Curious? Melbourne is about to experience Chroma performed by The Australian Ballet, with music by Orchestra Victoria (now officially married to The Australian Ballet after 40 years of hooking up) conducted by Nicolette Fraillon, one of the world’s few female conductors and still the world’s only female musical director of a ballet company.
Fraillon, who conducted her first orchestra at the age of 16, and who has been chief conductor and musical director of The Australian Ballet for more than a decade, shared with Beat a few observations on preparing Orchestra Victoria to play the music of The White Stripes. “I always start with the music,” Fraillon says. “Step one is my preparation musically; I spend time thinking through the whole thing, learning the score, thinking about the background to the piece. With The White Stripes pieces I spent time listening to their original punk roots sounds and comparing it to what Joby translated into orchestra. It’s fascinating, with the electric guitar sounds and special effects. The instruments are being used in different and unusual ways by the composer’s score. Step two is getting my head around the dance steps. I’m not working on my own – I prepare music in collaboration; I need to get my head around the ballet, what the dancers do next, what the dancers need, what the choreographer wants, the artistic concept, what we have to do with the music. You have to get to know the dancers and what are they going to do with the piece.”
This sounds like a huge task, and it is. “I start practically,” says Fraillon, “I start with what the orchestra needs.” In the case of Chroma, with the different sorts of sounds the music requires, Fraillon needed to hunt down instruments not usually part of the typical orchestral collection. Fraillon explains: “We need a full set of tuned gongs; you hardly ever need those in an orchestra so where on earth do we find them? And cowbells! The keyboards has to produce a range of sounds, represented sounds, scrambled sounds, the trumpet has to make high sounds and screeches; there are sounds from pop and rock and roll, we use a saxophone and every percussion instrument under the sun in the pit so I’m sourcing players, talking to other conductors…the Chroma piece is so complicated, you feel like you never really know it. It’s complex; the orchestra is not to sound acoustic – it has to sound amplified with a pop-rock feel, with a full on amp sound – so we need to use a different sound system than we would usually. Chroma is more like a rock concert than a classical concert; it has to sound different, so what will we all need?”
Seven pieces make up the Chroma ballet, the three White Stripes works –The Hardest Button to Button, Aluminium and Blue Orchid – and four additional pieces composed by Joby Talbot. “Chroma is such a great work to do,” Fraillon continues. “Joby Talbot has been re-orchestrating everything so it sounds like one big piece. Joby’s four pieces sound like they could be The White Stripes sound, anyway. The last piece, Hovercraft, is very beautiful, slow, melodic, and contemplative.” The Chroma score presents the singular problem of needing so many percussive instruments that there might not be room in the orchestra pit for all the musicians. “I don’t think they will all fit,” says Fraillon. “We will have to put two players in another room and pipe their sounds via video and audio; they will need to listen to themselves so they won’t have headphones on…then there is the issue of transporting these things around the country!”
An additional requirement for the musical director is to ensure there’s an aesthetic confluence to the entirety of the show. Along with the Chroma score arranged and composed by Joby Talbot, sharing the concert bill are two dances to works by Mozart, and another to a work by Tchaikovsky. The former pieces, Petite Mort and Sechs Tänze, are choreographed by dance giant Jiří Kylián and described as ‘contemporary ballets meshed with the classical sounds of Mozart’. Petite Mort (‘little death’, a French euphemism for orgasm) was created to commemorate the second anniversary of Mozart’s death. Sechs Tänze (Six Dances) sees The Australian Ballet dancers getting into an 18th century mood, all dressed up in period wigs and fencing on stage.
The Tchaikovsky dance, Art to Sky, was created by The Australian Ballet’s resident choreographer Stephen Baynes, referencing a little known piece the composer wrote called Mozartina, a loving tribute to his musical hero written for the centenary of the celebrated Mozart opera Don Giovanni. Thus there is a resonance with these period works in terms of their genesis, as they too were originally inspired by another’s compositions. “It all gels seamlessly,” says Fraillon. “The second piece by Tchaikovsky is where he wrote a tribute to Mozart. He was composing music like Mozart, creating Mozart-like melodies…Tchaikovsky was doing covers of Mozart. It feels like the pieces have morphed into one another; it all feels organic.”
Have there been any surprises along the way? Fraillon laughs. “There are always surprises in live performance! The bigger the orchestra the more surprises there are. As we piece it together, every night there’s something that doesn’t work, it might be a wrong sample or it’s extra loud or something. The audio designer is as much a part of it as anyone; mixing sound live…it’s a trust thing.”
One big difference between conducting music for ballet and conducting for a musical concert is the amount of rehearsal time needed. “With symphony orchestras you come in the day before the performance but with ballet companies you have two or three weeks of rehearsals so you can get to know the dancers well enough,” explains the conductor. “In ballet, preparation time is much longer. You have to get to know the steps – your text is the music; for the dancers their text is their steps – you have to know all the steps; the conductor has to know both – so you spend a lot of time in the studio, thinking about matching music to steps. You need an extra rehearsal in the theatre. Normally this happens at the last minute, all the fine tuning, getting the balance right but with ballet, it’s different; it’s different every night. You have to report back to the sound designer. The dancers give their own individual performances and the players have different things to match, with what the dancers are doing at different times. No two dancers perform the same way, there are physical things that make a difference; it depends on the height of the dancer, the speed at which they move, they all breathe differently, they do pirouettes at different paces, turn at different speeds, slow or fast, a tall couple will do a lift at a different speed which physically affects the timing… If you have a dancer who’s on the slower side, you need to quicken in certain parts yet still be telling a vibrant story. I’m marshalling huge forces – I’m buggered at the end of the night!”
Does Fraillon ever get to sit back and just listen to a concert or performance she’s conducted? “I might watch archival recordings later but not they’re not high quality sound so I won’t really be able to judge the piece. It’s never a pleasant experience listening later – I am a perfectionist: I need a distance of a few years before I can enjoy it.”
BY LIZA DEZFOULI
