Introducing Elias Brown
As we welcome Elias Brown to the Maestro Arts roster, we delve into his musical background and find out about his hopes for the future
What are your first memories of music?
Growing up in Los Angeles was an eclectic experience, and my parents, who come from a theatre background, have diverse musical interests. In the car, we would listen to Joni Mitchell and Radiohead and Keith Jarrett alongside recordings of Janáček and solo piano works of Ravel. From an early age, apparently, I used to sit at the piano and improvise. My parents would say, ‘Play a song about daddy,’ or ‘Play a song about the ocean’, and I would just start playing. I remember thinking the black keys were good and the white keys were bad, because any pentatonic combination of the black keys would sound great. My first piano lessons were with a wonderful jazz teacher who saw improvisation and learning by ear as essential, so music has always been something that’s explorative and conversational for me.
When did you become interested in classical music?
When I was around nine, I saw Jean-Yves Thibaudet play Rhapsody in Blue at the Hollywood Bowl. It was a pivotal moment as a young jazz musician to hear classical music merged with jazz, and it opened me up to the world of orchestral performance. I decided to learn the piece and took it to my teacher. Around the same time, I started the trumpet, and fell in love with the experience of being a part of a large ensemble. I was the lucky beneficiary of the incredible public school music programme in Santa Monica: my high school had six orchestras, five bands and eight choirs, with a strong history of producing professional musicians – David Robertson and Edwin Outwater attended the same school, and several of my friends from then now play in major orchestras.
How did your interest in conducting emerge?
In my first year in high school, we toured to New York and had a masterclass with Daniel Boico, then Assistant Conductor of New York Philharmonic. We had rehearsed our programme for months but with him on the podium, the orchestra suddenly sounded so unified. He had studied with Ilya Musin, who taught generations of conductors in St Petersburg. One of the principles of that school is to communicate everything non-verbally, which resonated deeply with me. I was fortunate to meet him again a couple years later and he began to give me lessons on Skype.
By then, a large part of me had already decided on conducting, but I didn’t want to go to a conservatoire. I was eager to explore ways in which music intersects with visual arts, architecture and society at large – to ask broader questions that are harder to articulate within the conservatoire system. The liberal arts system in the US provides this space to explore, and as a student at Yale I dotted between majors, including German Studies and Sociology. During that time, I was conducting and exploring music and its resonances with other aspects of life, and at the end of the day, I returned to the music department. I suppose I had to go away in order to come back.
What is your approach to classical scores?
Approaching classical repertoire is not so different to approaching a new score. You’re trying to understand the specificity of a composer’s language, the way they use certain markings. Our notation system is imperfect and often even the composers are figuring it out as performances go on. It’s all about being curious and open, starting with what’s on the page.
I am very interested in what period performers do with classical repertoire, more so than the accepted versions and ‘authoritative’ recordings. I remember hearing Teodor Currentzis’s Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony for the first time, thinking, ‘This is punk!’ For me, it’s in the spirit of the music not to see yourself as just a part of a lineage of great conductors performing this piece, but to explore the entire range of its possibilities.
You’ve been working with Esa-Pekka Salonen – what have you learnt from him?
It’s been wonderful to work with him as an assistant across so many different settings: San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Finnish Radio. We’re currently working together on Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina in Salzburg. Perhaps the most important thing I’ve learnt is seeing how he prioritises trust across all of these settings, and how that means something slightly different for each orchestra.
Very early on, I remember him passing along advice he received from Boulez, about the value of the relationships you cultivate across your artistic practice. Valuing relationships is the most important thing, and a career follows from that – not vice versa. A career is an ineffable idea, but relationships are real and tangible. Esa-Pekka has worked with the same orchestras continuously for decades, because of this emphasis on relationships and trust. Music-making has to come from believing in one another and understanding that a collaboration is bigger than any one person.
I’m also inspired by how Esa-Pekka’s composer and conductor identities intersect, and how he approaches scores as a composer. For example, in Khovanshchina, Mussorgsky incorporates real world sounds, such as church bells and the sound of a balalaika. As we create the sound design for our production in Salzburg, we are imagining how Mussorgsky would work with the conditions and possibilities we have today – he would certainly have been interested in expanding that sound world. As a conductor, you can see a piece through the composer’s eyes in a broad way, not with the literalist idea that something is sealed behind glass and can’t be touched. We can be curious and open, while still serving the composer’s intention.
What have you learned about the more technical sides of conducting?
Studying with Sian Edwards at the Royal Academy of Music, I developed my physical technique of conducting and how to change sound in real time. Later, studying with Harry Curtis in Berlin and as I began to work professionally, I recognised that the even greater lesson is how to understand and utilise this technique. You don’t have to exercise control 100 per cent of the time – there’s a lot of give and take between conductor and orchestra.
There are certain moments where the orchestra requires more grip on the steering wheel – as you shift gears or navigate a difficult transition. Then there are the moments where you just have to give the orchestra space to play, so the musicians all feel able to give themselves fully into an idea. Of course, you’re trying to urge that idea in one direction, rather than 80 different directions, but it comes back to trust. Orchestras play together every day, over long periods of time, and understand how to work together. You’re trying to open a space for them to do what they do best, within a certain frame or in a certain direction. It is always a collaboration.
What are your aims when you curate projects?
While I was running a new music ensemble at Yale, I began to be interested in curation and putting on concerts at the University Art Gallery. It’s an extraordinary space and they were very open about having music be in dialogue with visual art exhibitions. While I was at the Royal Academy of Music, I learnt more about this relationship, visiting museums such as the Tate Modern, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and Kolumba Museum in Cologne. These museums can put very old and very new objects in dialogue in ways that resonate with us and speak to our moment in society, to help us understand who we have been, who we are and who we’re becoming. This was very inspiring when I began to think about putting together musical programmes.
There are, obviously, practical things we also have to think about when programming concerts: what is right for this audience and this orchestra; what kind of relationship does the orchestra want with its public. I love finding ways to go beyond, say, programming based on nationality. It’s more about finding exchange between composers that we might not necessarily think of as connected – two composers you might invite to a dinner party, and see what conversation emerges.
What are the responsibilities of a musician today?
At a surface level, it’s about finding ways to keep audience members in seats (and then, of course, getting them to leap to their feet!). But on a deeper level, it involves being curious about how music intersects with the moment we are in as a society – and how to encourage a quality of listening to one another. An orchestra is a civic institution with which we can create a space for thinking about society and ourselves – questioning and contemplating.
I remember being told in a class in my second year at college that classical music had ceased to be relevant after the Second World War. That narrative made want to push against it. There is this idea that the canon has been decided by music historians, but in fact we are constantly making it in real time, continuing to decide what it is with our programming. It’s essential to take part in this evolution, opening the doors for other voices to be present in the concert hall.
What does a successful career look like to you?
I’m interested in a career that is built on solid collaborative relationships, whether that’s with orchestras or artists from other fields. The sustainability and longevity of these collaborations is really important to me.
I’ve also begun to do more opera this season – with Washington National Opera in the autumn, and now working with the McBurney brothers and Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra for the Salzburg Easter Festival. I’m inspired by how opera brings together people with different backgrounds, experiences and skill sets, to make this thing that is larger than the sum of the parts. Perhaps it’s utopian, but it’s so important that we continue to find ways of working together across different backgrounds towards a collective vision.
