Conductors sometimes evolve into the profession from within the orchestra: Sir Simon Rattle started out as a percussionist, Osmo Vanska as a clarinettist. Occasionally, starry soloists swap their bow for a baton: Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider or Leonidas Kavakos, for example. I can’t think of a single conductor, though, who graduated to the job via the ballet stage. Until now. When I first encountered Maria Seletskaja, at Paavo Järvi’s Pärnu Music Festival in 2019, she was still in full time employment as a ballerina with Royal Ballet Flanders. She’s now the English National Ballet’s new Music Director. That’s quite some journey.
“Initially, I don’t ever recall actually wanting to be a dancer,” Seletskaja tells me at the Coliseum during the final week of the Christmas run of Nutcracker. “I really wanted to be an astronaut! I dreamt of flying to the Mir Space Station. But my mother told me about this ballet school that her friend’s daughter was desperate to attend, so I entered the exam and got accepted.”
Seletskaja was born in the Estonian town of Narva-Jõesuu, just across the river from Russia. Initially, she trained in Tallinn, but after she graduated, she studied at the illustrious Vaganova Academy in St Petersburg for a year. “I really call myself a St Petersburg dancer because in that one year I absorbed so much. I worked like a fanatic, totally immersed. I would take four classes a day. Our teacher was one of the last students of Agrippina Vaganova herself, so I was very lucky being in this amazing bubble, being in this institution where everyone was driven by this same passion.”
Her dance career lasted for 15 years, including spells at Estonian National Ballet, Staatsballett Berlin, Ballett Zürich and lastly Royal Ballet Flanders. At what point, I ask, did she first explore leaving dancing behind and moving into conducting?
“I remember during my first season at Estonian National Ballet,” Seletskaja tells me, “I was injured and so miserable. It was Nutcracker time and I was not able to participate. But the music was still there and I recall speaking to one of the violinists in the corridor, saying I would give two years of my life to conduct Nutcracker just once.
“Looking retrospectively, I understand that making music together is the best feeling one can experience – apart from loving your own kids, of course – and that violinist said to me ‘You’re sitting here until midnight practising, you obviously know how to read music, you’re a dancer. Why don’t you become a ballet conductor?’ I replied ‘No, conductors are gods’ – for dancers, at least!
“Anyway it planted a seed. I was taking private piano lessons but had no idea where it was going. My teacher said I should enter a music academy and become a concert pianist. I knew for sure that I didn’t want to become a concert pianist.
“Two years later, I was dancing at the Staatsballett Berlin. Our main ballet studio was situated next to the Staatsoper's orchestral rehearsal room so every time you passed by, you would see all these amazing people – Zubin Mehta, Daniel Barenboim, Lang Lang – and I would always get stuck at that door. Every break I would go there. Barenboim had this rule of strictly closed doors, but they got used to this weirdo standing there – and the more I listened, the more I realised I didn’t understand what was going on so I started asking our ballet conductors questions. I was lucky that none of them laughed at me. One of them gave me a comprehensive list of literature I had to read about conducting so I studied them. Another conductor encouraged me, so step by step…
“Imagine crossing water and there are stepping stones; it’s foggy, so all you can see is the next stone. You have no idea where you are going. And I really had no idea. This is what worked best in my favour: I never counted on it working out. Apart from my best friend in Estonia, none of my family believed me when I said I wanted to be a conductor. I did not go to restaurants, I did not go out with friends – it was always ballet or music non-stop from 7am to 3 or 4 at night. The rest was switching between disciplines; in the break between rehearsals or classes I would practise violin; once my son went to bed, 9pm until 3am was piano, violin, score studies. All while maintaining a first solo dancing career. It was exhausting.
“It’s really not about my ego. People said to me ‘Ah, you want to be a conductor because you want to continue to be in the limelight!’ Not at all.
“Every principal role would become a favourite when I was dancing it,” Seletskaja explains when I ask about the highlights of her dance career. “But the absolute highlight, which brought me immense peace and satisfaction, was when we were dancing the Yury Grigorovich Spartacus at the Royal Ballet Flanders. Can you imagine, in Antwerp, a company of this size? It’s crazy, a legendary ballet. We had a lot of extra dancers brought in, including a huge group of Romanian male dancers as slaves and soldiers.
“I was dancing the role of Aegina and had a terrible time preparing it. I always had a complex about my body – feminine bodies are not very much in vogue in ballet these days – I had feminine hips so I would starve myself. Aegina has almost no clothes on so I was feeling awful. Technically it was super demanding, but that was secondary. I had several clashes with the lady who was staging it who felt that Phrygia was positive energy and Aegina was negative. I didn’t share that view.
