Music that Changed Me
Conductor Nicholas Collon
Nicholas Collon is the founding conductor of Aurora Orchestra, an ensemble widely admired for its experimental approach that has recently included memorised performances of entire symphonies. Collon is currently principal guest conductor of the Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne and chief conductor at the Residentie Orkest in The Hague. He has just been named as the new chief conductor of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra from 2021. Before taking up the baton, he played the viola and piano, and was an organ scholar at Clare College, Cambridge.
As a child, I listened to huge amounts of JS BACH. My dad had a copy of Trevor Pinnock’s Brandenburg Concertos with the European Brandenburg Ensemble, which is one of the earliest recordings on period instruments. I transferred the CDS on to cassette tapes so that I could listen to the music in my room on my walkman. The Brandenburgs – and the Goldberg Variations – were an anchor. I would take the recording with me if I had to stay anywhere overnight so that I didn’t get homesick. The purity and mathematical genius of Bach, which is so often talked about, was very calming. I played Bach all the time on the piano, too, with my grandmother. I played organ preludes – I’d play the bass line; she’d play the top.
In my early teens I had an obsession with chamber music, particularly MENDELSSOHN’S Octet. There is a recording by the Vienna Octet and it was paired with the Beethoven Septet – but I only ever listened to the Mendelssohn. The first time I actually played the piece was on a chamber music course. I remember they had reading sessions in the evenings for the older students. I begged them to let me stay up and I was allowed to double-up with the viola part. That piece has such a hold on me – I had the last movement
played at my wedding. I continued to have a love for chamber music throughout my late teens, playing the viola and piano with whomever would have me.
Around the same time I was playing in youth orchestras – first Stoneleigh Youth Orchestra under conductor Adrian Brown, who was a huge influence, and later with the National Youth Orchestra (NYO). I had listened to orchestral music on tape but actually playing in one, hearing the horns behind me and being among the strings was amazing. I played BERLIOZ’S Symphonie fantastique in a BBC Prom with the NYO under Roger Norrington in 2000. It’s a dream come true for me to revisit the work at the Proms 19 years later.
Choral music was a big part of my life as I got older. Understanding voices and text was a completely different world. I liked the unusual camaraderie of playing the organ and singing in a group. When I went up to Cambridge to try out as an organ scholar I sat in on an evensong at Clare College – there were just two people in the congregation, which is pretty normal. The choir sang Hail, Gladdening Light by CHARLES WOOD, a motet for double choir. I was blown away by the quality. I’d sung in a school choir but the sound of 30 people singing at that level was thrilling. I went on to study at that college, and playing the organ there was life changing.
One of the first pieces I conducted with the Aurora Orchestra was LIGETI’S Chamber Concerto. We performed it at the Aldeburgh Festival in 2006, not long after Ligeti died. Up until that point I had never considered myself a contemporary music conductor, or even a contemporary music enthusiast. It was a labour of love: I worked out every single pattern in the piece until I knew it inside out. I had played Messiaen on the organ but leading people through the Chamber Concerto was a revelation. It shaped the repertoire that the Aurora Orchestra explored for the next decade, works such as Birtwistle’s Secret Theatre (one of the hardest pieces I’ve ever learned) and music by Boulez and Adès. I have now conducted a lot of premieres – over 200 new works. And Ligeti showed me that music has many sides.