British composer and conductor David Robert Coleman was born in London in 1969. He studied the piano, musicology and conducting at the Royal College of Music, London, and King’s College, Cambridge. He has worked as an assistant conductor to numerous conductors, including Pierre Boulez, Simon Rattle and Hans Zender. He was engaged by Maestro Kent Nagano as personal assistant and associate conductor at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich from 2006-9.
In recent years David Coleman has become in demand as a guest conductor, having received invitations to conduct orchestras such as the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra, Southwest German Radio Orchestra, Bremen Philharmonic, Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, Bavarian State Opera, Berlin State Opera, Philharmonia Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.
He has conducted the first performances of works by Gerald Barry (The Road), Philippe Manoury (Abgrund), Xenakis (Kai) and the first performance of Boulez’s Messages Esquisses in a version for violas.
David Coleman has been commissioned to write works for the Frankfurt Opera (Herzkammeroper), Ensemble Intercontemporain (Deux), Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal (Ibergang clarinet rhapsody) as well as German regional orchestras.
His works have been performed mainly under his direction by Ensemble Modern Frankfurt, Southwest German Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic, Youth Orchestra of the Americas (Albéniz Phantasy for Viola and Orchestra with violist Edmundo Ramirez), Frankfurt Radio Orchestra, Oldenburg State Orchestra and Jena Philharmonic.
Recently he has written a series of chamber-music pieces for soloists of the Berliner Staatskapelle. In 2012 Coleman was commissioned by Daniel Barenboim to make a new version/orchestration of the third act (London scene) of Alban Berg’s Lulu from the extant sketches. Other commissions (2013) include a new work for soprano and orchestra for Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra as well as chamber-music pieces for the Jerusalem Chamber Music festival.
His children's opera Hans im Glück (Hans in luck) was played all December 2016 at the Staatsoper Werkstatt.
In 2014 Naxos released a CD with some of his works (Starry Night / Zwiegespräch / Ibergang / Fanfare and Palimpsest / 3 Character Pieces). Opera Lively has reviewed very favorably this CD - read our review by clicking [here] and purchase it from Naxos by clicking [here]; we highly recommend it.
You may also want to consult our review of this production of Luci Mie Traditrice, by clicking [here]. There are three other interviews associated with this production - a shorter one with the lead female singer Katharina Kammerloher, already published and included in the above review (scroll down when you visit that page, and you'll find it), and two more that are coming up (their transcription was also neglected...), with the lead male singer Otto Katzameier, and the stage director who was the famous Jürgen Flimm, who at the time was also the Intendant of the Berlin Staatsoper. Stay tuned for these other interview that will supplement this material.
The Exclusive Opera Lively Interview with David Robert Coleman
Questions by Opera Lively chief editor Luiz Gazzola - copyright Opera Lively - links to this interview are allowed as well as brief excerpts, but to reproduce the entire interview please use the Contact Us link to request authorization, and include a link to the source. Photo credits are unknown to us at this time; if we're informed of the photographers' names we'll be glad to include them; meanwhile, it's fair promotional use. This is Opera Lively Interview # 232.
Luiz Gazzola for Opera Lively – Let’s start by talking about Salvatore Sciarrino’s music for Luci Mie Traditrici. The orchestration and instrumental parts seem to me to be vanishing and phantasmagorical, and evoke blowing winds, breathing, neighing horses, sounds of nature (birds, insects), and percussion. Silence occurs often, which then goes from this state of zero sounds to a multitude of microscopic sounds and whispers and soft noises that seem to reproduce the sonorous real-life universe that surrounds the characters. Please tell us if you agree with this observation, and tell us how you understand and conceptualize this opera’s music structure.
David Robert Coleman – I think you made an excellent observation about the way the instruments of the orchestra are used in an unconventional way. First of all, it’s super chamber music; everyone has a solistic part; there are no conventional doublings. Then a lot of the instruments are required to make what we call extended techniques that is not normal playing of the twelve notes played sort of beautifully, but you have very hard harmonics, flageolet sounds for the violins, extremely high notes [Editor’s note: he seems to be referring to the extended technique of playing harmonics for the violin called flageolets – which is a type of flute but here the term means these very pure-sounding notes that have an eerie quality, as well as being high in pitch].
