Breathe in the air of nature’s music

Alexander Liebreich

Alexander Liebreich burst into song more than once when we met earlier this week. After all, he says, "It was singing in the Bamberg Symphony Chorus that made me determined to become a conductor, so I could get to know these symphonic scores in more detail."

The last few years have been busy for this German conductor, whose baton work was hailed by one Dutch critic as "stunning in every respect". At only 36, Liebreich has worked with orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic and Amsterdam's Concertgebouw. Tomorrow night the Auckland Philharmonia joins the illustrious list.

The first half of the AP concert is devoted to Mozart, whose music is the perfect example of how the voice must be the final arbiter of musical truth. "It's there in the communication between instruments," says Liebreich. "It's the voice that tells you how to phrase."

He admits he will miss the sound of the period fortepiano in the aria Ch'io mi scordi di te although soloists Stephen De Pledge and Anna Leese, both returning home from Britain, will hold the floor in "what is really a little Mozartian double concerto for piano and soprano".

Mozart's piano concertos are "fabulous", he exclaims, and one senses that tomorrow night's K595 is the composer's best as well as his final work in this form.

"Can we hear in this music that the composer would be dead in just a few months?" Liebreich asks, singing the song Come Lovely May that its joyous Rondo is based on. The question is rhetorical.

After interval, Elgar's Enigma Variations is a score Liebreich much prefers to the composer's symphonies. "The symphonic form, with its two subjects fighting and battling away, is too typically German for Elgar. The Variation form is much freer."

Elgar, he explains, is more popular in Holland than his native Germany, painting a picture of a musical Europe in which diversity has its frustrations. "Europe is just so full and you're so close to each other that you're always trying to keep your identity. It doesn't make life very relaxing because you have to fight for your right to exist."

He prefers the more open mindset in Holland. "There is much more of a tradition for modern music and people will go to a concert not knowing what to expect. You are always aware of that rivalry between the Concertgebouw and the Berlin Philharmonic but when you go to North Korea they just play wonderfully without worrying about such things."

Here is a man who knows George W. Bush's most feared country first-hand. He has written a book on North Korea. He gave the Korean premiere of Bruckner's Eighth Symphony in 2002 and later this year will take Mahler's Second to Pyongyang.

Like Liebreich, the North Koreans can't resist breaking into song. "They would sing the whole day if they could," Liebreich remembers.

"The first thing they would do at lunchtime is sing a song for me. It sounds strange that after only 10 minutes of eating you would get up and say 'OK, I am singing now' but then the others would get up and join in too. Not only traditional Korean songs but Mozart tunes, Italian arias and the theme from Titanic which was very popular when I was last there."

But there are other loves in Liebreich's life, one being diving, the excuse for a recent trip to Singapore and neighbouring countries.

"With no sound underwater," he muses, "just bubbles, you suddenly discover another side of the world. We think that human beings are the centre of everything, but being underwater changes that."

Music, too, can be better when it's not necessarily "human-centred". The work of Richard Strauss is flawed for this conductor, "over-dramatic and too obsessed with the composer's own problems". Others can still "breathe the air of nature, composers like Bach, Bruckner, Brahms and Mozart".

With three Mozart works on tomorrow night's programme, we could be in for a veritable nature spree.

Performance

* Who: Alexander Liebreich, with the Auckland Philharmonia

* Where and when: Auckland Town Hall, tomorrow, 8pm