As chief executive Peter Walls leaves and Christopher Blake prepares to succeed him, what beckons for the NZSO?
Passing the baton: Peter Walls, right, and Christopher Blake.
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra chief executive Peter Walls refers to the orchestra as a “taonga”: an appropriate word, implying its value, its New Zealandness and that it needs to be cared for and handed down to the next generation. It tells of our orchestra as a storehouse of 90 individuals with expensive skills and even more expensive instruments. Of skills learnt over many years, often starting in early childhood, worked at throughout school and university, probably polished up at an overseas college, and then continually exercised every day. Of national treasure.
Walls has been looking after this taonga for the past nine and a half years, in a role that has called for the financial wizardry, personnel management and boardroom know-how of an MBA businessman, as well as an arts and music awareness and an instinct for how to sell classical music both to an audience that thinks it knows what it wants and the new young audience that may be waiting at the box office.
He still looks fit and ready to fight off any cost-cutting barbarians at the NZSO’s gate, exuding such delighted enthusiasm after each concert that any critical thoughts one might have had are quickly forgotten.
But why is he stepping down at the end of the year? The board tried to persuade him to stay on for another three-year term, but “after three three-year stints there seemed to be a natural break point. I know I’m going to miss it hugely but it seems right to be making the move.”
The standard of performance by the NZSO, whoever is conducting, is now on a consistently high level. Overseas reviews of last year’s European tour under music director Pietari Inkinen, and of recent CDs, have confirmed what local critics have been saying: that they can, in the words of the Badische Zeitung newspaper in Freiberg, “without fear, allow themselves to be compared with leading European ensembles”. (Rather delightfully, the paper went on to describe the orchestra’s style as “pepper with chilli on top”.)
But there has been frequent criticism of the NZSO’s repertoire and promotion, and the cost of the orchestra is often looked at with a mixture of amazement and envy.
Walls dismisses these grumbles with arguments he clearly knows by heart. Crucially, he says, the NZSO was established by a government act as a “national” orchestra, and in the most recent 2004 Act it is clearly stipulated the orchestra must provide New Zealanders with live and recorded performances of symphonic music to an international standard.
The Act also stipulates it must promote New Zealand compositions and provide performance opportunities for New Zealand musicians, and it refers to the need to expand the audience of the orchestra on a national basis as well as providing a touring orchestra.
The Act makes it clear the NZSO has a different function from regional orchestras. But the $13.4 million it gets directly from the Ministry for Culture and Heritage makes it look expensive. “It’s not huge by international standards,” Walls claims, basing his argument on the subsidy per head of population.
“If you were to divide the funding that’s going into the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra with the population of Auckland and compare that with the funding that goes into the NZSO divided by the population of New Zealand, you would get a very similar answer.”
It may not be quite as simple as that, so he gives more details about how he calculates the APO’s funding, in which he includes funding from Creative New Zealand and Auckland Council, and “quasi-public” funding from ASB Community Trust, and adds on what they get from New Zealand Opera.
“But,” he says, “the NZSO is about excellence, providing an aspirational goal for New Zealand musicians. It will be a sorry day if someone made a rule that says we’re going to have to fund all these orchestras equally, because you would end up with nothing. This will all get a lot of airing in the not-too-distant future because of the review of the [orchestral] sector that is in train at the moment.”
Walls is personally committed both to New Zealand music and contemporary music, and yet the repertoire of the NZSO is often perceived to be short on both. “You have to be very strategic about how you programme both New Zealand music and contemporary music,” he says. He points out the NZSO performed Penderecki’s Threnody in five centres and played Ligeti’s Atmosphères and Berio’s Sinfonia in an Auckland Arts Festival concert this year. “I would love us to have done more of this great music from the mid-20th century, but you get caned if you start running risks that are unsustainable at the box office.”
But surely audiences are now growing into this music? “Yes, but one of the disincentives with Lutoslawski, Ligeti and others can be non-standard instrumentation, where you face either expense or significant logistical difficulties. And our commitment to New Zealand music has the unintended consequence of limiting the amount of other new music that we can programme.”
The repertoire taken on the 2010 international tour has also been criticised for being unimaginative and having no major New Zealand content. But here the concert promoters – working through the orchestra’s agent, IMG Artists (which is also Inkinen’s personal agent) – are to blame, as they dictated what could be played. Walls thought they would overcome some resistance by commissioning a piece for the tour, Ross Harris’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, which refers to three of the cities to be visited, but even here the promoters complained about having to pay performance rights and the orchestra had to resort to playing the music as an encore or as a surprise addition to the programme.
The decision to take only two symphonies (Berlioz and Tchaikovsky) was Inkinen’s; to take more, he thought, would be too demanding. In defence of the promoters and Inkinen, it has to be admitted the NZSO were rewarded with an average attendance of 92% of capacity at their concerts – a phenomenal result.