In the flutes – Sciarrino’s favorite instrument is probably the flute (he wrote enormous amount of music for the flute) – you have blowing sounds, you have sounds which have some idea of pitch, some idea of air, you have trills on high flageolet notes [Editor – he could here be referring to the flageolet register a.k.a. whistle tone which is the highest one in a vocal score used to produce pitches above C#6], you have percussive kinds of rrrrrrr sounds.
The whole orchestra develops these extra-musical colors that turn in an imitative fashion to one another, thereby creating a sort of super-sonority. He is totally away from a kind of Serialist pit fixation. The pitch is often repetitive. The singers often have the same motif “ya da daaaa” in a third and then a falling minor second. The minor second is a lamentoso theme. You have “aaah aaah” all the time in the score.
The genius of Sciarrino is that he is sort of finding these remnants, these microscopic kinds of leftovers, and then creating a powerful cosmos. You mentioned silence, also very important. His are as successful as Debussy’s discovery of the shock of silence. He is someone who works absolutely within the shock of pianississimo all the time, and then sometimes there are these outbursts, like the famous “tam tam” that we see in the end of the piece, in the denouement when the Count murders his wife. The relationship of silence to the short sharp fortissimo outbursts suddenly informs the tension.
OL – Now let’s talk about his vocal writing. It often uses long extensions of the vowels and short bursts of the other syllables, completely altering the dynamics of the words, with added complex melismas. These techniques are not only intriguing, but also convey a very Italianate melodic sense. What do you think of it?
DRC – Absolutely Italianate; you touched it right. There is a spiritual connection with the Italian Renaissance with Sciarrino. I had the privilege to visit him in his home one summer at Città di Castello. He has his own collection of Renaissance paintings. He also renovates and he is very knowledgeable.
Musically [Carlo] Gesualdo springs to mind. His vocal technique often starts with a long note coming out of nothing like a messa di voce which has a crescendo on it, ending with very quick squiggle, like “whaaaaaaaaa batachlivela” [the maestro sang this made-up sequence of syllables with the last ones said very quickly – whoever has listened to the opera will know what he means].
I see a parallel to Renaissance music there. The notation is something else. The notation comes out of the tradition of Post Avant-Garde. The notation for the singers in the first instance is almost frightening [laughs]. I think it's no coincidence that Sciarrino used to work with Sylvano Bussotti who also copied the scores. His notation is in the European Avant-Garde but actually the effect of the notation is something else.
We talked about bird songs. Again, in the Renaissance aspect, you see this kind of incorporation of this melody by Claude Le Jeune, a French Renaissance composer also very important to Olivier Messiaen. Le Jeune was one of the first people to write asymmetric music. He is analyzed by Messiaen quite a lot. This, I think is a troubadour song about unsuccessful love and it prefaces the whole opera in a production of the children’s chorus. It reappears in various levels of deconstruction in the instrumental intermezzi.
The first intermezzo is relatively straightforward – also with Renaissance-like harmonization. The orchestration is already hinting of things to come. The instruments play in unconventional registers and have a sort of vulnerable febrility. The second intermezzo starts to deconstruct this, and third one is just sort of entrails and silences and a drum beat suggesting this ominous life that is about to expire.
[See a trailer of the Berlin Staatsoper production of this opera, and then a still picture of it:]
OL – Sciarrino is a very prolific contemporary composer. Last time I checked he had to his name more than 130 pieces; probably even more by now. His music is fascinatingly sparse, using extended instrumental techniques with strings playing ghostly harmonics, winds producing multiphonics, and conveying a sense of thin, fragile atmospheres. Please our readers a bit on the importance of this composer, and tell us what you find exciting about his music.
RDC – Well, now that Luciano Berio is no longer with us, he is definitely the most important living Italian composer. I know that he is very, very influential in Italy for a whole generation of younger composers. He created an unmistakably unique sound world the way that Helmut Lachenmann in Germany had done. You can hear a few seconds and know immediately that it’s Sciarrino.
