Conductor Markus Stenz has an affinity for openness, attracted equally to the uncertainties of live performance and the innumerable potentials of interpreting a score. Talking to him before his live-streamed performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on 24th September, with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, of whom he is currently Principal Conductor, one got the strong sense that he has always thrived on change.
In the late 90s he explored contemporary music as conductor of the London Sinfonietta, and as Kapellmeister of the Gürzenich Orchestra he spearheaded the novel “GO Live!” project, which offered audiences recordings of concerts – immediately after the performance finished. Now travelling as far afield as Japan and Korea, where he is Conductor in Residence with the Seoul Philharmonic, he shows no sign of resting on his laurels. We caught up with him to talk live streams, contemporary music and the philosophy of Beethoven.
DR: Recently you conducted new works by Jörg Widmann and Detlev Glanert, and this upcoming season, you’re programming Ligeti, Messiaen and Pascal Dusapin. Is your relationship with modern music an influence from your days in the London Sinfonietta?
MS: It’s something that has never changed. It all stems from my genuine curiosity for music. I think the biggest asset these composers have is that they can speak to us with total immediacy. There is nothing that is between us and their time, and that makes the living composers different from any music from the past that we conduct.
You obviously revere the great classics as well. Is it important for you to have that contrast between the challenging contemporary works and the established classics?
I think you’ve summed me up in a nutshell. I really try to make a point that, whether we listen to the milestones of music from centuries ago, or whether we listen to today’s composers, we are in a time when that is possible to be a pluralist. To visit music from the past and maybe come up with interesting combinations, or build bridges for people to visit the past through the ears of a contemporary composers, or vice versa.
Beethoven’s 9th is a hugely famous piece…
For all the right reasons. Because there is of course the catchy tune in the last movement, but also there is an extra dimension. Anybody who listens to the other Beethoven symphonies gets a wonderful treat of orchestral music. But here we have Beethoven entering the realm of philosophy, and also the total idealist Beethoven who just wants to storm the world with this idea of the “Ode to Joy”.
Would you care to talk a bit more about Beethoven as a philosopher?
The way I see it, Beethoven, just like his inventing of music, goes beyond what he can notate. Just like with his chamber music, piano music or other constellations, he went to the extreme – stretching the musical imagination. Here, in the ninth, he stretched the imagination of what you can do in a symphony. There’s a choir in the last movement, and they chime in with one of those incredibly powerful thoughts: if you praise joy, you might be able to change the world.
Whatever he put down, I think he did to perfection, despite the fact that at this point he was probably going way beyond the limits of what people thought was possible on an orchestral stage.
When you perform famous pieces like this one, how do you hope to present something to the audience that is fresh?
Let’s stay with the Beethoven symphonies. What makes them so eternally fresh is the fact that the music is just full of ideas. In Beethoven’s time, because he was in a sense writing contemporary music, there are so many things that he didn’t need to notate – things that people would do automatically. Many phrasing things, microdynamics or rubati, beat hierarchy – things that make the music pulsate. For a while these things were lost, but now we live in a time when it is very easy to be informed, or to at least approach the music with a certain knowledge of the fashions, standards and instruments of the time. All these kinds of things add up to a picture of an extremely vivid work, with many more possibilities of what technically you see on paper with 21st-century eyes.
I’ve seen you talk in the past about being true to the original idea, rather than just what’s on the score. How does one go about doing that with a long-dead composer?
It all comes down to imagination: the imagination that any performer or interpreter puts into reading music of the living or the older composers. Pick any given “specialists” for historically-informed performance practice, and then compare their recordings, and what you’ll get is distinctly different outcomes, all based on the same kind of research. You won’t end up with a blueprint for an autopilot performance. You end up with the possibility of the performer’s imagination kicking in. All these choices that make music spring to life are things that you can live in the moment. You can also revisit the score in five or ten years time and come to a completely different playing field. That’s more or less what I mean when I say “Play the idea. Play the idea before it had to be notated.” Even if you end up in a corner which might have upset Beethoven, or a corner that would be completely wild, it is nonetheless a possibility that a performer’s skill can produce. It’s all incredibly stimulating and very much a creative process.