Her last moment of silence, says conductor Alondra de la Parra, was on Sunday. “I was on the beach on the west coast of France. I am a very active person, we ran and played tennis. But at the end there came a moment when I said: Can we sit down and be quiet for a moment? It was maybe three minutes, but I long for those moments.”
If you look at the conductor’s resume, it’s not surprising that quiet moments have to be savored. The list of orchestras with which she has worked is long and includes illustrious names such as the Orchester de Paris, the BBC Philharmonics, the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra and the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra. She was general music director of the Queensland Symphonic Orchestra in Brisbane, Australia and continues to travel tirelessly around the world.
In conversation with de la Parra, it quickly becomes clear with what energy she copes with this workload: she has mastered the trick of appearing casual and highly concentrated at the same time. Her fast English is full of melodies and sounds: “First I was a New Yorker, which – ba-ba-ba-ba-bam – is so fast,” she says of her early childhood. Growing up in one of the largest cities in the world, Mexico City, not only adds another superlative to her resume, but also provides a clue as to where her ability to seemingly keep track of three different strands of thought at all times might come from.
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“Every silence must be taken as seriously as the sound”
However, de la Parra explains that silence is as important to music as it is to music itself. “If there is a silence within a musical phrase, a quarter or an eighth rest or even longer, this silence can have different types: It can be a breath, or a vacuum, an emptiness. A silence can feel like crashing into a wall – or just the aftermath of sound. In a tense silence you wait to see what comes next. Every silence must be taken as seriously as the sound.”
Although she has lived in Berlin for five years, she gives the interview for the Berliner Zeitung via video call from Paris, where she only has a few meetings, as she notes with a shrug. She will soon be going back to conduct a one-off “The Silence of Sound” on September 13th at the Admiralspalast – a combination of orchestral music, video projections and a clown named Chula (Gabriela Muñóz). The latter is the quiet element in this concert evening. The sound of the orchestra and elaborately animated video projections together tell the story of this mute main character, who, among other things, finds himself underwater and falls in love with a violin. With this evening, De la Parra wants to extend an invitation to get closer to classical music and to get to know the orchestral repertoire. To do this, she and Muñóz selected classical pieces by composers such as Debussy, Stravinsky and Brahms and wove them into a narrative in which children and adults alike should be able to identify. “You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, it’ll remind you of moments from your life and… ouch!” is de la Parra’s promise to the audience.
The conductor also interwoven her own story into the concert evening. “We’re both outsiders, at least that’s how it feels to me,” she says about working with the clown Chula. “The clown is the embodiment of the outsider, that’s why we need her. A female conductor is also an outsider in the orchestra: We are not part of the group, we do not produce the sound ourselves. We are leaders, we are singled out and are praised the most and criticized the most. We are the most loved and the most feared. We say what no one wants to say – and the clown, the fool, the harlequin does the same. There are many parallels between us, even in our situation as women: Gabriela is a clown – and most clowns are men. I am a female conductor, most conductors are men. Gabriela can say what I want to scream in my heart.”
Alondra de la Parra feels like an outsider, and that motivates her
The fact that she feels like an outsider seems to spur de la Parra to stick to herself and subvert the classic ideas of what conductors should look like. “We conductors are supposed to wear this maestro suit, walk and speak in a certain way.” De la Parra imitates a broad-shouldered, pompous gait while sitting and says “ta-ta-ta” solemnly. She never wanted to fulfill that. In the show there is also a small parody of this classic conductor’s attitude, she continues, and shows how the clown is given a shirt collar and briefly becomes a little tyrant.
“I always found this Maestro syndrome extremely unnecessary. We are artists. We are there to communicate. If you look at theater or film directors, they all look different. There is no one way to talk or walk. Conductors do, and that gets in the way of the real person, the artist, the musician, the connections that are important to me. And now when women wear this suit, it becomes even stranger: on men it looks strange, but on women it is even more artificial. I’ve always tried to find my own body language and also my own words that are actually mine and honest.”
Alondra de la Parra knows how to use the role of an outsider to his advantage. In her adopted home of Berlin, however, she seems to have arrived and felt like she belongs: “When I moved to Berlin, my father told me a good sentence: A fisherman has to live by the water. I’m a classical musician, I should live where there is classical music. That’s exactly the feeling I have here: most of my children’s friends’ parents play an instrument, the taxi drivers play classical music, the posters on the subway advertise classical concerts. Berlin is one of the few places in the world where classical music feels pretty relevant. Everywhere else I’ve lived, I’ve felt like an alien who has to explain to others what she’s doing. That’s not the case in Berlin.”
2023-09-09 20:20:53
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