He works in a quite closed, hermetic system, I would say. He is the complete opposite of a composer like Wolfgang Rihm in Germany. Rihm is also extremely prolific, I think maybe even more prolific than Sciarrino, but Rihm is someone who is channeling and including all kinds of musical dialogue and musical experience, while Sciarrino is someone who lives in a very strict musical diet [laughs].
He makes the maximum of finely honed and crafted amounts of materials. It’s a difficult figure, just like Lachenmann in Germany, for younger composers, because he is a kind of endpoint. I don’t think it is a style that can be imitated or continued; he found his special world that really is his own world.
OL – While singers must have a nightmarish time producing these long notes followed by bursts of rapid-firing words, I wonder how difficult it is for instrumentalists to play it, like when winds explode in whooshes of puffed air, strings are scraped, hammered, and stretched, etc. Does it take an ensemble well-versed in contemporary music to perform this piece? How do you prepare your musicians for this? Does it take a lot of work?
RDC – Well, of course. There are ensembles like Klangforum Wien who specialize in playing this kind of music. If I were to go there and rehearse a piece by Sciarrino I would have to explain very little and it would happen very quickly. We have the privilege here in Berlin of working with members of the Berlin State Orchestra, the Staatskapelle, who are one of the leading orchestras of the world particularly for Wagner, but there are many musicians in this orchestra with an open mind, some of whom play in contemporary music ensembles; some of whom don’t.
We had an extensive rehearsal period. We had a workshop with the flutes in particular to go through the techniques, and I was positively surprised and very pleased with the kind of open-minded and engaged attitudes of the musicians.
OL – Luci Mie Traditrice has had unusual success for a contemporary opera, and some critics hailed it as the new Pelléas et Mélisande of the end of the 20th century. How do you situate this work in the context of 20th and 21st century opera?
RDC – That’s absolutely true. It has become almost a repertory piece. It is also in a line of contemporary operas that deal with stories from the Renaissance. I’m thinking of Written on Skin by George Benjamin. The story is totally timeless, classical, understandable to all – marital infidelity, jealousy. The metaphor of the rose with a thorn – it talks about the suffering and beauty of different kinds of love. That’s a Renaissance concept.
The opera, like all great art in a way, combines aspects from the past and aspects of the future. The great operas of the 20th century for me, are obviously Wozzeck, Elektra, Janáček’s, and [… inaudible]. In the Post-War period, there are very few operas that maintain some kind of claim to the repertoire. You are right, I think it will keep a place in the repertoire, particularly alongside Written on Skin and…
OL – L’Amour de Loin…
DRC – Yes, exactly, L’Amour de Loin from Saariaho.
OL – Yes, I was about to ask about Written on Skin. You received composition training from George Benjamin in London. His opera is in many ways, at least plot-wise, similar to Luci Mie Traditrice.
DRC - Yes, yes.
OL - Musically it is quite different.
DRC – It’s different, yes.
OL – Could you compare and contrast these two operas and these composers?
DRC – Both composers are extremely rigorous, self-critical figures whose material is carefully thought about and crafted. George is the opposite of a prolific composer. He has written little and is very self-critical. Famously one of his big pieces, Southern Time, I think, took almost ten years to write; started off as a little piece called Cascade for orchestra. I would say George’s music at a first listening has more open, inclusive, and I would even say conventional sonority. His orchestration is very interesting with the viola de gamba and …
OL – The glass harmonica…
DRC – Yes. But in Sciarrino there is a sort of paring down to moments of almost total silence or just one viola playing, with tiny little knocks of col legno bow in pianississimo, with an extreme paring down of each elation of texture that is not part of George’s aesthetic.
OL – While among his operas I only know Luci Mie Traditrici which is probably his best work and Da Gelo a Gelo, I’m aware of his other works such as Macbeth, Lohengrin, Perseo, and Andromeda. Can you tell us a bit about their merits?
DRC – I had the pleasure to conduct Macbeth by Sciarrino here two years ago, and I think it is a fantastic score too. It has two small orchestras. It also has a moment of quotation. It quotes the final scene from Don Giovanni, which is the dramatic high point. [Editor's note: Verdi makes an appearance shortly thereafter as the ghost of Banquo sings Renato’s aria from the first scene of Un Ballo in Maschera - read a review of Sciarrino's Macbeth by clicking (here)] .
