I could go anywhere … I’m choosing Scotland
Michael Tumelty - The Herald, Scotland, U.K.
January 28, 2009

HE'S dapper, he's diminutive, he's utterly charming and he's a giant. Five years ago, the European music scene didn't know who Yannick Nezet-Seguin was. Though he had already been music director of the Orchestre Metropolitain du Grand Montreal for four years, he hadn't conducted in Europe. Now, at the age of 33, the French-Canadian has Europe, the United States and pretty much the entire musical world banging on his door.

He is music director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and has been appointed principal guest conductor of the London Philharmonic. He is heading towards his 10th season in Montreal and has made a phenomenal debut at the Salzburg Festival. Last month he made his debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra; next month he debuts with the Boston Symphony and Los Angeles Philharmonic. And, next season, he has been invited to conduct the Vienna Philharmonic in Mozart's Requiem.

The season after that, it's the turn of the Berlin Philharmonic and Chicago Symphony Orchestras to welcome the charismatic young conductor to their halls. The Cleveland Orchestra, Covent Garden, the Met, the Munich Philharmonic, the Tonhalle Zurich and others are also in line.
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Nezet-Seguin is in the premier league. He can go anywhere he wants - and needn't go anywhere he doesn't fancy. So, after a hugely successful debut with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra a few seasons ago, he is back in Scotland to conduct the SCO and take up a two-week residency - a real coup for the orchestra, as anyone at the first of his concerts last week will confirm.

The man is a natural: a born conductor with a phenomenal technique and lashings of style, and possessed of a comprehensive command of the myriad elements that comprise the successful performance of music. With the world beckoning, why has he come back to Scotland?

There is a context, he says, reminding me that it is only four years since he started conducting outside Canada. Early on in his international career, the pace of his development was breathtaking. There was a point where it was a debut with a different orchestra every week. And that, categorically, is not what he wants.

"The real priority recently has been to identify for myself the ensembles with which I felt the most comfortable and thus could make better music," he says. "It's not something we talk about much in this business, but how do people get along? What is the chemistry within an ensemble, between an ensemble and a conductor, between a conductor and a soloist? In all of these respects, the SCO is one of the best experiences I've had in recent years. There was no question that I wanted to come back."

He loves that size of group, where, with the strings, "you can establish a special relationship". And he raves about the woodwind section: "There is a real individuality and a real care for the beauty of the sound." The same applies, he says, to two other chamber orchestras with which he has a special relationship: the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe.

Moreover, Nézet-Séguin values what he calls the rehearsal process as much as the final result. "In the SCO, I've found a group in which I've felt no limits at all to going in depth into the music; and in concert, unlike some, they don't shy away from that process." In other words, there is no abandonment of risk-taking, no falling back on a safe, default position.

At the age of 10, Nezet-Seguin announced to his parents that he wanted to be a conductor. "I saw the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and Charles Dutoit in the era of their greatest success. They were on TV, all over the media, and it got my interest. It grabbed me, and my focus never changed."

Fine. But the critical thing is what happened next. Nobody - his parents, his teachers, his contemporaries at school or in his church choir - was dismissive or condescending. Even when he had the brass neck to phone the conservatoire at 12 to request admission to the conducting class, he was not ridiculed. They let him in but advised him to pursue his piano studies, and his technical and academic studies, to the furthest extent possible: to get equipped, in other words.

Which he did, without for one moment wavering in his focus on conducting. He had private meetings with the great Carlo Maria Giulini, but the bottom line is this: the French-Canadian taking the musical world by storm has never actually had a conducting lesson. "I did training sessions, observation sessions and my year with Giulini. But I feel I learned conducting by chamber music and analysis. My piano teacher was my conducting teacher; my history of music teacher was my conducting teacher. It's so broad. I never say I'm self-taught."

So he beavered away, learning, thinking, analysing and conducting his church choir, which appointed him music director at 18. By 20 he had founded a baroque group, and by 22 he was conducting Montreal Opera. He has developed a colossally broad style base, from Monteverdi to Alban Berg in opera, and from baroque music to contemporary in other forms.

Ten years ago, in his early twenties, he took on the Metropolitain du Grand Montreal - at the time regarded as Montreal's number-two orchestra - and began seriously to cut his teeth, learn the repertoire and start developing the phenomenal musical and communication skills that have catapulted him to the very highest level. "The point is that when international' happened, I already had a solid background," he explains. "Yes, it's been amazingly fast, but it never felt like a whirlwind, or out of control."

His career continues to accelerate - but such is Nezet-Seguin's position now that he can dictate. "It's hectic, but the repertoire rate is slowing down. I control the volume and spread of my work. A priority for my agent is to make sure the repertoire is right for me and for that orchestra at that time."

Which brings him to this week's SCO concert and Mendelssohn's oratorio Elijah, a much-derided and neglected work. Nezet-Seguin thinks it's a masterpiece, "possibly the achievement of his lifetime". He is aware of all the prejudices against Elijah but he doesn't buy them. "We tend to be very pompous about it. We tend to be too reverential. Maybe it's been performed by too large forces, or forces not able to carry the real message of the music.

"It's true it can be done really boringly, and I can imagine how endless it can seem. And if it's too distanced and reverential, it becomes solemn, didactic or grandiloquent. And that," says the French-Canadian dynamo, with a wicked grin, "is not at all my way."