FOR A WHILE Mark Wigglesworth seemed horribly close to becoming the Fallen Meteorite of British conducting — a sort of musical William Hague. He had made the traditional brilliant start, winning the high-profile Kondrashin Conducting Competition just three weeks after leaving the Royal Academy of Music and seven years after leaving Bryanston School.
He had been showered with opportunities — though “baptised with fire” might be a better description of his apprentice years as associate conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and then when appointed at 30 to be principal conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. It didn’t help that he wasn’t very tall and looked about 13. “To be in the limelight when one’s not very good is tricky,” he admits disarmingly. “But I don’t regret it, because the opportunities I got meant that I learnt fast.”
Then he drifted. Conducted well, but made no real mark in the roaring slipstream of Simon Rattle — which, unfortunately for them, is where every British conductor under 50 has to work. I remember him conjuring some compelling interpretations of late Romantic music — performances that packed an emotional punch, even if they weren’t the last word in precision. Yet Wigglesworth’s career seemed stalled. When people tell young British conductors to “go west, young man”, they mean New York or Boston, not Cardiff.
He was rescued not by a new orchestral appointment but by making three brilliant excursions into London’s opera houses. That he would conduct Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk with tremendous passion at English National Opera in 2001 was predictable. Shostakovich has long been a Wigglesworth speciality. “I get very tense now when someone says ‘great if you could come and do some Shostakovich’,” he says. “If you get known for doing something well, people assume you do everything else badly.” Less anticipated was his stylish handling of Così fan tutte for ENO in 2002. And he crowned the year by making his Covent Garden debut with Die Meistersinger, and conducting Wagner’s gargantuan “comedy” so deftly that almost every critic was seduced into adulation.
The experience, he admits, has transformed him. “I felt that if I could learn Meistersinger I could learn anything. Everything seems shorter after that. And since then I have had extremely happy engagements abroad.”
Now he’s back in the opera pit — this time at Glyndebourne. And how! Between tonight and August 24 he will conduct the London Philharmonic in 15 performances of La Bohème and 13 performances of Figaro, plus a Prom concert. “At the end of that lot,” Wigglesworth observes drily, “I’ll either have a great relationship with the players — or I won’t.”
He’s never conducted Bohème before, and the LPO has never played it before. “It’s odd, isn’t it, that whenever you go to a Bohème you never imagine that the conductor or orchestra are playing it for the first time. But everyone has to start somewhere.”
A lot of the cast, however, are not Bohème virgins. “We’ve spent a lot of the rehearsals discussing which performing traditions are good and which not. In an opera house that knows Bohème, it often hardly gets rehearsed at all. So all these things creep into a performing tradition and are never questioned. I think the singers benefit from me looking at it for the first time and saying, ‘Why do you sing it like that?’ And I benefit from their experience.”
Rather controversially, perhaps, Wigglesworth believes that the British opera scene “has the best conditions in the world”. No opera in Britain, he contends, is done without proper rehearsal. But as a recent guest conductor at ENO, where does he stand on the contentious question of whether a company like that needs a large, permanent and fully salaried chorus and orchestra? “I just hear rumours, so I only hope not everything I hear is true,” he replies. “But what’s so upsetting about ENO is that some people don’t seem to realise that value is just as important as cost. No money can buy collective experience. First, if you are hiring different freelance players all the time you will need to rehearse longer. Second, you lose the sense of company, which is what makes ENO great.
“But it’s hard to define what ‘company’ means if you aren’t part of it — if you just look at the finances and aren’t in the rehearsals. There’s nothing wrong with the present ethos of ENO. It should be sustained as it is. And its audience really does include all sorts. When you hear that more space is being made available at the Coliseum for corporate dining, well, you just sigh. If ENO is going to become a little Covent Garden, why should it exist at all?”
Wigglesworth is uniquely placed to make such observations about British musical life, because he is an insider currently on the outside. Since leaving Wales he has held no permanent position. Instead, like the Flying Dutchman, he wanders the world, guest-conducting a week here, a fortnight there. A rewarding existence?
“You sometimes feel frustrated. Working for short bursts with orchestras, you don’t know initially what each player needs, whether they will fly or break up if you push them over the edge. If you knew at the beginning of the week what you knew at the end, you would have done a better concert. So part of me feels that it would be great to have a permanent job again. On the other hand, I only have to do music at present — not all the politics and other stuff that comes with being a music director.”
And Wigglesworth’s travels have given him extensive and, one guesses, entertaining insights into the psychologies of orchestras around the world. He contends that their respective characteristics can’t any longer be categorised by nationality. “For instance, contrary to the stereotype, there’s great discipline in Italian orchestras. They are passionate, yes, and that means the sound is slightly less focused at first. But that’s not indiscipline. I love the Italians. To create order from passion is a lot easier than creating passion from order.”
Where orchestras do differ, Wigglesworth says, is in what they expect from a conductor. “Some want conductors to give only the big picture, while they sort out the details. Others want help with the details, and then allow the big picture to emerge in the performance. I’m the latter sort of conductor; I don’t really enjoy the house unless I have looked at all the books.
“Conductors usually say, for instance, that you can’t have a relationship with both the Cleveland and the Philadelphia orchestras. They are opposites. Cleveland for me is about as good as it gets. With them it’s like chamber music.”
So what now for Wigglesworth? It seems inconceivable that a 38-year-old conductor who has won such good press lately will be without tempting offers. Should he perhaps go to the LPO when Kurt Masur retires? With four of London’s five symphony orchestras currently led by foreign maestros, that would be welcomed in some quarters. On the other hand, his present passions seem very opera-orientated.
One thing is evident. He is a far more mature figure now than when he first hit the London scene 12 years ago— more authoritative, assured, determined not to waste time, particularly by conducting pieces he doesn’t like. “If you do a piece you don’t want to do, you waste the chance to do one you really believe in. And already there are more operas I want to conduct than I have enough years left to do them in.”
There’s one composer whose music he will never conduct — J. S. Bach. “Because he’s the greatest, I’m terrified of spoiling his music. When you’ve conducted a piece, it’s hard to listen to it purely emotionally. So if I never conduct Bach, I’ll always have him to come home to.”