I like Macbeth a lot. I wouldn’t say that Luci is a better piece. Lohengrin I know too. It’s a much smaller work. I think it is the first of his well-known stage works. That again, the score is more aleatoric, in which you can see a process of how he is thinning down. If I look also at his works form the seventies, I conducted once a piece called Clair de Lune for piano and orchestra – a short piece but very dense, the kind of dense and hectic – I know there is a lot of tension with [Franco] Donatoni but I think there is also some level of influence. With this sort of thinning out and just having one sound object, just a flageolet sound or a held tone, there is a sign of the mastery of the material where less becomes more. It’s sort of finding this tension and power in a few materials pushed to their limit.
OL – What contemporary opera composers you uphold in greatest esteem?
DRC – I myself am a composer but I won’t talk about myself. There are many composers. Jörg Widmann is extremely talented; we have Lucia Ronchetti who has written several pieces here; there is Oscar Strasnoy. In England there are excellent composers like Julian Anderson, and Thomas Adès of course. I think it is fantastic that each country has a certain style and identity. We are very far away now from the international avant-garde of the seventies. The possibilities for creation are limitless.
OL – Please tell us about the challenges of getting contemporary music to be appreciated by the general public, and explain what kind of strategy conductors, orchestras and opera houses should employ to make it happen.
DRC – I don’t think there is any problem to make an audience accept contemporary music whatsoever. We define contemporary music as music written by living composers. In fact I’ve often seen the opposite. I remember for instance a production of Unsuk Chin’s Alice in the Wonderland in Munich which was sold-out for five performances and could have been sold-out for many more.
It’s not a question of contemporary music. It’s a question of what contemporary music. Which contemporary music. It’s often, in the case of opera, what kind of production we are talking about. For instance, in our production of Luci Mie Traditrice, Jürgen Flimm has created a colorful and dramatic naturalistic production that acts as an important counterpoint to the music. When it’s an installation kind of production it gets more difficult to grasp the whole situation.
I think Boulez was absolutely right when he said that a culture where more than 50% is about reproduction of works of the past is a culture that is going to commit suicide. He is quite right. I’m not in any way saying that we shouldn’t celebrate the past and the great works, but we need to remain moving into a creative culture. I’ve seen many cases of contemporary music being even more successful than traditional music. I’m thinking of the works of Esa-Pekka Salonen – he champions also his own music. This strange idea that because it is contemporary it is not appealing is rubbish.
OL – I couldn’t agree more. Of your own works, which one gave you the most satisfaction?
DRC – [laughs] Well, I wrote a chamber opera for young people which is in the repertoire here called Hans im Glück which gave me a lot of satisfaction, and also I was very pleased with the production. I enjoyed very much the clarinet concerto that I wrote for the Montreal Symphony which I did also in Frankfurt. One of my perhaps small, challenging tasks of the Berlin State Opera was a new orchestration of the third act of Lulu, the London scene.
As someone who works as a conductor and works in the opera house, for me it is very important to be in touch with the interpretive, practical and living process. I’m not someone who would feel comfortable being locked away in a university. I enjoyed having intellectual stimuli with people in Cambridge, being with friends and reading books, but I think that music is a vibrant, living, and practical art form.
OL – Yes. So, in 2012 you were commissioned by Daniel Barenboim to make a new version/orchestration of the third act (London scene) of Alban Berg’s Lulu from the extant sketches. Tell us what challenges are encountered in this kind of work, and how you went about it. It must be very difficult to continue the genius of a composer’s masterpiece and try to give it an appropriate ending. Tell us about it.
DRC – Let’s be clear about the third act. Alban Berg in fact produced the piano vocal score of 95% of the third act, which was even published in the 1930’s [Editor’s note: 1936] under the editorship of Erwin Stein. So the only little bits of the third act which we are not sure about are the quartet scene where not all voices were composed and a few other little moments, but basically the continuation of the third act is clear.
The orchestration, as we all know, he didn’t complete. We all know about [Friedrich] Cerha’s fantastic work on the third act. Cerha proceeded like an archeologist. Every moment is same or similar to music earlier in the score that Berg did finish and orchestrated in the same way.
