In a primary school, children who have never heard a violin before suddenly stop talking. On Halki, people with no connection to classical music come out of a concert lost for words. Nikos Chaliasas, conductor of the Athens State Orchestra, has seen it happen time and again, and he knows exactly what is taking place in that moment. “Once you manage to concentrate,” he says, “you enter another dimension, one that carries you towards the greatest possible pleasure.” We spoke to him about mistakes on stage, the art of listening, the power of music and a festival that has been carefully nurtured over the years.
If you closed your eyes tomorrow morning, what would be the first sound that told you which city you were in? And how differently does a conductor hear the world from everyone else?
I would say the birds in the National Garden. It is a sound that immediately makes me think of a calmer side of Athens, even though you are essentially right in the centre of the city.
As for the world, I’m not sure a conductor hears it differently. Music, though, is another matter.
Whether you mean to or not, and simply through habit after a certain point, you hear every voice, everything that is right and everything that is wrong!
Behind a concert that seems perfectly coordinated, there are doubts, mistakes and moments the audience never sees. Which of those unseen moments has stayed with you most, and why?
Small mistakes, and occasionally larger ones, can certainly happen. And although, as you say, everyone hears them, very few people, sometimes no one at all, actually notice them. For us on stage at that moment, though, they can feel enormous.
There is one moment, not entirely unseen, that made a huge impression on me, and I will describe it to you. When I was studying in London, I attended a London Symphony Orchestra concert at the Barbican, conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich, with Maxim Vengerov as soloist in Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1. During the fourth movement, where the tempo is fiendish, one of Vengerov’s strings broke.
As is customary, he turned to the leader of the orchestra and they made the familiar violin swap that happens in situations like this. During those ten seconds or so, the orchestra of course did not stop, presumably because of the speed and difficulty of the movement, so by then it had moved several bars ahead.
But instead of picking up where the orchestra had reached, the soloist started again from the point where he had stopped. At that moment I thought, as I am sure most of the people around me did, “Disaster!”
And yet, within a matter of seconds, without the conductor really being able to make any kind of “drastic” intervention, the orchestra found the soloist again.
A magical moment… that’s what happens when experience, knowledge and musicianship come together at that level.
Classical music still carries the prejudice that it is “not for everyone”. Have you seen people change their minds in the course of a single concert? What is the moment when you realise that someone attending for the first time has put those labels aside and truly surrendered to the music?
I have met so many people who had no previous experience of classical music or classical instruments, yet watched their “first” concerts with a sense of wonder and almost ecstasy, and afterwards spoke to me in glowing terms about what they had experienced.
This has happened, and continues to happen, very often on islands such as Halki, which are so far removed from major urban centres, and also in primary schools, where we give educational presentations to young children.
That is when they realise that classical music really is for everyone. And that, with the right, carefully measured “doses”, they can gradually learn to follow it, enjoy it and understand just how wonderful it can be.
Classical music, after all, covers an enormous range in terms of period, style and scale. And then, of course, there is the vast world of the voice, with opera, lieder, choirs…
Even people who love classical music do not listen to all these different genres and categories with the same degree of pleasure. They have their preferences, which is perfectly natural.
For the audience, a concert ends when the final note is played. For a conductor, though, the next one has already begun. What creative projects are occupying you at the moment, and which of the Athens State Orchestra’s upcoming encounters with the public are you most looking forward to?
The truth is that, just as a conductor has to think “ahead”, “before”, as an artistic director I am also constantly thinking about the next move, the next event.
There are many different projects coming up, but I do not usually announce them until the time comes for press releases and official announcements. I would not want to “take away” that pleasure from my wonderful colleagues.
There are places that make you want to lose yourself in their rhythm. Halki is one of them. When music meets an island with such a distinctive identity, what emerges between the place, its people and the orchestra?
Halki draws you into its own rhythm all by itself. The calm, the natural beauty, the slower pace, the simplicity, these are some of the qualities that make it very easy to become part of the island.
All the musicians who have taken part in the previous four festivals, well over 100 of them, have been so enthusiastic that, if it were possible, they would all come back every year. There has not been a single person who felt indifferent about taking part.
The residents, too, have grown to love the festival. They have come to understand the festival’s many layers of value, and now embrace us as if we were part of their own community.
And above all, Mayor Frangakis sees the “musical seed” he planted with such care and affection five years ago flowering and growing from one year to the next. The Halki Festival now holds a prominent place among the country’s leading music festivals, and our ambition is for it to establish itself internationally too.
We live in an age when everything happens quickly: a video lasting a few seconds, an endless stream of images, attention that is easily lost. Symphonic music seems to ask for precisely the opposite: time, silence and concentration. Do you think this is ultimately its greatest obstacle, or its greatest strength?
It is both an obstacle today, when everything and everyone moves at a frantic pace, and also its enduring strength.
Because music has nothing tangible in the way that sculpture, painting or photography does, it simply requires more concentration, stillness and calm. It is not easy, but it never was, even in earlier times when the pace of people’s lives was not quite so relentless.
Once you manage to concentrate, and this applies to us musicians as listeners too, you enter another dimension, one that carries you towards the greatest possible pleasure.
That is when they realise that classical music really is for everyone. And that, with the right, carefully measured ‘doses’, they can gradually learn to follow it, enjoy it and understand just how wonderful it can be.
