Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
A decade ago, David Robertson was named the St. Louis Symphony’s musical director—just in time to get caught in the middle of a union dispute between his musicians and the administration. He helped restore harmony, solvency, and the St. Louis Symphony’s golden reputation, taking the orchestra to Carnegie Hall and to Europe. Back home, he built bridges between Powell Hall and North Side churches, stuffy patrons and Beatles fans, kindergartners and avant-garde composers. He’s celebrating his 10th season with his usual collegiality—by slotting in solos for 50 orchestra members—and he’s signed a contract to stay through 2018. Cue Mozart’s Exsultate, Jubilate.
Did you ever imagine you’d stay this long?
When I first started working with the orchestra, [concertmaster] David Halen said to me, “You could make this into something like [conductor George] Szell in Cleveland.” I remember thinking, “Wow. That would be amazing.”
What characterizes the St. Louis Symphony’s sound?
There’s a warmth to it, and a real sense of care in the way that they play. When a composer asks them to be brutal and raw in the sound, they are always loving, so it never goes rough or crass. It’s like an actor who can whisper or yell but always retains a kind of soul in the voice. They can do the raw elemental power when that’s asked for, but they never lose the fundamental beauty.
What did you set out to do here?
I essentially worked on building things that two people had brought. Leonard Slatkin brought an incredible quickness to the orchestra, in terms of understanding what’s going on in a complex score and how they fit in. Leonard was such an incredible polymath with all different scores that the players had to have that speed. Then Hans Vonk came, and he worked on a small number of scores in extraordinary detail, and that brought a kind of depth one tends to associate with European orchestras. For me, what’s been interesting is blending these two traditions.
How do you do that?
Like Leonard, I love all kinds of scores. But I also spent a huge amount of time in Europe, where the culture of the society is reflected in all sorts of subtle ways in the music, and the music always has meaning. There’s never a note where you say, “Why would you have that note?” Every note is important. One left out is like one word taken from a sentence, and therefore the sentence is less comprehensible. So I’ve coupled all this with a kind of manic interest in precision.
Yet the playing never sounds stiff.
Composers and soloists who come to work with the orchestra are amazed that their precision doesn’t mean a lack of flexibility. It’s very hard to define something that is just so incredibly intelligent. There’s never any stupid playing.
Music’s full of divas. How do you handle them?
When people come into this hall, we all seem to leave our egos at the stage door. There have been times when one of the players has said, “Could we get a really clear downbeat here?” or I’ve asked them, “What do you find clearer, this or this?” I can’t imagine many of my colleagues opening themselves up to that kind of commentary.
But what about guest soloists? You’ve had no divas?
The players know we’d like to have people who listen to what they do and want to work with that rather than simply imposing their own ways. The best musicians are listening not only to themselves but to everything around them. The people who are jerks, we tend not to invite.
You’ve brought in 33 new musicians. How do you acculturate them to this kinder, gentler environment?
It just happens. There’s such a strong sense of community here, of family. There are orchestras which are great orchestras, but people leave the stage and they don’t see each other anymore. Musicians in other cities say, “You guys actually hang together between rehearsals!”
What’s been the best moment since you arrived?
One of the best was when Des Lee conducted “Auld Lang Syne” at a New Year’s Eve concert, because it was a total and complete surprise to everyone. I heard he was in the audience about 10 minutes before the show. I said, “Can we ask him if he would like to conduct ‘Auld Lang Syne’?” He loved to play the drums, and he so loved the orchestra, and this was literally a month before he passed away. To have a full, packed Powell Hall for this man who had given so much art and music to St. Louis… I knew he would not be able to keep the orchestra together, so I looked at them and said, “Des, you conduct the orchestra, and I’ll conduct the audience.”
What’s been your worst moment?
For me, most lousy moments are connected with death. The lousiest was the loss of Drew Thompson, our contrabassoon player, because it was so unexpected, and he was so young, and he was right at the start of what was clearly going to be a great career. But music keeps resonating, even if people who make the initial resonances are not there. He continues to resonate in our hearts.
How do you think about death—as fated, random, or just bad luck?
