The final concert of the Spring 2025 season of the Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI) culminated with a performance on February 15 by Sir Mark Elder, one of Britain’s most acclaimed conductors, performing the works of Weber, Schumann and Beethoven.
Seventy-seven-year-old Sir Mark Elder has a long resume of the work he has done over the years, one being that he was Music Director of the Hallé from 2000 – 2024 and is now Conductor Emeritus. To date he has worked with many of the world’s leading symphony orchestras and seeing him perform recently in Mumbai, he has the agility and confidence to continue to do what he loves.
In an interview with The Free Press Journal, Sir Mark Elder shares his experience with the SOI, his early days in music, music education and much more.
Excerpts from the interview:
Can you share the reason you chose Weber, Schumann and Beethoven for the NCPA concert.
Oh, well, I was asked to do the Weber’s Overture to Oberon. I was told that the orchestra hadn’t played it for a long time. In fact, I was told that they’d never played it, which isn’t true. But it’s such an important piece that I think one should program it comparatively, regularly, so that people have a chance to play it often, but also the public has a chance to really listen to it live. I think it’s a very good piece for live experience. The other two pieces I chose as a way to prepare for Beethoven, that they come from the same background, Weber and Schumann, next generation, of course, but that they would fit well together, that the climax of the concert would be the symphony.
You’re conducting the SOI for the first time, what have you heard about the SOI prior to your visit to India?
Oh, a lot because so many of my friends and colleagues have already been here. Steven Huff, the pianist, for instance, told me he’d been here more than once. He told me he enjoyed it and had a lovely experience to come and play here. For ages, I couldn’t find time in my diary to come because there were so many other things in my life. But eventually, we managed to find it this February.
How did this tour come about? Were you approached by the NCPA or what was it?
I was approached by the consultant to the NCPA, Ed Smith, who’s worked or used to work with the orchestra to try and encourage musicians from England to know about the orchestra and to find time in their diary. So that’s how I first heard about it.
What are your earliest musical memories, if you can tell us something about that?
There are two different sorts of memory. To sing, for me, was very, very natural. I did it when I was a child without realizing what I was doing. I would just sing, invent things. My mother wanted me to become a chorister in a cathedral. She took me down to Canterbury for the voice trial, and I got the place. And I was incredibly, like seven or eight or something, much too young to be away from home. But I became a chorister in Canterbury, and I was there for four or five years, and it was the beginning of my musical career. It was an incredible opportunity to learn music. When I left that school, the choir school, and my voice broke, I could sight read anything because we’d sight read all the time. Those were my earliest musical memories, singing great music in the Casper Cathedral. But there’s another memory I have, which is my first orchestra concert. I was brought up in a part of North London which was away from the center of London. One of the London orchestras, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Thomas Beecham’s Orchestra, used to come, perhaps once a year and play in the area where we were. My mother took me to a concert when I was 10 or 11 years old. They played the Enigma Variations of Edward Elgar and The Rossini Semiramide Overture. I can still remember the event of going to it and concentrating like mad and thinking, what are these notes? I felt this, because the music was so different from the music that I was singing. It was like another door had opened for me.
What made you choose from choir to being a conductor? How did you make the transition?
Well, it happened by going to Cambridge, I have to say. I went to Cambridge to read music, but I knew from the moment that I went that I wouldn’t use all the academic knowledge that they expected me to have. I knew that I wasn’t going to be an academic musician or a lecturer or working in a university. I didn’t know quite what I was going to be, but I knew that it couldn’t be in this environment. Now, that wasn’t bad because it meant that I had three years as a young man in Cambridge making huge numbers of friends and hearing music for the first time. Then I realized that all the things that mattered to me in my life could come together. I was a musician. I sang, I played the bassoon, played the piano, and I acted a lot in plays. So all these things seemed to point, I suddenly realized, to being a conductor. And I didn’t know whether I could do it, but I suddenly thought I want to try this. This might be the answer because I could play the piano, but I wasn’t that good. I didn’t have a very good technique. I could do lots of stuff, but I couldn’t play a concert. So I thought, I don’t want to be a bassoonist, because you spend all your life scraping two bits of cane. It’s neurotic. So I thought, what am I going to do? Perhaps I could be a conductor. So I started to conduct when I was at Cambridge.
What was your age around that time?
I was around 20 or 21. I did lots of concerts, and two or three operas. Probably terrible, but it was an experience. I found opera the most exciting thing imaginable, because it combined being a musician and being an actor. I heard all these operas, either on LP records, in Covent Garden or Sadler’s Wells, for the first time. I knew this was my life.
What is your opinion on the SOI?
Well, I think that this orchestra is full of the most wonderful musicians who are very dedicated. The problem for them is that they don’t play together enough. They don’t give regular concerts. They have these periods of time, and so they have to find themselves every time they come together and it’s difficult that the orchestra can’t always be exactly the same people. There’s always a feeling of creating something fresh. I quite like the idea of training an orchestra to rise to do better. One of the things I think a conductor can do is to show the orchestra where the bar is. We make people do better by rising above the bar, to what they thought would be the expected level. You can get better at making music if you demand more.
What challenges do you face as a conductor?
Travelling all over the world leaves me with very little family time. I would like to spend more time with my family, my wife, children and grandchildren. I really miss out on many celebrations and milestones of the little ones and that’s one thing I want to be more present for.
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