Young conductor keeps the momentum going

By WILLIAM DART

On Saturday, 31-year-old Xian Zhang will make her New Zealand debut, conducting the Auckland Philharmonia.

The talented young woman will take the baton for a programme of Mozart, Schumann, Verdi and Smetana, the first concert in the Philharmonia's Lion Foundation Midwinter Masterpieces series.

The conductor comes with impressive credentials, including the first prize in the 2002 Maazel/Vilar International Conductors Competition.

Zhang admits the win has put her on "a track that I never expected" and in June she is relinquishing the security of an academic post at the University of Cincinnati to take up the baton full-time.

We start our conversation with memories of her early days in China. Her mother, a music teacher, was a victim of the Cultural Revolution, unceremoniously sent from conservatoire studies to farm labouring.

"That finished her musical training," Zhang adds laconically.

Her father, a worker in an instrument-making factory, "learned the craft of piano-making, bought all the parts and assembled me a bright red piano".

The instrument served her well until, at the age of 12, she went to Beijing's Central Conservatory of Music. Piano studies were eventually relinquished - "my teacher didn't think I was physically strong enough" - and replaced with musicology. Zhang was worried.

"Although I knew that history was important," she confides, "I wanted to make music."

Conducting seemed the perfect compromise and she studied under two professors, both women graduates of the Moscow Conservatory.

"Because China had been very close to Russia from the time of the Revolution in 1949, we had Russian experts in everything from science and athletics, to music," Zhang explains. "They set the pace for later generations."

And what about the downside of this solid Russian training? "We didn't get to hear much music before Bach or after Mahler," Zhang adds, with a tinkling laugh.

Her musical horizons are wider now and, with the Maazel/Vilar success winning her a friend and associate in Lorin Maazel, the maestro has proved to be both mentor and model for her.

"Maazel has the perfect technique," Zhang explains. "He feels it is not a physical thing, but a mental one; it all comes from your mind."

Not surprisingly, Zhang is also an admirer of Carlo Maria Giulini and reveals, "Carlos Kleiber is my all-time favourite. These people really can fuse their emotional expression into their movement without you even feeling like they're trying to do that. It's so natural."

Today Zhang is rehearsing Mozart's G Minor Symphony for this weekend, and frankly confesses, "These classic works are the most difficult to do - the hardest in the whole repertoire because they are so very transparent."

She also finds that, apart from "that big tune in the opening Allegro", the symphony is not an easy one, "especially in the second movement, where you have to keep the momentum going, like in opera".

There are not so many women conductors, but Zhang feels that women are making their influence felt. "They have the advantage of being easier to get on with. Maybe we tend to co-operate a little more easily than male conductors."

She mentions a magazine article which slated an orchestra for being decidedly mean with a visiting maestra, adding ruefully: "You have to really prove that you can do well."

We both laugh when Zhang recounts how, one night at the opera, she had to play a 10-bar introduction four or five times, "because the diva was still in the dressing room fixing her makeup. Terrible things always happen in the pit".

But I return to a question that has not been answered. Has Zhang ever suffered from discrimination as a woman conductor? There's a moment's hesitation and then the answer - "Not yet" - delivered with that characteristic laugh.

There are quite a few "not yets" in Zhang's career, she cheerfully tells me. She still has to tackle works by some of the exciting contemporary Chinese composers with a professional orchestra. They tend to be demanding, she says.

"I did Bright Sheng's piano concerto Red Silk Dance with the school orchestra, but it took us some time to get the notes right."

She has also not seen, at first hand, the financial exigencies rife in the music world, although it breaks her heart to see her Cincinnati students frustrated because it is so hard to find a position in the States.

But it's the same all over the world and, when I mention her stint conducting The Marriage of Figaro in Beijing, she sees chilling parallels: "There is an opera house, but they do fewer productions now because of financial problems."

Performance

* Who: Xian Zhang, with the Auckland Philharmonia

* Where and when: Bruce Mason Centre, Saturday 4pm; Holy Trinity Cathedral, Sunday 2pm