I’m one who looks at the universe in very large terms, and so I think we are extremely lucky for whatever we get, because the universe is a very big place. That doesn’t mean that our own personal loves are any less huge and important, but they pale by comparison to the size of the solar system, let alone the Milky Way. That’s why, although they may seem small on a cosmic scale, I think the interactions between people are really important. In a universe that’s so big, humans have to stick together.
You tear up pretty easily—is that just physiology or a greater depth of feeling?
I think it’s a combination. My uncle used to say that as a Robertson gets older, their bladder gets closer to their eyes, which I think is the physiological explanation. But it also seems to me—I’ve thought about this—that the enormity of connections that exist are very real and very close to the surface for me. It wasn’t that way, I don’t think, until my early 30s. And then I lost both parents quite close to each other: My mom was gone at 59, my father a year later at 67. As Oscar Wilde says, to lose one parent is a sad event, but to lose both seems like carelessness.
And a rude shock.
Yes. I’d had an idyllic childhood I thought of as normal—I thought everybody was that lucky. And then you travel around, and you see that they are not… and that these things don’t go on forever.
Do you ever feel guilty about your idyllic childhood? Like you haven’t suffered enough?
There’s a misnomer that suffering creates great art. The truth of the matter is, hard work creates great art. Suffering just creates suffering.
What makes you laugh—pratfalls, wordplay, schtick, rapier wit?
E, all of the above. I try and see the humor in almost everything, and it’s a real problem: Sometimes my brain is going very quickly, and I’ve had to learn—I’m still learning—that you don’t have to share everything that comes into your brain! But I find that humor is the most important thing, even in the darkest moments. My wife said something I thought was very profound the other day. She said, “We get so confused, because everything we’re doing is really just to produce laughter and art, but we get so caught up with tasks and possessions and jockeying for position…” I said, “But what about food?” and she said, “Ah. Cooking. Art.”
What’s easiest for you, that other people marvel at?
I’m not sure I’m very talented, but one thing I’m able to do is see connections very quickly. That’s how my brain’s built. When I’m listening to a string of notes, they connect up not only to where that string of notes might have been in other pieces but also to all of the different possible emotional contexts in which that string of notes might fit. And it’s all happening very fast. In the BBC Symphony Orchestra, they called it Robertsonland. Once I asked for the pissicatos—plucked strings—to be played a certain way because “they should be nuclear-charged popcorn.” Not only do they pop, but they really pop. This is popcorn that has a long shelf life.
Are you a romantic? Are there dangers to that?
I think so, yes. You will see very beautiful people, both male and female. I remember when I was in my 20s and I would suddenly become awestruck by some person. I made a rule: Never fall in love with someone until they stand up. They’d be sitting at a table, and you’d think, “This is the person I want to spend the rest of my life with,” and then they’d stand up and you go, “No.” It’s not so much romantic as doglike. Dogs are really great at superlatives. Everything’s the best. I understand that; I’m the same way. And it’s helpful when you’re working with 95 instrumentalists. You can have the best from all of them, because all of these qualities are unique and therefore noncomparable. That’s how I look at the Romantic idea: There’s this blending of souls, but it does not necessarily follow that there is physical contact or even a mental connection. It’s this way of being in love with someone, a writer or painter, a person you glance at on the street which totally takes your sense of yourself, your whole being, and transports it to another place.
The orchestra’s been weaving in lighter forms, integrating film and dance, interpreting pop culture, in the hope of introducing more people to classical music. What’s been your favorite experiment?
Probably the work we did with Wayne Shorter and his quartet. The improvisatory nature of a lot of jazz and even pop music is something we don’t get to do very often, so it was really nice to find out how free we could be.
And the worst experiment?
I have done enough things in my time that I can usually smell a rat before it gets anywhere close. But the one which was tricky was the first time we did The Wizard of Oz. The technology was a little bit shaky, so there was one point at which the time clock I was using to keep the music in sync with the film just completely went out. It just stopped. And the film just keeps going on—it’s merciless. I’m used to doing films in what we call the old school way: You look at the image and put the music with it. With a time code, you can figure out exactly, in terms of beats per minute, where something is supposed to be. You are looking at sync points. And if there isn’t a numerical sync, it’s, “The third beat is exactly when the car door slams.” Because I was used to doing it old school, I could look at Judy Garland’s feet and keep everybody going along the Yellow Brick Road in sync.