Walls is pleased about his successor as chief executive. “I am thrilled that Chris Blake is taking on this role, and even if he ends up saying the same things to the ministry, they will carry new weight simply because they are being voiced by someone with strong credentials that are different from my own.”
Blake certainly has experience of the ministry mindset. He was, after all, the first chief executive of the Ministry of Cultural Affairs when it was set up in 1991, and this is the ministry, now with Heritage added to its title, that funds the NZSO, as well as Creative New Zealand, the Royal New Zealand Ballet and other important cultural bodies.
Blake has also headed the Department of Internal Affairs and National Library, and will remain chief executive of the Department of Labour until February. He has had other management positions in the arts, most significantly as general manager of the APO from 1985 for six years.
Those years saw dramatic changes in the APO’s stature, when it was seen to become a keen performer of New Zealand music as part of its subscription series of concerts. Blake has had a long-lasting effect on the APO’s programming, establishing a tradition of innovative performances Auckland audiences have come to accept and expect.
Blake is seen as one of New Zealand’s most significant composers. He’s received commissions from the APO, the NZSO, the Southern Sinfonia and Chamber Music New Zealand. His music always looks outwards for its inspiration: to the other arts, the landscape and the country’s history.
Memorable examples have been Till Human Voices Wake Us for tenor and orchestra, which was inspired by Archibald Baxter’s harrowing account of the brutal treatment of a conscientious objector. His opera Bitter Calm, premiered at the 1994 New Zealand International Arts Festival, told a story of conflict between Maori and Pakeha settlers shortly after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.
Most recent is his Angel at Ahipara, a set of pieces for string orchestra that take as starting points four Robin Morrison photographs of memorial gravestones, a memorial arch and a church in the Far North. Angel at Ahipara has been recorded by the NZSO and will shortly be issued by Atoll on a CD that features the Morrison photographs on the CD booklet.
I’ve known Blake for a long time, but we’ve been out of touch during the 20 years he’s been running all those ministries, “longer than any other departmental head”, he says.
So after his NZSO appointment was announced, we decide to meet for lunch in one of Remuera’s quieter restaurants. He looks tastefully prosperous, dressed in the almost-uniform of the upper echelons of the civil service. He has a black briefcase beside him, but his mobile never appears and never rings. All he puts on the table is a pair of glasses that he seems to need only when concentrating on the menu.
I’ve brought the NZSO’s glossy, over-designed programme booklet with me and I put it on the table beside me. It is visually as different from the dignified Angel at Ahipara CD booklet as one can imagine.
He waves a hand over the programme. “Of course, I’ve had no part to play in putting together what’s in there,” he says diplomatically, adding that he thinks it details an exciting year ahead of concert-going and that he fully supports it, although he cannot be drawn on what he thinks of the programme booklet itself, other than wincing slightly as I flick over the extravagantly coloured fold-out pages with their internet prose and irrelevant “keywords”.
He waves his hands around as he talks, almost as though he were a conductor, and says the past 20 years of working for various government departments have brought him in touch with all sorts of New Zealanders, made him aware of how we all relate to each other, taken him to different parts of the country and enriched his knowledge of our history. I feel at times as though I’m part of the appointment panel but I know Blake well enough to be sure this is genuine, not just a prepared self-promotional speech.
On the way back to his office in Queen St, Blake turns to ask me what I think about the way the NZSO currently puts all its New Zealand music into one “Made in New Zealand” concert. Hardly ideal, I say, as I don’t like to see New Zealand music being compartmentalised away from the standard repertoire.
And yet I was also unhappy about the five-minute commissions they put into concerts in previous years, which always seemed like a grudging gesture towards New Zealand composers.
Blake talks about his own violin concerto, , a long three-movement work the APO played several years ago, and “the audience gave every appearance of enjoying it”, he says. I have my own memory of a number of major works, most notably four symphonies by Ross Harris, all commissioned and performed in the APO’s main concert series, with no apparent fall off in audience.
We seem to be in agreement.
Looking back to Blake’s years as general manager of the APO, I remember how, with John Hopkins as his principal conductor, he programmed all three Douglas Lilburn symphonies and even explored the possibility of persuading Lilburn to write a fourth. Together, he and Hopkins explored the New Zealand repertoire keenly and it was clear they shared the same philosophy for the orchestra.
What happens with the NZSO will depend much on Blake’s relationship with music director Inkinen. When notified of the Blake appointment, Inkinen said, “This seems like an ideal appointment: a musician, a New Zealander and someone with enormous experience as a leader in the musical world and in the public sector. I look forward to working with Christopher.”
Walls talks of the need to be “strategic” in programming, and has been unfailingly supportive of whatever Inkinen has wanted. Inkinen, for his part, is clearly reluctant to perform New Zealand music that has not already proved itself musically and with the audience. But will Blake persuade Inkinen to share his interest in New Zealand music? Blake, all those years ago at the APO, showed what is possible when the chief executive and music director are united in their vision.