Place Stravinsky in Paris is rammed with people, but there he is, cutting through the crowd to meet me. He immediately starts talking about my latest review, before we’ve even decided which café we’re going to hold the interview in. The former cellist of the Arod Quartet is travelling at speed. In 2021, just a few months after leaving the quartet, Samy Rachid won Second Prize at the Tokyo International Conducting Competition – and now he’s Assistant Conductor of the prestigious Boston Symphony Orchestra. But Rachid hasn’t let it go to his head. On a stopover in Paris this evening, he’s taking the chance to listen to a high-level amateur orchestra, of which he was briefly musical director. For now, he sits down, orders a crème brûlée with gusto and readies himself for my first question.
As it happens, I’ve known Rachid for a long time: when we were still students, we were in the same chamber music group during the 2012 summer session of the Orchestre Français des Jeunes. I remind him about our rehearsals and how he had very clear and precise ideas about Brahms’ String Quintet no. 2 in G major, Op.111, and how to interpret it. While he never said so at the time, was he already dreaming about becoming a conductor? He bursts out laughing: “Was I that much of a pain?”
He’s quickly serious again: “When I started in music, it was to become a conductor. But as my cello studies progressed, the instrument took over. After entering the Paris Conservatoire, I was considering joining the conducting class, but that’s when the adventure of the Arod Quartet began.” He changes tack. “I’m a great believer in destiny. So I told myself that my destiny was to play in a quartet, that I was playing a fabulous repertoire, that I was in my proper place.”
The Covid-19 pandemic was to change everything. “I realised that deep down, I didn’t want to be a cellist”. (The crème brûlée arrives.) “During autumn 2020, when musical activity was beginning to restart, I made my decision. I knew that if I left it any longer, it would be too late.” In January 2021, he left the quartet and started conducting classes, with the Tokyo Competition already in his sights, fully conscious of the risk he was taking. “I was very scared. I was really starting from scratch. It was a big gamble, the gamble of a lifetime.”
Rachid has honed his skills as a conductor with his mentor Mathieu Herzog, who himself exchanged the quartet player’s bow (in the Quatuor Ébène) for the conductor’s baton. “It was completely natural because I knew that he had already been through all this, the moments that were going to turn my life upside down. He’s an exceptional pedagogue, he knew me backwards, forwards and sideways. I knew that he could set me on the right path.”
But why risk an international competition on the other side of the planet when he hadn’t even stepped on a podium in front of an orchestra? “I needed to prove myself, to see how I was positioned in this competitive world of young conductors. I like a challenge and I’m attached to tradition – I felt it was important to go back to the paths of the past, the ones trodden by the great conductors of the last century, who went through the steps one after the other, distinguishing themselves at major competitions, passing the role of assistant conductor...”
So onto Tokyo. But before that, he set off for Prague and a masterclass that enabled him to kill two birds with one stone, to speed up his preparation and to create a video: the calling card which is a requirement to enter the Japanese competition. That was where he faced an orchestra for the first time. He shakes his head. “You can’t imagine the shock I went through. I was incapable of analysing where the sounds were coming from. I could see the strings, woodwind, brass, but my ears couldn’t do it, they weren’t trained for it. I was very bad that day.” At that point, Rachid was 27, with a quartet career behind him and a head full of question marks.
Today, he shows himself to be capable of remarkable hindsight, frankly explaining the gap between what he imagined a conductor’s job to be and what it actually is. “As a quartet player, with me and my three colleagues being in charge of our interpretation, I imagined that everything would be broadly similar as a conductor, that I understood Beethoven’s music because I had played it with the quartet. But that’s not how it worked at all! I found myself staring at a blank page, having to abandon my preconceptions about composers and really trying to understand the scores in front of me, to understand the psychology of orchestras and orchestral musicians, because – unlike quartet colleagues – these are not people you spend your life with. I had to completely ditch my approach to music.”