Meet the conductor: Charlotte Corderoy
You’re making your Philharmonia debut at Bold Tendencies in September. How do you prepare for working with an orchestra for the first time?
It’s always an enormously exciting prospect – and a daunting one too, in the best possible sense.
My preparation begins and ends with the scores; I try to keep them at the very centre of my work. Every orchestra has its own character, and an ensemble like the Philharmonia have played this sort of repertoire countless times, under many different conductors and alongside many pianists. That’s why my focus is on building as deep a personal relationship with the music as I can.
Of course, that relationship then shifts during rehearsal – and so it should. I personally feel that in order to be enriched and inspired by an orchestra’s offerings, it’s imperative to have a point of comparison – a sense of how the room’s ideas compliment or challenge your own. Only then does it start to feel like a true collaboration.
I’m so looking forward to working with the Philharmonia for the first time, whose music making I’ve enjoyed and respected for a very long time. I count myself very lucky to join them in such exciting and programatically unique circumstances.
This concert will be a UK first – performing all four Rachmaninov piano concertos in one evening. What excites you most about this project?
I think this concert offers a rare and beautiful window into Rachmaninov’s development, and a uniquely complete way of experiencing his music. Each concerto can be very poignantly mapped on to a chapter of his life, so to hear them all in one night is almost to be given an autobiographical account spanning nearly 36 years.
They each bear the imprint of his age, his personal circumstances, and his artistic growth: he was an 18-year-old student, still relatively unknown, when he wrote No. 1; by the time of No. 4 he was a father and an émigré in his fifties, having left his homeland Russia permanently after the 1917 revolution. These works are infused with his struggles and triumphs, and performing them together is like tracing his entire story through music.
Personally too, I’m excited by the challenges presented by conducting all four in succession! It’s going to be an exercise in balancing stamina with discovery. I’d love for it to be an evening that can be enjoyed as one great arc, as opposed to just four separate works. I’m sure I’ll learn a lot about myself in the process, as has already proved to be the case throughout the preparation!
Have you worked with any of the four pianists before?
As it happens, Junyan and I were students together at the Royal Academy of Music. We were studying in completely different departments, but she often played for our conducting classes when we worked with two pianos – so she’s seen the good, the bad, and everything in between! It feels like a really happy full-circle moment to be working together again on this project, and it’s been a joy to watch all the amazing things she’s achieved since we graduated.
Do you have a favourite moment or section from each concerto?
Each time I sit with each of these concertos I’m struck by something new – a colour, a texture, an ambiguous detail. For me, that sense of discovery is one of the great rewards of this repertoire, and I know it will only be enriched by hearing Ryan, Jeneba, Boris, and Junyan’s interpretations.
That said, there are certain threads of thought that I keep coming back to. Across all four I feel an acute sense of a restlessness, a constant state of searching. At times this pursuit feels direct and urgent; at others it yields to moments of retrospection and a profound, if elusive, longing. I’m deeply struck by the potential for orchestra and piano to engage in an ever-shifting dialogue, full of questions and suspensions, but rarely arriving at finality.
I have a particular soft spot for the opening of the Andante in No.1 – the movement is so understated in its complexity that I can hardly believe it was born of such a young mind. There’s a moment very early on when the piano begins to unwind a thought first voiced by the orchestra. Soon a bassoon enters, singing entirely on its own terms yet somehow in complete cohesion. For me, it’s a moving example of Rachmaninov’s unusually integrated and dialogic approach to the concerto form – a delicate interplay that, in hindsight, magically anticipates the conversational, symbiotic relationships he develops even further in his later writing.
What three things are you listening to at the moment?
Phil Collins! I’ve been threatening to buy a drum kit for as long as I can remember, despite having zero drum-playing ability whatsoever. This summer I finally came good on my word, and I’ve been teaching myself the drums (with varying levels of success, it has to be said). It’s always been a dream of mine to play for fun, and so I’ve been really enjoying lots of seventies and eighties rock. Though I doubt my neighbours are best pleased…
On an entirely different note – I’m currently preparing Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffman, for my debut at Opéra National de Lyon later this season. So there’s been plenty of that on-the-go at the moment too! It’s been a lot of fun getting under the skin of some entirely new repertoire and immersing myself in the fantastical, the grotesque and all kinds of dream-like surrealism.
My absolute favourite go-to playlist of all at the moment, though, is my ‘Rain Sounds’ compilation. It sends me off to sleep! That said, I’m very particular about what sort of rain sound makes the cut – there’s got to be a bit of thunder, but not too much thunder. Bonus points if it sounds like we’re in a forest.
I think this concert offers a rare and beautiful window into Rachmaninov’s development, and a uniquely complete way of experiencing his music.
