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C:T Talks to Conductor Richard Bernas Interview
Posted on Sunday, November 05, 2006. © Copyright 2004-2008 David Bruce
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C:T talks to new music conductor Richard Bernas who works as music consultant to London's Tate Modern art gallery and has premiered countless works including the UK premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage's landmark opera 'Greek'.
Tell us something about your background.
I grew up in Manhattan, was a keen pianist and attended a state High School that was largely scientific (I was shocked to discover years later that Bronx Science had the largest number of Nobel Prize winners of any secondary school anywhere). The emphasis on maths and quadruple science meant that, as an Alienated Teenager, I spent more and more time in the music department. When I then moved to London I leapt at the chance to study music academically.
How did you become interested in contemporary music
It was a vibrant time to grow up in New York. It was certainly not unusual to be aware of incredible painters like Pollock or Kline, who were given serious attention even in popular news magazines. And I had been to a lot of Bernstein’s New York Phil concerts and had heard quite a bit of new music there.
After moving to London I had the luck to be taught piano by John Tilbury, who was teaching piano at the school I attended for A levels. He’d just returned from Warsaw and, though he taught me standard repertory, he persuaded the school to give a recital of the music he advocated – Cardew, Feldman, Terry Jennings and Cage. I was knocked out.
Later I found York University a delightful and still-new place, not an Institution. For example, lecturers like Robert Sherlaw Johnson let me prepare their office piano so I could practice for the UK premiere of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes during a student festival. Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, Bernard Rands turned up to play or participate at concerts. By the time I left York we had founded a live electronic ensemble (Gentle Fire) and soon had invitations to perform with, for example, Stockhausen in Berlin (the premiere of Sternklang) and the Merce Cunningham Company at Sadlers Wells. Five years later I studied conducting - mainly with Witold Rowicki in Warsaw - and by then working on new works was a natural activity.
In this respect, I think of myself as a traditionalist; when I collaborate with living composers I’m doing what musicians have done during 90% of the history of notated music.
You’ve had a strong association with the theatre, particularly opera, throughout your career – notably Turnage’s Greek, Casken’s Golem and Henze’s Ondine. Do you feel that contemporary opera is an art form that easily communicates to audiences or, as Turnage felt prior to composing Greek, is opera still elitist and irrelevant as many people perceive it to be?
It’s complex, expensive and labour intensive, but there’s something about us that needs opera and dance. I can relate many examples of it appealing directly to untrained ears and eyes, as long as the mind is open. So I hardly think it’s an irrelevant artform.
There is more tradition and weight of baggage in an opera house than in a concert hall, and that will often be the composer’s biggest problem. Rhim, on the contrary, plays with that tradition, alternately exploding it and reinforcing it with passion and intelligence. (I’m genuinely surprised that after the performances of Jacob Lenz I gave at the Almeida Festival that his operas were not taken up by UK houses. I’d love to see Hamletmaschine.)
Ballet is a different, often better case. One can perform concert-audience-phobic-music (there ought to be a German compound noun for this) like the Schoenberg’s Op. 16 or his Piano Concerto to a full house, as long as a master like Kenneth Macmillan or Roland Petit has choreographed it. Henze’s Ondine fills Covent Garden. Is it the mediating eye of the choreographer, the consoling patterns of known dance steps that leaves the door open for difficult or unfamiliar music? I am not sure, but I am glad of the chance to present it to people who would shy away from “tough” music in the concert hall. They get a homeopathic dose of something unfamiliar and interesting.
You have worked with an impressive number and variety of composers - Nicholas Maw, Karlheinz Stockhausen, James Dillon as well as those listed above. What, in your opinion, makes a succesful work, what keeps you interested?
It’s got to be an intuitive response. Some things fit and others don’t. As a performer I avoid having a fixed aesthetic agenda to which each new work must confirm - far too limiting - but without a doubt there are pieces you “inhabit” instinctively.
For example, I’ve done hugely rewarding concerts (and premieres) with Brian Ferneyhough and James Dillon but right now I’m preparing scores by Michael Nyman and Joby Talbot for Covent Garden. They also interest me and will certainly extend my technique, but definitely in other directions.
Interview by David Bruce © Copyright 2004-2008
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