Stutzmann, the only female music director among the largest 25 American orchestras, takes the podium with a strong sense of self.
At Bravo! Vail this summer, Nathalie Stutzmann was leading the Philadelphia Orchestra in a reading of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony as volatile as the thunder that echoed around the mountains that evening.
It wasn’t so much impulsive as poetic. The players phrased their lines with the arc and the articulation of a singer — a good one. They seemed to breathe together, too, even to gasp for air.
In the depths of the first movement, immediately before Tchaikovsky’s most consuming cry of desolation, the bassoons, basses and timpani hold a low F sharp, for just a beat and a half. Most conductors plunge straight into the torment to come; no pause, after all, is marked in the score.
Stutzmann waited. She inhaled. The beat and a half stretched to four, then eight. That low F sharp came to sound lonely, bereft. Only then did she let the pain flood out.
Textually, it was blatant. Emotionally, it hurt. And for Stutzmann, that’s what matters.
“What is respect for a score?” Stutzmann, who for three decades was among the world’s leading contraltos before she turned fully to conducting, said during an interview the next day. “Is it to play exactly what is written, or is it to play what is written and put your own life in it, your emotions, your feelings, which means sometimes you might need to take a bit of time? Why not?”
She continued: “To respect the score is to make it alive, and the score lives because of us. The only thing we can do for the score is to dare.”
This week, a daring new era dawns at the Woodruff Arts Center in Georgia, as Stutzmann officially takes the podium at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, giving her first concerts as music director. The sole woman holding that title at one of the largest 25 orchestras in the United States, Stutzmann’s inauguration comes at the start of a season in which she also makes conducting debuts at the New York Philharmonic, the Bayreuth Festival and the Metropolitan Opera, where she oversees new productions of “Don Giovanni” and “Die Zauberflöte” in May.
Jennifer Barlament, the executive director of the Atlanta Symphony, called her “a really tremendous artist,” one who “brings a whole different set of voices, artistic tastes, personal experiences, musical experiences to the institution.” She added that “to have someone like her come to work with us, and partner with our musicians, is going to be transformative, because she goes for it every time as an artist.”
Atlanta’s search was a thorough one. The ensemble worked its way through a longlist of 80 or so candidates after its chief for two decades, Robert Spano, announced his departure in 2018. But when Stutzmann led two streamed concerts with the orchestra during its 2020-21 season, her talent and connection with the players quickly became clear, Elizabeth Koch Tiscione, its principal oboe, recalled.
“She came in and read Brahms’s Second Symphony with us,” Tiscione said. “Usually Brahms in our orchestra is played with this weightiness, and we do the same thing every time, no matter who is on the podium. She came in with this completely fresh approach.”
It was crucial, Tiscione added, “that people were willing to do it, because she was so convincing. You can just tell that the way she makes music is from her truth.”
BORN IN THE SUBURBS OF PARIS in 1965, Stutzmann is the daughter of two opera singers, and she grew up backstage. “I spent half of the time watching the singers, admiring them,” she said, “and half of the time in the pit, looking at these men.”
She learned the piano, bassoon, cello and viola, and she attended conducting classes as a teenager; her teacher refused to let her work with an orchestra while his male students could. She turned to singing instead, though after her vocal career took off in the late 1980s, she took care to watch the conductors she worked with closely. Eventually, at the end of the 2000s, she decided to take a chance.
“I sang with the best orchestras in the world, the best conductors in the world, and I felt I had achieved a lot of dreams,” she said. “Musically, it was time to try, and society was starting to change a little bit.”
With Seiji Ozawa and Simon Rattle as her mentors, Stutzmann studied with Jorma Panula and started a chamber ensemble, Orfeo 55, in 2009. That group, which she dissolved a decade later, was originally intended to allow her to sing Baroque repertoire that countertenors had otherwise claimed, she said, but podium dates started to follow.
“First I was asked to conduct Handel all the time,” Stutzmann recalled, “and I said, ‘I’m sorry, I love Handel, but I’m not a Baroque conductor.’ My core repertoire is Strauss, Bruckner, Wagner. I get a strong sound from the orchestra. This was also gender related. You know, women can conduct Mozart, and anything else, no. It’s so stupid.”
Even if Stutzmann says she declined many invitations to avoid limiting herself, her rise has been stunningly rapid. In 2017, she became the principal guest of the RTE National Symphony Orchestra in Dublin, then the chief conductor of the Kristiansand Symphony Orchestra in Norway a year later. In 2021, she picked up a post as principal guest conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, with which she releases an invigorating recording of Beethoven’s piano concertos (with Haochen Zhang) on Friday.
Stutzmann has her own style, and even her own sound — brawny yet supple. She never wanted to be “one of those soloists who pretends to be a conductor,” she said, and if there is little risk of that now, her interpretations are propelled forward through melodies, with even minor lines in textures singing out characterfully. Fittingly, she is willing to use her voice in rehearsals.
“Some conductors will get up there and give you some strange metaphor, and you’re like, you want me to play — purple?” Tiscione said. “I had one conductor tell me that he wanted a solo to sound like I cooked with too much garlic. She’ll just sing the phrase. It’s refreshing.”
At a time when orchestras are generally responding to pressures to diversify, and in an Atlanta metro area where the population is now majority-minority, Stutzmann nevertheless will focus on traditional repertoire from the Baroque and Romantic eras. (One exception is a Hilary Purrington premiere in her first concerts.)
“I need to be touched,” Stutzmann said, explaining her commitment to performing works in which she feels particularly inspired. “If I don’t feel touched myself, I don’t want to conduct. It’s hard, because you are asked to conduct many things. But I try to stay very strong with my identity. I will never be someone who can just conduct anything every day.”
Gaetan Le Divelec, Atlanta’s vice president of artistic planning as of this season, who was, for several years, Stutzmann’s manager at the Askonas Holt agency, said that while he had learned over time not to assume anything about her, he intended to broaden the range of guest conductors who work with the ensemble, and that they would continue to venture further afield.
“Part of my role is going to be to introduce Nathalie to the variety of styles that exist in music from living composers, and I certainly hope that she will be part of that picture,” he said. “But this is an important topic for any orchestra, and an orchestra’s approach to new music should, in any case, be bigger than just its music director.”
Stutzmann is passionate about music that the orchestra needs more of to build up its sound, Barlament said, as well as music that Spano and his longstanding principal guest, Donald Runnicles, played infrequently, such as the works of Mozart.
“I think of diversity and variety and things that are new from a lot of different perspectives,” Barlament said. “I wouldn’t say Franck’s ‘Le Chasseur Maudit’ is common repertoire, and I don’t even know when the last time is that the orchestra played Bizet’s Symphony.” (Stutzmann will conduct both pieces this season.)
Stutzmann, for her part, insists that taking on an American music directorship will not stop her staying true to her identity.
“You like it or you don’t like it, what can I do?” she said. “The secret is still to focus on the music.”
Source: Music - nytimes.com