“She felt that Aegina is a slut, a whore who sleeps her way up to Crassus, but I don’t believe that, so she disliked how I built the role. I believe Aegina is torn apart by doubt. ‘But Yury Nikolayevich wants it like this,’ I would be told and a number of times I thought about not dancing it, but then I considered how Flanders was heading more and more into contemporary ballet. When else would I have the chance to dance this kind of role? Never.
“At the dress rehearsal, Yury Nikolayevich was there – he was about 93 then – and I danced it my way. After rehearsal, the lady doing the staging called me to see him. I was petrified. I was escorted to the auditorium where he was still sitting. I knelt in front of him and he took my head in his hands and he said, ‘Young lady, I watched you dance my ballet. And I believed you. I see you had an idea about what you wanted to portray and I give you absolute carte blanche.’ You can imagine how that changed the view of the woman doing the staging!
“It suddenly flashed before my eyes, being the kid from that small village of 3000 people and seeing Yury Grigorovich on the cover of all the dance magazines. He was a star. And then he says ‘I believe you’. People can say ‘Oh you were so lovely, you have such nice extensions’ and it means nothing, but when someone of that calibre tells you ‘I believe you’, for me it meant I had made it. I had this sense of absolute fulfilment.”
The breakthrough came when Flanders danced Nutcracker and James Tuggle from Stuttgart Ballet guest-conducted. The choreographer tipped off the maestro that his Snow Queen was studying conducting, so he invited her for a coaching session. “He turned two chairs back to back, put a red carving board on it and said ‘That’s your rostrum!’ He got out his score and said ‘We’re doing Nutcracker’ – I had to sing and conduct. He was really strict… I didn’t think I would leave his apartment alive!” Tuggle called her back a second time. “He said, ‘I saw that you’d taken on every point I asked for and I realised that this is your dancer mentality: you do your homework.’”
Seletskaja began shuttling between Antwerp and Stuttgart for coaching and was taken on as a cover conductor while continuing her studies. Eventually, in April 2017, the call came and she was given a performance of La Fille mal gardée. “I was so scared stepping onto the rostrum but from the first upbeat I thought yes, this is what I want.” The following season, she stopped dancing. “Two or three weeks after my last performance, I got a call from the National Ballet of Canada. I had a few projects with them and they made me conductor-in-residence – I was in disbelief. In January 2020 I had just conducted my first Romeo and Juliet, which went very well… and then Covid happened. Canada was closing all borders so I was on a flight back home.”
Lockdown was used profitably. In 2021 she began her Master’s studies in orchestral conducting with Arvo Volmer at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre. “It gave me peace of mind. When I was appointed in Canada I was stupid enough to read some nasty comments online: ‘She’s an imposter’, ‘She’s just a ballerina who learnt to wave her hands’, ‘Show me her relevant qualifications’. At the academy, I did the same curriculum as everyone else; I sat and cried at the piano and did piano exams, score reading, conducting exams, everything, so now nobody can say I’m not qualified.”
We reminisce about her time at the Järvi Conducting Academy. “I am immensely grateful to Paavo Järvi. He and Maestro Tuggle are the two people to whom I owe my profession. I later asked Paavo why he invited me because when I watch videos from that time, I was nothing. And he said ‘I saw the potential, I’m not looking for the finished product’. There were people from the Sibelius Academy, from Juilliard – this was prior to me doing the degree, when I was still dancing full-time. I took everything in and then unpacked it at home, processing it over the next year. It wasn’t so much the conducting, it was attending his rehearsals. This is my advantage as a dancer: I can close my eyes and picture him conducting a piece. I have this body language memory. I can copy, if I need to – you can learn so much from watching Paavo’s conducting – it’s impeccable technically but also impeccable in taste and musicality.
“I knew ballet was my way into conducting. I still have this imposter syndrome but in ballet I know how the music has to go.”
English National Ballet appointed her to succeed Gavin Sutherland as Music Director in the autumn of 2023, before she had even made her company debut. Last Christmas, she led the orchestra in the company’s new production of Nutcracker, which gave her a lot of time with her new charges, trying to take the score back to Tchaikovsky’s original tempi. “They’re incredibly flexible. You can change tempi on the spot, they want to play well, to play musically, to make the score come alive. Today we are playing performances 37 and 38 and still they’re very engaged.”
Are there any ballets Seletskaja is desperate to conduct? “I haven’t conducted any Stravinsky yet, but I’m not desperate because I’m still scared! Paavo said that Petrushka is the hardest of the Stravinsky ballets to conduct. I would be happy if these came into my life later. I think for some of these scores you need to have more life experience.” One could argue that with an intensive dance career already behind her, Seletskaja already has the credentials.