You once had to wing it at Carnegie Hall, too.
Yes. My first and last singing debut. Our soloist was stuck on a runway in a Chicago snowstorm. At least I was singing in the role of a chansonnier, a person who only pretends to be able to sing.
Is there anything you’ve done a 180 on?
Yes. When somebody auditions for another orchestra and they get the job, we give them some time to be in that orchestra before filling their position. We have to find a replacement, and it’s hard on the life of this orchestra, so I always complained—until one of the players I love as much as I love anybody in the orchestra decided to come back to us from the Boston symphony orchestra. Then I said, “Anytime somebody finds another position, let’s leave their position open for a while.”
Symphonies have tried glamming up classical artists, popping up the concerts…what’s next? Any new marketing techniques in the works?
We live in a society that measures things in terms of numbers, and so distribution numbers and ticket sales and attendance figures are what one uses to catalogue the value of experiences. Classical music works on a totally different scale. You may get a song by Lady Gaga which gets numbers we can’t come anywhere close to and has spinoffs in a Nintendo game or fan mags or social media hits. Pop culture is doing different things and it is made for greater consumption. And therefore if you look at numbers for classical music, it will always be a niche market. But there is a quality to the Vivaldi Four Seasons which takes it beyond those kinds of measurements.
So how do you know it’s successful?
By the quality of the experience received. You are asking people to listen for longer stretches before there is a break. A normal pop song goes no longer than four minutes. a piece asking you to concentrate for 10 minutes is going to be that much harder. So for me it really helped the moment I understood, “Wait a minute. We are a niche market. We are going to be most quickly understood and appreciated by people who have hands-on experience of playing or singing music, in the same way that someone who has played a sport is more likely to appreciate that sport done at a higher level. This explains the enormous success of cricket in the U.S.
So what can you do, other than perform well?
The most important thing classical music can do to help ensure its own survival—which I don’t think is in danger at all—is to make sure children get hands-on experience making music in one form or another. And it doesn’t matter what kind of music. When I was in Los Angeles performing with the L.A. Philharmonic, in comes Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and he thought it was so cool to come to the concert. Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead was so into these classical composers. Once you start working with the nuts and bolts of music, you will find lots of music fascinating.
It seems like every year the orchestra does more community outreach. Do you have a favorite experience or venue?
No. The real communication is between a musician and a listener, whether that’s one child sitting in a bed when Angie Smart goes to the hospital to play, or Alvin McCall and Jennifer Nitchman helping a second-grade class do a performance of The Nutcracker, or the trombones playing a concert in Tower Grove. They are all unique and irreplaceable.
What have we learned about music and why it touches us so deeply?
It’s in the brain’s best interests to develop easy, flowing connections between all of its various parts. Music makes more connections, so it sharpens the mind. You are building connections between the two hemispheres of the brain, and you are asking your visual cortex, auditory cortex, motor cortex, and executive function of the prefrontal cortex to all work in tandem. You’re also learning that progress is sure but slow! You can only really develop many things through slow and steady work, an insight which, in our days of being turned into consumers rather than human beings and having gadgets which immediately produce some type of stimulus or result, is a dangerous thing to lose.
How do you counter that?
When I’m working on music, I will do things with pencil and paper that I could do on computer. It becomes very evident to me when people who have written a piece of music actually worked it out in their head or just used a computer. Certain things are easy to do in computers—they’ve worked it out for you—and you can see the traces of that in the music.
What’s the best advice anyone ever gave you?
The man who was my first agent, who was quite a character—he was raised in a market in Tunisia—said, “Always leave a group of musicians better than you found them.” That’s easy if you have a group of people that don’t play very well, but if you have a group like the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, it could sound pretentious. However, as anyone who’s ever tried to do anything at a high level knows, it requires tremendous energy on everyone’s part—there is always entropy—so anything you can do to stave off degradation or a lessening in quality is already leaving them better than you found them.
The old joke about getting to Carnegie Hall—what difference has it made for St. Louis that you’ve taken the orchestra there every year, to resounding critical acclaim?
It’s the single most important national stage in the U.S., and it has international repercussions. It’s like going to the World Series and each time, we knock several out of the ball park.
How does being named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres change one’s life?
Not at all, ’cause they don’t give you a horse.
