The Long Climb to the Podium

I remember the first time I stood shakily on a podium in front of members of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, a small group of tentative parents and one handsomely clad Christopher Seaman. Bow tie in place, hands neatly folded, the British conductor coached me and the other gangly high schoolers chosen for the Symphony Australia youth program with a humour and tenderness that belied his position in the industry. He cajoled and encouraged, gently correcting our technique and telling anecdotes about mistakes made, difficulties ironed.

The musicians in front were patient with our fumbled beginnings, the musical corners so clumsily handled. We were just beginning. We were hungry. Most of us were not destined for full-time careers on the stage, but many of us continue to string together a life made up of music: freelancing and teaching, managing and accompanying. Some do find themselves on podiums now, and when they walk across a stage, we all walk with them; all of us with our childhood dreams, long grown dusty but never entirely put away.

Every year, a new, bright-eyed cohort of young Australian artists pitch their baton-shaped dreams into the universe. They enrol in degrees and short courses, academies and workshops, tutorials and masterclasses, both at home and abroad, with the hope of making it on the world stage one day. But in recent decades, few have made it, the number dwindling year on year. What is changing? Certainly not the appetite for a career in the classical music industry; universities are posting record enrolment figures. But something appears to be lacking. Is it the waning interest in early childhood music education? The funding cuts to key programs that pluck teens from their classrooms and set them on the path to musical success? The professional opportunities lessening not just at home but across the world? Perhaps the cost-of-living crisis is to blame, or the changing audiences? But one thing is for sure – where there were once many, there are now fewer Australian conductors making it to the podium.

There’s something elusive about the role of a conductor. At the time of writing, it takes about 0.2 seconds to find 225,000,000 Google results to the question: What does a conductor do? Ask a couple of working maestri, though, and you’ll quickly find there are some basic non-negotiables: keep time, cue solos, be a leader and a roadmap, knowing the path better than anyone else in the room. Then there are the other, less-teachable parts of the profession: flair, musical ideas, charisma and passion. All are necessary, but every conductor presents these in their own idiosyncratic way.

“You have to have something to say,” conductor after conductor tells me over the phone. Sometimes, a lack of traditional technique can be forgiven because of the wealth of musical ideas and an onstage je ne sais quoi. In some repertoire, nothing but technical precision will do. In many cases, the truth falls somewhere in between.

If you were asked to name the country producing the world’s top conductors today, Australia may not immediately reach your lips despite the international success of the trailblazing Simone Young, Chief Conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, who, in July, became the first Australian and first woman to conduct Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the prestigious Bayreuth Festival.

Finland or Germany might jump to mind first, but the training at home was highly sought-after historically. The programs run by Symphony Australia (the company now known as Symphony Services International) – one of which led me to Christopher Seaman – are seen by a generation of conductors as the reason they now do what they do.

The organisation began in 1997 as a centralised service provider for the six Australian state symphony orchestras, offering access to its impressive print music and program note library. It was perhaps best known for its commitment to national artistic development and the programs it offered on behalf of the six member orchestras, including the tiered conducting programs from high school to post-graduate level. Many homegrown artists that grace stages across the globe have graduated from one or more of its educational offerings or competitions.

One such artist is conductor Benjamin Northey, a musician and creative leader known to most in the Australian musical community. Following studies at the Sibelius Academy in Finland and Stockholm Royal Academy of Music with the acclaimed (if controversial) maestro Jorma Panula – the then leader of the Symphony Australia conducting program – Northey returned home to become one of the most sought-after conductors in the country. He is currently Chief Conductor of the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra in New Zealand and Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor – Learning and Engagement of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

Now, two decades since being named the 2001 Symphony Australia Young Conductor of the Year and with a clear view of the Symphony Australia-sized hole left in local training, Northey has been announced as the new Creative Director of the Australian Conducting Academy from 2025 and is set on developing a new approach that will allow more emerging hopefuls to pick up the baton.

He is careful to emphasise that ‘young’ is not the right word to use here – artists can approach conducting at any point in their career and be considered ‘emerging’. Northey tells me hopefully about his new three-tiered approach, a method that will allow those with great developing skill to move quickly into a position where they are ready to step up to the podium. The program that Northey is adopting is no slouch, built by German conductor Johannes Fritzsch, Principal Guest Conductor of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, and the team at the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra.

