![]() ![]() Because it’s a repertoire house, we play a different opera every night. These singers, he says, “will take the vast majority of the roles in any given season. In Stuttgart, where I have been working since, it’s 40.” They all have a fixed ensemble of solo singers. “Every opera house in Germany and in the German system, including Austria and Switzerland, is a repertoire house. He explains the system he had opted to work in. I began to see that the gap actually wasn’t so large.”Īfter London he harked back to the idea of becoming a kapellmeister in a German opera house and, after a stint as a prompter in Darmstadt, he managed to get his toe in the door through a last-minute audition as a répétiteur at Theater Bremen. But, “In the second half of the year I realised I had gotten so much professional experience in Ireland that I had a sort of instinct for things that you can’t necessarily learn at a conservatory. He was grossly underqualified in comparison with his colleagues. ![]() So he took a sideways weave, and got a place in London’s National Opera Studio as a répétiteur. Because it’s not necessarily a country that educates conductors, if I could put it like that.” I think they may also have viewed an Irishman with suspicion. I don’t know what they thought, but I wasn’t having much resonance in terms of finding the right teacher for me. I’d gone to Europe a few times for master classes with conducting professors. Because one really doesn’t realise the abyss of ignorance. If you’re unlucky, which I very often have been, as a young kapellmeister, you will not have any rehearsals whatsoeverīut at age 22, he says, “I thought, I really know nothing. And he studied for a music degree at TCD. “He instilled in me the importance of musical detective work.” He got breaks from conductors David Brophy (in Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus), Fergus Sheil (in John Adams’s Nixon in China), John Wilson (as chorus master for the RTÉ Concert Orchestra’s opera performances), and from opera director Vivian Coates (becoming chorus master of Coates’s Lyric Opera Productions). The tenor John Elwes went through the Bach score with him for six hours. But whenever I would be at the rehearsals – at the beginning trying to tell the 12 people who had come up to sing, trying to convince them that I knew what I was doing – my parents would be sitting at the back reading a book.” His parents, he said, “used to have to come to rehearsals, because I was under 16, which is the child safeguarding age. It was really amazing.”Ī much younger Killian Farrell prepares for a Dublin performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion. “I would put it on with professional musicians in the orchestra, professional soloists, and with an amateur choir that did not exist, but that I would form for the occasion. He persuaded his local parish to sponsor a performance of the St John Passion as part of their 50th jubilee celebrations. And there are places where they will pay you, in Germany, to sit down every day and coach singers in this music.” I”m completely enthralled in the sound world of Strauss and Salome. He became “a real recording nerd”, and reading about Solti’s time as a kapellmeister in Germany (literally a person in charge of making music, and the formal title of conductors in German opera houses), he realised “Okay. At 14, he says, he was “looking for any escape from suburban Dublin”, and Salome became “a real fixation of mine”. ![]() He had been a member of Dublin’s Palestrina Choir and, after his voice broke, filled the gap by paying more attention to his piano playing and then falling in love with opera, an experience sparked by buying Georg Solti’s recording of Strauss’s Salome with Birgit Nilsson in the title role. Irish conductor Killian Farrell, who next season becomes generalmusikdirektor (general music director) of the Staatstheater in Meiningen, at the southern end of the German state of Thuringia, found a radical solution to the problem. While doing that, they have to imagine a full stage and pay acute attention – as they would with an actual orchestra – to where the instruments would all be positioned, and show they can communicate with players who are not actually there. Because, in college, they will spend a lot of time conducting two pianists at two pianos. They need to find a way to get themselves in front of an actual orchestra. One of the biggest challenges for young conductors is very easy to explain. ![]()
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