Dvorak's honesty a popular policy

By WILLIAM DART

American conductor Steven Smith points to the irony that he made his Auckland Philharmonia debut last year with "a concert of farewells", including the Haydn Farewell Symphony and Strauss' Four Last Songs, alongside an ambassadorial gift in a revealing performance of Charles Ives' Three Places in New England.

He is back with us for a month, working with the orchestra in the weekend's Midwinter Masterpieces concerts and overseeing next week's Dvorak celebrations.

For the voluble Smith, Dvorak is a composer who writes "totally honest music. In every note of his music there's heart and soul and it speaks directly to both the musicians and the audience. I am convinced that's why he's popular".

Smith feels next Thursday's Seventh is "the finest of Dvorak's symphonies from a compositional point of view", while he loves The Noon Witch "for the simplicity of language with which he tells such a gruesome story".

The music is less dramatic for the winter concerts.

Smith seizes on the pairing of Mozart's Haffner Symphony and Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet which "offers another glimpse of Tchaikovsky other than that of the usual overwrought romantic, when in fact he is the most ardent classicist that could be.

"There may be a romantic soul there, but there's classicism in the gesture and the form".

Smith, a violinist, who was lured from the concertmaster's desk to the podium because he was "more interested in the big picture", has done the circuit of smaller orchestras in the United States, culminating in a stint as assistant conductor with the Cleveland Orchestra, eventually graduating to music director of the Santa Fe Symphony.

He is proud that Santa Fe has presented a balanced budget three years in a row - "bucking the trend, especially when Cleveland Orchestra is looking at an accumulated debt of $7 million".

Although Smith doesn't offer easy solutions to such fiscal problems, he puts a lot of energy into coaxing younger audiences into the concert hall.

In his own composition, Shake Rattle and Roar, youngsters played their own Styrofoam instruments with the orchestral players. "This really opened my eyes to having kids involved in concert-making," Smith says.

"We have too many passive listeners, and listening needs to be an active endeavour."

It is only through working with the younger generation that concert halls will be patronised in the future. Smith is not worried about the greying of our audiences. "Statistics have borne out the fact that they have always been older. These people have more leisure time and greater disposable income.

"But in previous generations those people had a basic musical education, which was the accepted thing in every middle-class household.

"Today, we have lost that. Many schools are not teaching music. So, by the time the kids of today are 50 and 60 they won't come to concerts."

Smith scorns dumbing-down to sell tickets. "It's an absolute mistake," he says. "If we don't believe what we do and stand up for what we believe in, how are we going to convince anyone else to be a part of it. In the long run we are damaging ourselves."

The key person in the orchestra is the artistic administrator, "who must develop a cogent strategy to develop programmes that are musically satisfying and can captivate the people.

"Unfortunately, the marketing department sometimes starts driving the ball. Orchestras need the right marketing approach to justify the music we want to do."

Even more elusive is the relationship between conductor and players. "I like a more collegial style, like we're all in this for the same reason, working together to make this happen.

"But different orchestras have different personalities, with a different collective psychology. How they as a group respond to any given conductor is going to be different.

"In my conductor's training, psychology is the one thing they never taught and it's half the job."

One of the bonuses at Cleveland was working alongside Pierre Boulez - "one of the great musical minds of the century. I respect his intellect and the simplicity of his music making.

"People criticise him because he doesn't seem to be doing anything on the podium but, if you know the score and you're watching him, you realise that everything you need to know is there."

When I remind Smith about last year's Ives triumph, his eyes take on the fire and zeal of a missionary. "We all have a duty to present the music of our countries, especially when we travel.

"And it is important to do new composers, keeping the art alive. People forget that during the time of Beethoven and Mozart there were a lot of other people being played whom we don't hear any more.

"You need that wide range of music so that time can distil what stands out for eternity as the great works of an era.

"If we don't play the music of today, there is no way anything is going to be distilled."

* Bruce Mason Centre, Saturday 4pm; repeated at Holy Trinity Cathedral, Parnell, Sunday 2pm; and Auckland Town Hall, Thursday Sept 9, 8pm