Wunderkind backs academy as winner
The Age
Friday June 26, 2009
JET-LAGGED and unable to sleep after flying in from Vienna on Wednesday night, conductor Daniel Harding wandered down to Crown Casino and placed a single bet - a winner - just as he had on his last visit to Melbourne in 2000."I told (Australian National Academy of Music general manager) Nick Bailey: 'You should put the academy on the table and double your budget.' I was right," Harding said yesterday.Absurd bureaucratic conventions made that impossible, but the academy has a consolation prize just as valuable: the wunderkind of world conductors will direct its students in a concert tonight at the Melbourne Recital Centre. It is a colossal artistic and political coup for the academy, which has largely seen off last year's closure threat but cannot relax.Harding, 33, a protege of Sir Simon Rattle and Claudio Abbado, is principal guest conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, principal conductor of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and music director of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra. He is also a close friend of academy artistic director Brett Dean.The Dean family housed him for months when he became Rattle's assistant at the Berlin Philharmonic at 19. When he heard of the academy's travails, he offered to help.The result is tonight's concert of Haydn (Symphony 83, "The Hen"), Ligeti (the Australian premiere of the Hamburg Concerto) and Sibelius (Seventh Symphony). Rehearsal time with the academy orchestra was cut short when Harding had to stand in for Seiji Ozawa at the Vienna Philharmonic this week.He took the academy podium for the first time yesterday - a slight figure but quietly authoritative. In the Ligeti, a work requiring the utmost precision, he was calm and clear; in the Haydn he was much more expansive."The Ligeti is a piece that requires a really cool head. There's so much character in it, wild outbursts and violence and energy, but you have to have a very calm approach to putting something like that together or it's a real danger," he said.Soloist Geoff Viking Lierse, a French horn player with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, said: "All the quarter tones are like sucking lemon through your eardrum - it refreshes your palate. It's magic."Would Harding notice any difference from the Vienna Philharmonic? Dean said: "What he'll notice, I hope, is that there's a real sense of orchestral culture at the academy. Our orchestral projects trying to make the experience as real as possible, and at a high calibre."Harding did notice. After just an hour of rehearsal, he told The Age: "They have fantastic spirit, great energy, and seem to be doing everything the right way. There are some very talented kids. It's fantastic, and it should be going on everywhere."In Europe, Harding said, hundreds of graduates emerged as soloists, with no idea of what it was to play in an orchestra, a particular skill. Yet that was where the vast majority of them ended up - if they were lucky.His last concert was with the Vienna Philharmonic, his next is with the London Symphony. The academy is keeping exalted company, and it is grateful."It's an unbelievable thrill for us, plus recording it on the ABC," Dean said. "It shows the regard in which the academy is held elsewhere, and we hope that becomes apparent. It's certainly a statement of intent."
© 2009 The Age
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