In my attempt, there are few moments in the Lulu Suite that are orchestrated the same way. The rest is more creative orchestration. It uses a small orchestra within the large orchestra. It expands on some sonorities. For instance, I have an accordion that leads to a harmonium, and the vibraphone that is a central element of Berg’s score is expanded to include steel drums and a marimba. It’s not an attempt to draw a mustache on the Mona Lisa but more a subtle attempt to enter into the sound world from the experiences, now, of Boulez and Berio. It’s a work that is very close to my heart. I conducted the piece. Aesthetically for me it’s one of my absolute most important favorite pieces of all time.
OL – Let’s talk about your children’s opera Hans im Glück. Can you explain a little bit how you conceptualize it, and talk about the musical structure and all?
DRC - Hans im Glück is a lovely little story by the brothers Grimm who were the famous German fairy tale merchants. It’s an almost anti-capitalism critique, about it failing people. It’s the story of a young apprentice who is given a big piece of gold by his master after working for several years, and he manages to be conned out of his money by various people who sell him things, but the problem is, every time he buys something, the value of what he has goes down.
But the irony is that at the end of the story he is just left with a few grinding stones which he drops into a well, and in that moment, when he has nothing, he feels happiest and he says that in this moment he is happier than he ever was before. So, it’s a wonderful story we can interpret like all great fairy tales from many angles. In this interpretation which has a libretto by Rainer Brinkmann; the interpretation is that the man who keeps selling him things that are worth less and less is in fact his master who gave him the gold in the first place. He is some kind of Prospero trying to teach him a comic lesson.
[Editor's note - see an excerpt of it, here:]
Musically I enjoyed writing this a lot. It originally started its life as a little piece commissioned a music ensemble in Brandenburg, for a speaker and some instruments. Then I made the second and much bigger version here for the Staatsoper with just five instruments. It’s a sort of soldier’s tale-size, also with accordion and flute, percussion and clarinet.
The music starts off with just a few little chords with tones being hit against one another. Slowly it is sort of an empty glass with more and more things being poured into it. I think the music has a lot of witticisms, telling jokes with semi-quotations from music history. They are not exact quotations.
Then there is an aria for a pig where the pig turns the tables around and kills the butcher and eats him [laughs] which is a little joke about Zerbinetta from Ariadne auf Naxos. I tried to suspend these kinds of things in a sort of abstract grid of contemporary sketching.
OL – Nice! I'd be curious to watch it! What other exciting projects are in your future?
DRC – There is a commission for the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra for a singer and orchestra that deals with questions of identity and Palestine. I’m not going to say more about that. There are also some chamber music works. Next season I will be again here at the Staatsoper to conduct different things, including the German premiere of Nicola Sani’s opera Falcone.
OL – Do you have the intention or plan to compose other operas?
DRC – Yes, definitely. I have something in mind. I think fairy tales are a great starting point for opera and right now something is in the pipeline but it is too early to mention it.
OL – You had long associations with conductors such as Pierre Boulez, Kent Nagano, and Daniel Barenboim, among others. When you were an apprentice, what did you absorb from these great conductors? What did they teach you?
DRC – Every one of them has a different point of view. Boulez used to say “conduct what you want to hear” which can mean anything you want to [laughs] but it’s a great sentence. I think I’ve been very lucky to have been an apprentice to some very great masters. Also from Boulez I learned a lot about orchestration which helped in Lulu a lot - the way he turned his piano pieces and notations into big orchestra scores, the way he made his different versions of Le Visage Nuptial was very important; his use of sonorities and textures.
Barenboim is a great master of the German Romantic repertoire. Certainly, this orchestra in Berlin is of an extraordinary level thanks to his years of training here. Nagano is also a master of refined, very precise textures in the orchestra. I enjoyed a lot working with his orchestra in Montreal when they played one of my pieces.
OL – Why did you become a conductor?
DRC – Like all people I started out as a pianist. I still work with singers at the piano. That’s great. I used to play the violin. The orchestra is such a fascinating collection of possibilities! It’s really a toy world; its irresistibility never wanes.
OL – Now a more personal question: how do you approach life as a person?
DRC – [laughs out loud] Ah!
