Conductor Edward Gardner: ‘We are being asked to widen what we give audiences’

In masterpieces of 20th-century music, as war, revolution and terror buffeted composers such as Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Bartók, exile and displacement were prominent themes. Some of the works focused on burning contemporary issues, such as the Nazis’ persecution of the Jewish people, while others widened their scope to embrace those uprooted at different times and in different cultures.

The emotional message in works of this period can be just as powerful today. Take Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time, an oratorio rooted in the events that led up to Kristallnacht, the 1938 Nazi pogrom. Its impact on one young listener has not been forgotten. “I sang Tippett’s A Child of Our Time as a kid and have known it most of my life,” says Edward Gardner, settling in now to his second year as music director of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. “It is a work that grows in relevance every year, and we took it as the starting point of our season ‘A Place to Call Home’.”

The purpose of the series is to question what we mean by home. There is a wealth of material that could fit into this broad theme of belonging and displacement, and Gardner and the LPO have been admirably adventurous in the choices they have made.

Among the concerts coming up are Solemn Prelude by the black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and the first UK performance of the Clarinet Concerto by Syrian clarinettist/composer Kinan Azmeh. Tan Dun’s Buddha Passion (2018) occupies a whole evening, as does Heiner Goebbels’s A House of Call. Fresh from its premiere last year in Berlin, it tells the story of displaced people from around the world using recordings of their words made by Goebbels on his travels. Both will be getting their UK premieres.

“The idea of binding the musical language you grew up with [in your homeland] to your new environment is extraordinary,” says Gardner. “Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra and Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances are both linked in this way. The central elegy of the Bartók is full of the fear of not seeing your homeland again. The lyricism in the Rachmaninov to me is all about looking back across the ocean and yearning for what he had [in Russia].”

This all fits with the fresh awareness among orchestras of the need to feature more music by composers from minority backgrounds. “We are being asked, quite rightly, to widen the diet of what we give our audiences,” says Gardner. “It is our fault for having stood still for 100 years. To fast-track finding the audience for pieces we haven’t performed is not easy, but we are focused on how to weave them into our programmes. With audiences fearful of coming back to concert halls, it is an extra challenge.”

Gardner’s own roots lie in Gloucestershire. He was a regular visitor to the Three Choirs Festival when he was young and sang in a performance of Mahler’s gargantuan Symphony No 8 at the age of nine. From there he went to Eton on a music scholarship, followed by King’s College, Cambridge, and the Royal Academy of Music.

Audiences in London became properly acquainted with him during his eight years at English National Opera, when he was still in his early thirties, a young and inspiring presence. Here was a conductor who always achieved a good standard of playing and proved himself equally strong in composers as diverse as Wagner and Britten, Janáček and Strauss. That flair for bringing such an eclectic range of music vividly to life has now carried over to the concert platform and engagements with top international orchestras.

As the ENO faces its potential demise, his reign there from 2007 to 2015 is starting to look like a long-lost golden period. Unsurprisingly, Gardner is shocked by the treatment meted out to the company in Arts Council England’s recent cutbacks. He calls the thinking “exceptionally confused” and points out that the company seems to have followed every Arts Council England edict in recent years to a fault. “Everything we did at ENO to build up young singers and musicians when I was there — that will be lost,” he says ruefully.

Now he divides his time between London and Oslo. Since 2015 Gardner has been principal conductor of the Bergen Symphony Orchestra and is also due to take over as music director of the Norwegian National Opera. That fits the dual centres of his personal life, with a son in London from a past relationship and a wife and “bonus” daughter in Oslo (“they don’t say stepdaughter over there”).

For decades conductors were exhaustingly peripatetic, but now there seems to be a greater desire to set down roots and Gardner is keen to build bridges locally in his chosen cities. “When I was in Philadelphia just before the pandemic, there was an announcement: ‘Welcome to this concert by your orchestra,’” he says. “I loved that. What is marvellous about having an orchestra is the opportunity to create a civic resource. Rooting ourselves in the community around the South Bank [where the orchestra is based in London] will be a priority, and we are creating a children’s choir. We have a strong core audience already, but we want to make that community wider.”

At 48, though not old in terms of the average conductor’s longevity, he has reached the point in life when encouraging the next generation is a priority. “It is fascinating how eclectic young people’s listening is now,” he says. “People have become way more intrepid. They try a movement of a Mahler symphony, then some Philip Glass, and are not boxed into any single kind of music. They form their own opinions and that makes them less scared about approaching new music. I am optimistic about that, but maybe that also reflects how we need to present music in a concert. As we look through different prisms at what we are doing, we have to make sure we are offering the best of everything.”

The next concerts in the LPO’s ‘A Place to Call Home’ season include Kinan Azmeh’s Clarinet Concerto on January 18 and Tan Dun’s ‘Buddha Passion’ on January 22, both at the Royal Festival Hall, London, southbankcentre.co.uk