“The horses only left yesterday, I’m sorry for the smell in the lift!” Alain Altinoglu’s secretary is apologetic. The horses had featured in Die Walküre, which has only just finished its run at La Monnaie. A conductor’s score of Siegfried under his arm, the Music Director of the Brussels opera house welcomes me into a small office with white walls, equipped with an upright piano covered in scores. Doubtless the main agenda item for the house right now is definitely this Ring cycle, spread over two seasons, back after an absence of over thirty years.
“We’ve just played Die Walküre ten times: the orchestra has shown phenomenal stamina,” Altinoglu says, his eyes shining with pride. With 1,400 seats, La Monnaie isn’t a huge vessel like the Opéra Bastille, and its acoustic is more intimate. “I found a book from the early part of the last century which describes rehearsals of Die Walküre at La Monnaie – Le tutti orchestral by Paul Gilson. They raised the strings by one metre, then dug out one side of the pit so they could locate the percussion, which was too loud.”
“The more recent building works have presented us with new challenges,” Altinoglu continues, “both those done under Gérard Mortier in the 1980s and those more recently: the stage has been reinforced, but as a result, the orchestral musicians can no longer be seated under it, so their sound has to be modified.” Wagner himself was akin to an orchestral architect, a designer of sonic landscapes, a builder of leitmotifs – to interpret his music, one has to be prepared to wear multiple hats. “Wagner used to say that he wanted to hear the orchestra as if it was behind a door: in doing this, he anticipated cinema to a great extent. In my opinion, that was his underlying aim.”
This idea of soundscape almost in the background reminds Altinoglu of his experience at Bayreuth, where he was only the third French conductor to be invited, following André Cluytens and Pierre Boulez. “La Monnaie is a sort of anti-Bayreuth: there, you have to play loud and very dry, like Stravinsky. One day, I heard the horns shaking the walls of the pit, at the limit of audibility – and then I heard my assistant in the earpiece saying ‘Maestro, tell the horns to give us a bit more, we can’t hear them!’” Mouth agape, stunned, he still hasn't recovered.
Next comes the work on tempi, “never metronomic but always verbalised: Rasch, fliessend... Wagner is never short on vocabulary”. The composer himself was highly flexible. “We know that Wagner was very happy with the tempi of Hermann Levi, who conducted the premiere of Parsifal. But when Wagner took up the baton to conduct the same work, the length could vary by a dozen minutes for just one act! We know this because we have access to the Bayreuth records, which document the length of the performances – they’re a goldmine of information. The important thing for me is the agogic accenting and relationships between different tempi more than the metronome markings themselves.”
It was during a trip to accompany his wife to a competition in Bayreuth that the young Altinoglu fell into the Wagnerian cauldron. “Those wooden seats, deliberately uncomfortable, the total darkness, the deathly silence, and then...” He sings the Prelude of Die Walküre, hands mechanically beating time to this highly rhythmic passage. “What intensity!”
Today, it’s in his own establishment that Altinoglu has the privilege of conducting his first Ring, allying himself with director Romeo Castellucci, who he describes as “someone who takes things to the limit, while being open to dialogue”. There was a great deal of debate about the presence of horses, birds or dogs on the set, but “Romeo is a very humble person, who listens. We had constant dialogue with the unions and things happened very naturally”. Less obvious, undoubtedly, was the director’s decision to use children to portray the Gods, with the singers backstage. “The concept is genius. In the face of the giants, the Gods are so small that they are like children. We put the real singers at the side of the stage and we amplified them lightly. I’m sure that if Wagner had been given access to amplification, he would have used it.”
In the end, the biggest challenge is to support the singers enough so as to make sure they reach the end of the score. “There are some roles which are within the abilities of only a handful of singers.” Altinoglu has the reputation of being a conductor who is particularly attentive to the needs of singers, which explains the numerous role debuts in this Ring. (Nora Gubisch as Erda, Marie-Nicole Lemieux as Fricka, among others.) “It’s part of house policy”, he explains.
