Interview: David Danzmayr - Apprentice has proved he's ready to take up the baton

Published on Tuesday 27 October 2009 17:57

FOR the past two years, David Danzmayr has been working his passage with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra as its assistant conductor. Occasionally, the 29-year-old Austrian has emerged briefly into the limelight for such RSNO perennials as the popular New Year's Viennese Night, or as someone to share such novelty events as the recent Classic Bites with chief conductor Stéphane Denève.

But now, in his third and final year in the apprentice post, he has earned his stripes and during the current season will be seen at more regular intervals, and also where it matters most: at the core of the main programme.

His first appearances of the season happen tomorrow and on Friday, when he teams up with the irrepressible animateur Paul Rissmann to present Holst's The Planets as part of the RSNO's highly successful and hugely informative Naked Classics series. Friday's Usher Hall presentation marks Edinburgh's first exposure to Naked Classics.

For those unfamiliar with the format, Rissmann dissects a work in the opening half, through a combination of bubbly chat and computer-aided graphics, all of which come at lightning speed, crammed with unique insight and fascinating facts. It's the job of Danzmayr and the orchestra to illuminate Rissmann's presentation with musical extracts. For the second half, though, it's over exclusively to the musicians for a complete performance of the work.

And just in case you thought you knew everything there is to know about Holst's astrological lollipop, take heed of Danzmayr's advice: "I've been attending these concerts myself in recent years, thinking I already knew the pieces so well, only to discover that Paul can tell you so many things you didn't know. I don't know where he gets it all from, but even the full-time musicians on the stage come away with fresh knowledge of the music."

Danzmayr has found the whole experience of working with the RSNO an invaluable lesson. "It came at exactly the right time for me," he explains. After studies in his native Salzburg with Dennis Russell Davies, followed by a year in Finland under the tutelage of Leif Segerstam, Danzmayr was already making headway through opportunities to work under Claudio Abbado and Pierre Boulez with the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, and as musical director of his own Ensemble Acrobat in Salzburg. He won the Bernhard Paumgartner Medal (awarded by the Stiftung Mozarteum) in December 2005.

"Before coming to Scotland, I had done a lot of contemporary music, and various other bits and pieces. But to have a fixed position with a major orchestra was an incredible blessing. You get to learn about the whole organisation, how it plans, how it programmes, and where all the responsibilities lie," he says.

It has also allowed him to make Scotland his home for the past couple of years, and to become involved in wider musical activity. He has an association with the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, for whom he will shortly conduct Mozart's Requiem, and is scheduled to conduct the Scottish Opera Orchestra in one of the Children's Classic series. He has also appeared – and reappeared – with the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland.

But the RSNO has been the centre of his life here. Through substantial involvement in the orchestra's Educational Concerts, and now growing appearances in more mainstream programmes – it seems only natural that someone with Austrian blood coursing through his veins should have been handed the reins for last year's Viennese Night – Danzmayr has shown himself to be willing to experience the very grassroots of the job, as well as such sexier gigs as one last June for the orchestra's first residency at the St Magnus Festival.

"It has been so important to have this opportunity to learn by doing," he says. "Educational work is so important for orchestras, not just in helping build future audiences, but in keeping classical music alive as an important part of our culture. It is not something we do just for fun; it is a necessity. And we do it far better here than orchestras in Austria, which are years behind in comparison."

But this is Danzmayr's big season with the RSNO. After The Planets, he is back on the rostrum in January for another Viennese programme. Then at the end of January, the stakes are even higher for Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite No 1, Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony and the European premiere of Michael Daugherty's piano concerto Deus ex machina, with the same soloist – Terrance Wilson – who premiered it in the United States last year.

It's a programme Danzmayr is convinced the RSNO audiences will love. And it's one that is substantial enough finally to secure his reputation with the orchestra that has engineered his development over the past three years.

So where now for Danzmayr, assuming (as he does) that this will be his last year in the apprentice post? "I don't really know," he says with disarming honesty. "I have a simple, long-term goal to be a very good conductor. But, in the short term, I have to be realistic. As long as I continue to progress and improve as a conductor, and get good work that pays enough to keep me, then that's enough for just now."

Those lucky enough to have seen him in action with the RSNO will have few worries on that count. But have we seen the best of him yet? This week and the coming months will provide the answer.

&#149 David Danzmayr conducts the RSNO's Naked Classics at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall tomorrow, and at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh, on Friday.