Enter Alan Gilbert - Page 2

The New York Philharmonic chose a relative unknown as their new chief conductor. Just before he took up the baton, Alan Gilbert talked to James Inverne about his plans

Alan Glibert - photo Chris Lee

Alan Glibert conducts the New York Philharmonic - photo Chris Lee

After we reach his spacious abode, picking our way through children’s toys in the garden, he hands me a quite enormous mug of tea and settles into a sofa. Considering that he is weeks away from his summer concerts with his new American orchestra, after which he officially takes over, he is supremely relaxed (what might be termed “Obama-esque”). Mind you, it’s not as though he and the players are complete strangers. Gilbert is part of the family, literally, both parents having been violinists for the orchestra (his mother, Yoko Takebe, still is, though his father, Michael Gilbert, has retired).

So what was the Philharmonic to him growing up, I ask – just an orchestra? A place your parents went to work? A way of life? “All of the above,” he smiles. “When I was a young child I had a lot to do with the orchestra. When they toured my parents were of course part of that and my sister and I very often travelled with them. I used to help hand out the passports, I knew the players, I used to sit on the planes with them and play games. We were all close.”

Although such experiences, alongside Michael Tilson Thomas’s children’s concerts (the series Bernstein had famously initiated), provided an early introduction to the classics, it was a different genre that attracted him at school. “I played drums in my schools’ jazz bands,” he recalls. “I still love jazz.” Did he need it, I wonder, as light relief from the continual soundtrack to his early home life? He grins at the suggestion. “If you’re implying that it was some sort of antidote, it wasn’t like that at all. My parents also loved jazz and Dad was always playing me jazz records. In some ways, jazz was a flip side of classical. It filled out the picture. And being exposed to jazz has served me very well. I realised that the lines that people draw between styles are very artificial.”

One composer who shared this view was Leonard Bernstein, with whom Gilbert studied and to whom in some ways he is now – because of this appointment – being compared. His memories are filled with veneration but also a refreshingly clear-eyed perspective. “When I started going to concerts, Bernstein was coming back to the Philharmonic as a guest and was in a down period after his wife died. Although it was still always an event when he came back, he seemed tired. As I got older and he neared the end of his life, though, everyone felt that his music-making was back and maybe greater than ever. Some of the greatest concerts I can remember are of him conducting in that period.

“I had lessons with him at Tanglewood, and it was always an unusual dynamic when he was around. He was so generous and loved to spend time with young conductors – he would stay up all night and chew the fat with us, talking about whatever was on his mind. It was exciting to be around him and you felt that he was very giving. On the other hand, it was also about him. He needed you to give a lot of energy and it took a lot out of you to be around him.” He was looking for disciples, I suggest. Gilbert ponders – he seems never to have found quite the right answer to this question. “He didn’t always surround himself with the kind of student who went on to become great in their own right,” he says, hesitantly. “He was a great teacher. But although there were brilliant students, like Ozawa or Michael Tilson Thomas, there weren’t as many as you might expect.”

For Gilbert, Bernstein represented something that, in his polite, understated way, the new man clearly feels has been missing lately. “Lenny was iconic, and when he was music director of the New York Philharmonic it really was part of the fabric of New York. Obviously it still means a lot for the city and is an iconic institution. But it’s my hope that we can get back to the point where it’s commonly accepted that the orchestra represents what’s best about the city. Even if people don’t necessarily set foot inside the concert hall, they should feel civic pride that this is one of the world’s great orchestras and that it not only operates in New York City but is of the city. I have a feeling that it was more that way back in Lenny’s day than recently.”