But Altinoglu runs more than one house. He is the Music Director of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony and since 2022, he has been Artistic Director of the international Colmar Festival in Alsace. The geographic proximity is essential. He tells me he has turned down several opportunities in order to stay close to his family. “That’s also why I’m conducting less in the US now. Besides, there’s an obvious ecological problem for me to conduct there.”
On train journeys, Altinoglu has been studying the scores of Shostakovich’s 15 symphonies, a major project he is undertaking with his German orchestra. A live video of the First Symphony is already available on the orchestra's YouTube channel: “a visionary project, launched in 2011 and followed by nearly 500,000 subscribers!” Altinoglu will be first French conductor to record a complete Shostakovich cycle.
He’s not short of other projects for the orchestra either: “I’m trying to launch a real dynamic exchange across generations. Young people come to rehearsals, in Frankfurt as well as here – sometimes very young ones, who we seat close to the musicians. It’s wonderful to see them astounded by the power of the sound! We’re also organising conferences for university students, and young people’s concerts like Peter and the Wolf, which we did at Bozar with La Monnaie; the 4,000 seats were sold out in just a few hours. There’s real demand, and the stakes are high for tomorrow’s audience.”
Altinoglu is also trying to ingrain this philosophy into the Colmar Festival, “a very old festival with its own audience and its own habits: that’s why I want to open it up to French music, and increase the use of presenters, which is becoming more and more common, especially among young artists. I’m wondering more and more whether I shouldn’t take the microphone myself. Sometimes, after an anecdote told by a presenter, even some of the musicians in the orchestra open their eyes and tell me they’ve discovered things about the works they’re performing that they didn’t know!”
Directing a festival also means discovering a new aspect of the profession, such as contact with agents and public authorities, as well as a new closeness to the audience, which is something that delights Altinoglu, decidedly more interested in others than in himself. “I’m discovering Alsace and the people of Colmar, who have quickly become so warm towards me, as well as being genuinely demanding and ambitious music lovers. The town isn't huge, and it’s not unusual for people to stop me in the street to tell me about the previous day’s concert. I love this festival atmosphere on a human scale.”
Although well established in the east of France – at the crossroads of European countries – Altinoglu is unsurprised at the low presence of French conductors on their own soil. “The question doesn’t only arise in France. I think there’s a psychological bias of thinking that this guy from the other side of the continent certainly knows things that I don’t; and that, on the other hand, I’m not going to have this chap who sat next to me in music class when I was 8 years old directing me today! No man is a prophet in his own country! But that changed with Covid-19, there was an inward-looking reflex which triggered a fair increase in appointments awarded domestically”.
While he seeks to pass on to his ensembles “a philosophy of the orchestra based on the pleasure of playing together, as in an enlarged chamber music ensemble”, he is also the curator of the sound that is so typical of the region. “Nowadays, I consider it a duty to preserve the specific sound of each orchestra. With the internet and recordings, this is being lost.” This standardisation is also happening among young conductors. Altinoglu knows this intimately, as a professor of conducting at the Paris Conservatoire: “Sometimes, students conduct a piece and I notice that they all have the same tempo, the same way of beating – and I realise that they’ve all watched the same video on YouTube!”
Altinoglu’s conducting class at the Paris Conservatoire is an exception to the European conservatoire landscape – after weekly lessons at the piano, the students practise their skills in front of a real professional orchestra, the Orchestre des Lauréats du Conservatoire, made up of young professionals and dedicated to conducting lessons, under Altinoglu’s watchful eye. “It’s one of the best teaching systems in the world,” he says. “The entrance exam is attracting more and more people, and I wanted it to be more demanding, with an emphasis on music history. When a candidate tells me that Brahms composed 24 symphonies ‘to mirror Bach’s Preludes and Fugues’, I tell myself that we need to start by reviewing the basics... And who knows: in a few years’ time, I might come up with a best-of collection of gems like that from the competition!”
Translated from French by David Karlin.