On the podium in a pandemic
New Zealander Gemma New was booked to conduct six concerts around New Zealand with the NZSO and one with the Dunedin Symphony Orchestra. Two Auckland concerts in early September and the DSO concert were cancelled when the country went back into the gathering restrictions of Levels 2 and 3. Yesterday, the remaining concerts in Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin were also cancelled, although the planned NZSO “Passion” programme will be broadcast as a live stream on Saturday 29 August and the Shed series “Cadence” concert will be recorded for later broadcast.
Conductor Gemma New: “we need to be sharing music more than ever now.”
In the Chicago summer of 2017 Gemma New took a midnight phone call. She'd been observing rehearsals of the Grant Park Orchestra with acclaimed conductor Simone Young and now Young had to return home to Australia for a family emergency. New was asked to take over - from the rehearsal the next morning. The work was Strauss's tone poem Symphonia Domestica, a work for very large orchestra, programmed for outdoor performance at the long-established Grant Park Music Festival.
"That was one of those high pressure moments," says New, laughing. She clearly pulled it off. After the concert the Chicago Classical Review noted that even a veteran would have been unnerved by making a Chicago debut under such fraught circumstances. They also reported that the thirty-year-old New Zealander had been an “outstanding presence” on the podium, receiving a “long and resounding ovation”.
New was already accustomed to applause. Since leaving New Zealand in 2009 to undertake graduate studies in conducting at the prestigious Peabody Institute in Baltimore, she’s worked her way up through the hierarchies of conducting appointments in North America – assistant conductor at the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, resident conductor at the St Louis Symphony Orchestra and Music Director of their youth orchestra, Dudamel Conducting Fellow at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where she “covered” such luminaries as Esa-Pekka Salonen and John Adams, and now about to start her sixth season as Music Director of the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra in Ontario, the first woman to hold that leadership role. Her biography lists many other orchestras in Europe and the US and a year after her Chicago debut she was appointed Principal Guest Conductor of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.
I talk to New on the last day of her managed isolation in Auckland, having returned to New Zealand to undertake a long-planned concert tour with the NZSO. She’s determinedly positive about her situation. “I’ve been very comfortable and have a nice view of the harbour, seeing the ships go in and out.” She also has a keyboard in the hotel room and scores to study for upcoming concerts. “And we’re announcing our 2020/21 season in Hamilton, Ontario today, so that’s exciting and I’ve been in touch about that over the past two weeks.”
So the HPO in Canada can feel confident enough about live concerts to announce a season beginning in September? In fact, the season is called “Home is where the HPO is” and New explains that for the first five months the Canadian orchestra will broadcast chamber music concerts on-line and after that, from February 2021, will take the same approach with orchestral concerts. “If we’re able to add a live audience at any time, we’ll have the facility to do that.” She’s seeing a “silver lining” in the situation. “We’ve been interested for a while in taking audio and video and making a show out of it for broadcast, with personal stories from musicians, and this is an opportunity to do that.”
Being invited to study for a Masters at the Peabody marked New’s realisation that conducting was going to be her career. That and the financial support of several New Zealand foundations helped her make the move. “I knew then I was supported to conduct and I was determined to make the most of that time to learn everything about the craft.”
Swiss conductor Gustav Meier, then in his 80’s, was Director of the Graduate Conducting Program at the Peabody. He was an inspiration for New, who worked with him in a class of just nine conductors. “He taught me so many things - to really know the score, to have a lot of energy on the podium. He was a great human being, so kind. I learned that once you’re prepared, you should be yourself, be natural, think about sharing the music with others.”
In classical music, conducting is perhaps the last area with a striking gender imbalance. Women on the podium are still rare – just a handful have made it to the upper echelons of the profession. When New Yorker Marin Alsop conducted the Last Night of the Proms in London in 2013, she was the first women to do so – it took 118 years for her to get there. In a speech from the podium that night, Alsop said "I have to say it's amazing that there can still be a ‘first’ for women in 2013." A pioneer for women in classical music’s ultimate leadership role, Alsop was also keen to make sure her younger conducting sisters had opportunities and set up a fellowship for women conductors.
The Dallas Symphony Orchestra held a Symposium for “Women in Classical Music” during New’s first season there and she conducted Rainphase by her compatriot Salina Fisher at one of the associated concerts. She tells me she didn’t play a big role in Symposium discussions, however, and deftly deflects questions about gender in her profession. “People are more open than they were in the past; we need to find our own personal approach to music and conducting,” she says. “That’s the beauty of the world, we all have different approaches to it. I’m really grateful for the career path I’ve had.”
On the podium:
“we need to find our own personal approach…”
New’s planned concerts with the NZSO would have been the first she’d shared with a live audience for some time. She shrugs off the disappointment. “It’s very similar to how things have gone around the world since March; the world keeps spinning, we have to take each challenge as it comes.” But she lights up with enthusiasm when talking about the repertoire she’ll conduct for the “Passion” programme, now scheduled for live stream.
“Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony was the first piece I conducted with the Christchurch Youth Orchestra, my first professional job.” New still works from the same score. “I see it as autobiographical; the dark and stormy nature of the heroic first movement, then the waltz that takes us to Vienna. The March is about Tchaikovsky’s prestige in the world but though he’s made it to the top he’s not content with his growing success and his personal voice is crying out. There’s a lot of suffering in the work, something we can all relate to, grieving together. We don’t have to finish with triumph every time.”
The programme also includes Elgar’s Cello Concerto, with NZSO cellist Andrew Joyce as soloist. New points out that both these passionate yet melancholy works were written at the end of the composers’ lives. She chose the opening piece, Tū-mata-uenga “God of War, Spirit of Man” by New Zealand composer Robin Toan. “It’s equally dramatic and fierce and a great addition to this already turbulent programme.” And there’s a personal link – New was a violinist in the NZSO NYO’s premiere of the work in 2005 when Toan was inaugural Composer-in-residence for the youth orchestra.
New feels strongly that music has an important role to play in the world at the moment. “It’s a very difficult time for many people so we need to be sharing music more than ever now. It gives us joy and unites us when we feel isolated. Every orchestra in the world has a community and listeners who appreciate not only the music played but the players themselves. It’s a personal gift from us to them. Even if it’s broadcast or seen on-line, it’s experiencing it together and feeling that collective emotion – and being transformed by it.”
PASSION by the NZSO conducted by Gemma New with cellist Andrew Joyce
Music by Robin Toan, Elgar and Tchaikovsky, Saturday 29 August, 7.30pm from the Michael Fowler Centre in Wellington, available by free live stream on live.nzso.co.nz