OL – Tell me about your take on life, and things you like to do outside of the music world.
DRC – Okay, I grew up in cities and I just moved to the countryside near Berlin, which is very beautiful, an area called the Schorfheide. For the first time in my life I have a large garden, and I’ve started gardening. I think it is really fascinating to observe how plants react to light and to weather. Like why a certain amount of leaves grow in one stalk, and the incredible ways of Nature to regulate itself with the geometry of it. It’s something I discovered. Also, I’m a father now as of over one year, and it’s a big change in my life. It’s not all about me all the time. [laughs]
OL – Great! Anything you would like to add?
DRC – Berlin Staatsoper and Jürgen Flimm through this festival Infektion! but not only this festival, made of contemporary music a central aspect of the undertaking here; not just in a king of alibi sense but in an important way; also helped by [inaudible - Anne Schwarz? – this name is not among the ones listed as dramaturgs at the Berlin Staatsoper], the dramaturg here. It’s a very, very important, like one says in German, Kulturauftrag [cultural mission].
OL – This was a very informative and instructive interview. Our readers will love your answers.
DRC – Oh, thank you! I read some of your interviews like the one with George Benjamin, and I think they are fantastic. You provide intelligent music critique. It is very important that people have access to high quality reviews like yours.
OL – Did you see my book about Written on Skin?
DRC – Oh, I didn’t know you wrote one. I’ll get it.
OL – Yes, it contains among other items such as the full text of the opera, all the interviews related to the piece, including George Benjamin's, Martin Crimp's, Katie Mitchell's, Barbara Hannigan's…
DRC – Oh, I worked with her; we did Matsukaze together here [Editor’s note: an opera by Toshio Hosokawa written for the dance company of Sasha Waltz].
OL – She is fantastic. I’ll mail you a copy of the book.
DRC – That will be great, and I’ll mail you a CD with my music.
OL – Fabulous. Thank you for this great interview.
DRC – Thank you.
------------------
If you came to this page through a link from another site, please consider exploring our exclusive interviews (as of today, over 232 singers, scholars, conductors, stage directors, composers etc. including some of the most prestigious names in opera), news, and articles by clicking on the Articles tab above and using our clickable content index [here], or the Section Widget on the top left of the Home page; our very active discussion Forum (of course, by clicking on the Forum tab - and please notice that over there we also have an area with content in Spanish, German, French, Italian, and Portuguese).
And then if you like what you see, consider registering as a member so that you can post your own comments (it's entirely free and will remain so) and please use our social media share buttons to "like" our site and "tweet" about it to your opera-loving friends.
Thank you for visiting Opera Lively!
And then if you like what you see, consider registering as a member so that you can post your own comments (it's entirely free and will remain so) and please use our social media share buttons to "like" our site and "tweet" about it to your opera-loving friends.
Thank you for visiting Opera Lively!
BUY OUR BOOKS PUBLISHED BY OPERA LIVELY PRESS
You might consider the purchase of ours books "Opera Lively - The Interviews" volumes 1 and 2 - full announcement and links to sales points [here] for volume 1 and [here] for volume 2. Also don't miss the very funny book by famous Metropolitan Opera tenor Jay Hunter Morris, "Diary of a Redneck Opera Zinger" published by Opera Lively Press; click [here]. Also on sale, our guidebook to Berlioz's Les Troyens: click [here] with a new and full translation of the libretto, and the guidebook to George Benjamin's gorgeous contemporary opera Written on Skin, libretto included: click [here].
Bookmark our site and come back for more - several new and exciting interviews are always coming to Opera Lively. Some of the best recent ones can be consulted in our Home page. By clicking on the widget on the upper left corner of the Home page and on the + sign next to Exclusive Interviews, you will have access to all the others, with many opera luminaries such as Anna Netrebko, Piotr Beczala, Juan Diego Flórez, Diana Damrau, Joyce DiDonato, Danielle de Niese, etc.
STAY TUNED FOR THESE UPCOMING EXCLUSIVE OPERA LIVELY INTERVIEWS:
We will be soon publishing our interviews with stage director and opera company director Jürgen Flimm, composer and opera company director Bernard Foccroulle, French singer Sandrine Piau, and many others.
Section Widget