Fritzsch, who first conducted for local audiences in Opera Australia’s 1992 production of Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, is proud of the young musicians he has ushered through the ACA program over the past years.

“All the participants of the last group are now assistants or working with one of the major orchestras,” he says, adding that Sam Weller was recently chosen as one of six finalists who will compete in next year’s grand final of the International Conducting Competition Rotterdam. “I’m happy with the cohort . . . it’s an amazing program for young conductors.”

The recent cohort is, in fact, flying despite the current lack of pathways for Australian conductors. The five participants – Weller, Ingrid Martin, Carlo Antonioli, Nathaniel Griffiths and Leonard Weiss – have gone from strength to strength during and since their participation in the program. Martin was recently announced as having secured a spot in the prestigious 2024–2025 Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship Mentoring Program, which will see her join the ranks of now leading conductors Karina Canellakis, Mei-Ann Chen, Jeri Lynne Johnson and Valentina Peleggi.

Antonioli and Weiss have both held the post of Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s Cybec Assistant Conductor, while Griffiths has worked with the Auckland Philharmonia, Christchurch Symphony Orchestra and Dunedin Symphony Orchestra in the role of New Zealand Assistant Conductor-in-Residence. It’s an impressive lineup of achievements for the first cohort of the academy, following its expansion in 2023, and an indicator of the level Australia has to offer, should certain cracks in the path be fixed in coming years.

There are potholes in the training that Fritzsch can quickly call up, holes he thinks lack an easy fix without interventions from major institutions. “Some musicians come too late to us,” he notes. “None of the universities in Australia offer specific conducting courses for undergraduate conductors, and that’s a fundamental mistake. You must start when you’re young. Violinists and pianists begin when they’re five, woodwind and brass players [start] a little later, but still when they’re children.”

Fritzsch himself began his conducting training at 17 years of age, working on his technique and musicality for five years before getting plucked for his first job in a German opera house. “I wouldn’t have survived that first year if I hadn’t started that training when I did,” he says.

This makes sense, logically, of course, so what is stopping our institutions from starting to offer these opportunities early? Part of it, Fritzsch says, has to be the cost. “It’s expensive to train conductors – you need, in the first instance, two pianists, and then you need an orchestra.” And the orchestra can be a sticking point.

The Australian Conducting Academy, which has already been a success on many levels, has made evident some of the ways the symphony orchestras differ from one another in their commitments to developing emerging conductors. When the ACA made its offerings, the majority of state orchestras came to the table with a week of masterclasses. The Sydney Symphony Orchestra, instead, offered assistant work but little podium time. Many of the state orchestras still fail to offer assistant positions, a crucial step for emerging conductors to cut their teeth and begin learning what orchestras need from them. There is room here for continued and improved access across all institutions – what they’re willing to offer and how they’re willing to offer it. In saying that, it is important to remember that an assistantship and assistant work is not a training program, but it is what should be offered next on the long path to gaining sufficient experience to take on projects oneself. Those who aren’t ready to step onto the podium and who find themselves thrust into assistant positions too soon can find themselves stuck there. And, to create a new method of developing emerging Australian conductors, one must begin the arduous task of unpicking the places where the stitching has gone wrong in the past. A good place to start, as Fritzsch suggests, is to catch the talent while they’re young.

Sam Weller – the young conductor Fritzsch mentioned, who is competing in the Rotterdam competition – taught himself from the age of 15 to 22. He learned all of his foundational technique from his remarkable Ensemble Apex, a group he initially founded as a way to pick up technical and musical tools. Since its first appearance in 2016, the ensemble has grown into a fully-fledged professional outfit. He laughs as he tells me that though his best advice is starting your own ensemble to fill in the gaps in your knowledge, he “could have gotten a lot better a lot quicker if [he’d] had a teacher.”

That said, Weller is quick to acknowledge the Australian conductors who have supported him on his journey. Northey and Fritzsch are “legendary” he tells me, and British conductor Mark Wigglesworth, the Chief Conductor Designate of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra “changed the way I approach music and preparation”.

Following undergraduate studies in Australia, Weller graduated from the National Masters of Orchestral Conducting jointly offered by the Conservatorium van Amsterdam and the Royal Conservatoire The Hague – a prestigious program with impressive pathways, but a world away from the Sydney Weller grew up in.

“It’s a pathway problem,” he says. “I would have stayed in Australia if I saw a really excellent Masters that I could do. Europe is great to get experience and exposure, and I was lucky to be able to go there, but there’s a missing piece [at home].”

