong direction, immediately in the moment. It’s very easy to think ‘I have a million things to think about’. But really there’s simply one thing to think about, which is the very last chord of the piece. How do you get from the very beginning to the very last chord? When I first started conducting Bruckner, I thought it was going to be far more exhausting than it actually is. If you’re exhausted by the end, you’re probably working too hard. The music develops on its own, and as long as you give a really nice shape, then hopefully it should be a minimally sweaty night.”

That Bruckner concert was a one-off event. Next March, however, Bancroft and the RSPO will be touring in Sweden, Germany, Austria and Luxembourg, performing Tchaikovsky’s Symphony no. 5 no less than nine times. I ask whether he will hone the interpretation down to exactly what he wants – to get a consistent product, so to speak – or whether the performances will develop as the tour proceeds. The answer is unequivocally the latter: “I think every orchestra that I work with closely can attest that every performance that I do, there is something that I change, and not just a small something. I oftentimes will rehearse for the sake of spontaneity as well. There are some times where when I will hear a phrase and I genuinely will have no idea how the phrase should go, or I’ll have two options in my head, and sometimes I’m convinced by both of them equally well.

“Royal Stockholm, like most of the orchestras that I work with closely, know when to look up, because I might change something! They’ve said to me ‘Oh yeah, that moment where you completely changed how you did it – everyone was on the edge of their seat, like, what’s going to happen now?’ But that’s what’s exciting about live music-making, especially with a piece like Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, that requires a sort of balletic and operatic drama that has to change every single time you do it. If you try to repeat it every time, that’s boring.”

Bancroft has conducted a wide variety of orchestras, from chamber-sized upwards. One way in which conducting the RSPO differs, he explains, is that in any given week, the orchestra typically has a single project on which to focus, most likely a large symphonic work, whereas the BBC National Orchestra of Wales (of which he is also Chief Conductor) might have three or four. But he’s interested in exploring. “It’s been really exciting for me to bring in chamber-orchestra sized works. I’m doing a Schumann or Schubert or Mozart symphony almost every season, and the orchestra does downsize at my request as well. You can do these pieces with huge orchestras, but it’s been interesting to explore a different style of playing from what other conductors might do. This is an orchestra that you want to hear play Mahler and Rachmaninov, but that makes me even more excited to do Mozart, because in a lot of ways, you can approach them similarly. Rachmaninov can have the lightness of Mozart and Mozart can have the drama of Rachmaninov as well.”

His detail-consciousness comes out in our conversation. “Let’s say we’re doing Mozart’s D minor Piano Concerto – the very opening of the piece. It’s fraught with tension and drama, but it also has the woodwinds’ chords overlapping the texture. Now, if you have woodwinds sitting right in the centre of the orchestra, it just sounds like overlapping chords. But if you place them like how they did back in the day, antiphonally, all of a sudden you get different sounds coming from the orchestra – it sounds like invention, something that Sir Roger Norrington did so brilliantly all the time. That comes from studying the piece. If you apply the same way of playing to every piece or every composer, it’s dissatisfying to the listener.”

In mid-November, the RSPO will stage a four day “composer festival” dedicated to Sir James MacMillan, a composer with whom Bancroft “fell in love” from his time living and studying in Scotland (he cites The Confession of Isobel Gowdie as MacMillan’s masterpiece, with its leanings to modernism and combination of folk and sacred aspects). Amongst other MacMillan pieces, they will play the Concerto for Orchestra, which premiered in London in September. “This piece, in many ways, is kind of a laugh riot, too. The opening has the trombones going absolutely nuts, there’s a sort of fiddle playing that happens throughout, and an other-worldly shimmering of bells that ends the piece. This is stuff that you get in a lot of his music, but I do find that the music’s becoming in many ways more transparent. It’s a difficult piece of music, but I know the orchestra is going to have a blast with it.”

Bancroft is a rare example of a conductor who is a trained dancer, and the RSPO films its concerts in high definition for their video platform, Konserthuset Play. Is he conscious of performing for the cameras? “At the beginning of the pandemic, yes, I was. It was all we had, performing for cameras and microphones. But nowadays, it doesn’t really pop up in my brain so much. And I think that’s a good thing, because if, God forbid, I started choreographing or tried to manage how my body looked to the orchestra, then I think I would start being dishonest. An old teacher told me all conducting is an elevated form of body language, but I never think ‘I need to do this to show the audience how grand this is’. My intention is always to show the orchestra what my intentions are, and where I think the music should go.”

I close the interview with the thorny subject of classical music being seen as only for the elderly or for people from privileged backgrounds – given that Bancroft is patently neither of those things, being a mixed-race child of working class parents whose first exposure to classical music was through his computer screen. Does he have a role to play as myth-buster?

“As any chief conductor, it’s paramount to have a part in preaching the word of what we're doing. That said, I think there’s a mistake that a lot of places can make, which is the expectation that people should come to us. At least in my own approach to music-making, I’m always thinking about, ‘how can we get this music to people? How can we earn the right to go into other people’s communities to show what we’re doing?’ That will then create trust for having people come back into our hall as well. This is a community-based venture.”

See all upcoming performances by Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra.

This article was sponsored by Konserthuset Stockholm Foundation.