BACKSTAGE WITH… Conductor Ilan Volkov
Your concert in Glasgow with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra on 17 March features Maderna’s rarely played Venetian Journal. Can you tell us about it?
Maderna was one of the first composers I got into when I was in my teens, but I have had very few opportunities to conduct his music. It’s fanastic finally to programme something! He was an amazing composer, but when he died aged just 53 in 1973, this and many others of his pieces got lost – very few of them became part of the repertoire. This piece is like a collage of ideas and quotations, with an emphasis on bel canto opera, and there is a lot of pastiche in it. The text is a mixture of English and Italian, and there is also a tape part which is very personal, as it has recordings of Maderna’s family. The way the piece is notated also gives you a lot of freedom as to how you want to perform it.
It’s quite rare to see Maderna taking centre stage, isn’t it?
Yes, this is not what happens most of the time! But this is the joy of working with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra – we can create a lot of projects from the angle of a new work. Doing it this way has now become quite a norm for me, even when we are performing at the BBC Proms. When we take a new piece and then start to think about what would go perfectly with it, putting it in this sort of context is, I think, the best way to make the new piece shine. We think about music that relates to the piece and music that contrasts with it, and this is exactly what we have done with this concert. I knew that Maderna made many wonderful arrangements of older composers, so programming Frescobaldi and Rameau was a natural next step.
And you finish with Haydn’s Symphony No. 82, The Bear…
The Bear is a symphony that I have conducted before but wanted to do again. There are so many of Haydn’s symphonies to choose from, but you really need to have more than one chance at them. I find them some of the most difficult pieces to perform with an orchestra, to be honest, because the texture is so clear and every little thing is so noticeable – you can’t hide behind the lush orchestration of, say, Richard Strauss or even Beethoven. As with Rameau, everything is out there and everything is open, and there are a lot of solos. And such a joyful, exuberant piece fits with the Rameau as well, so there is a good connection there too, I think.