What leaders like Northey and Fritzsch are envisaging is a world where young conductors don’t have to leave Australia to receive a world-class conducting education. “You can find people with the attitude that if you really want to learn to conduct, you can simply go overseas,” Fritzsch tells me, “but once young conductors have gathered the funds to go, it’s often too late.”

It’s time to shift attitudes, to begin to think again about talent development in the country in a way that allows us to keep our homegrown talent around if they wish to stay. But who pays for it? Who is willing to stump up the money when there’s no guarantee that any given intake will produce a star? Fritzsch, who has spent his last five years advocating for young conductors through his work with the ACA, and many more mentoring and encouraging conductors off his own bat, knows that funding is a major priority. It’s essential if the country is going to develop an undergraduate program that could bring back the kind of level Australia was working at when the Symphony Australia initiative was active.

Pressing him for an idea of what that undergraduate course needs to look like, he says, “It needs two-instrument training; the musician’s main instrument plus keyboard,” – a requirement at many German conservatories – “then also vocal coaching, composition, musical theory and history, and psychology, because conducting is a leadership position. [The course would also need] access to professional orchestras for the students that allows for weekly training to build up all the technical tools to conduct repertoire from the Baroque to the contemporary.” And once they have those skills, the institutes must continue to find pathways for the conductors to follow.

Dane Lam, the Artistic Director of State Opera South Australia and Music Director of the Hawaii Symphony Orchestra, agrees. “Institutions need to support young conductors in the first place, yes, but then they need to keep supporting them. No one emerges fully ready; there needs to be enough backing to fail,” he says.

It feels like a complicated idea: creating mechanisms within seemingly immovable orchestral institutions to deliver feedback and provide learning opportunities in a manner that gives emerging conductors the information they need to improve without ruining their confidence. But it isn’t impossible. And it isn’t just about conducting on a world stage that makes the practice of training worthwhile.

Northey knows that not everyone who participates in conducting training will end up on the podium, but that’s not the point, he tells me. “As a country, we need to invest in our cultural leadership; the investment is not currently proportionate to the level of talent we are producing. Conducting teaches you a lot of different things, and there will be conductors we create who go on to have a huge impact on many different levels, as teachers, in developmental programs, in music management, as well as on the podium. [That] would be a tremendous success.”

Lam notes the impact conducting training has on a much wider level. “Good conducting training helps the whole community. It makes teachers better; it opens kids up to future possibilities. Not everyone becomes a famous singer, but everyone learns to sing.” The reason we make music in the first place can’t be forgotten, despite how challenging the debate or how tricky the logistics.

Jessica Cottis, the Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Canberra Symphony Orchestra, speaks with me at length about the changing relationship the conductor brings to repertoire they have performed before, reflecting the importance of the job in creating something truly vital for both the musicians and the audiences – who cannot be forgotten as the reason why this conversation matters at all.

“The first time I realised that what I did had an effect, I can’t put into words what that felt like. It was stimulating and overwhelming,” she says.

At the time, Cottis was conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in the Ritual Dances from Michael Tippett’s opera The Midsummer Marriage at the St Magnus International Festival on the islands of Orkney, off the north coast of Scotland. “In some moments, it was apparent that I could impact the sound, but I also realised that there was a beautiful ecosystem already there that I was being invited into; that was humbling and terrifying and exhilarating. What I love most about conducting is the collaboration, of you and the orchestra having ideas and finding a new way for the music to come to life.”

Days later, she writes to me referring to a quote attributed to Mahler – a composer who also found himself on the podium. “Tradition is tending the flame, not worshipping the ashes.”

We’ve slowly lost our grip on the Australian tradition of creating world-class conductors. But that light never really goes out, as it never is truly forgotten by the young conductors who never step onto the podium but who find other ways to lead across the sector. It is up to those people who make up the musical community in all of its complexity to rekindle the flame and begin tending it again.

So where to from here? Northey is the first to point out that at this stage there is no data to back up his ideas, but the vision is strong and shared. “As a country, we have an incredible success story to tell,” he says, “and that’s not just the high-achieving musicians; that’s the teachers [and] the management. Recently, conducting has been the exception to that rule and [if we can change that], the impact will amplify all the appreciation for music and culture across the country.”

It will also remind the world that while we may have to travel a little further, Australia does not, and will not, stumble on its way to the podium.