Interview with Ronald Zollman

As we can read in your CV you began your musical studies at the age of four. How exactly?

Indeed, I started to study piano at the age of four, and I could read music before I knew the alphabet. But this has not made of me a child prodigy, far from it. Thank God, my parents were very much against this kind of creatures! However, I dare say that music has occupied me since then for the most important part of my life.

You later attended the Royal Conservatoires in Antwerp and Brussels; which teachers do you remember most often, and why?

Paradoxically, the teachers I think mostly of were not from those institutions. When I was seventeen, I approached Igor Markevitch, whose interest in the pedagogy of conducting was known to me. He accepted me as his student at a summer course he was giving that year in Madrid. There, we were about fifty young conductors, some of them absolute beginners like I was, others more experienced already. Markevitch seemed particularly interested in what I was doing, and at the end of the course, he advised my parents to send me to Paris in order to study with his own teacher, Nadia Boulanger (she was then eighty years old already). I spent two years with this great lady of the music world, dividing my time between the lessons I had with her, and some very short but intensive periods I would spend with Markevitch. Nadia Boulanger has definitively been the key person in my musical education, her principles being part of me at all times. She was not a conducting teacher, she was a music mentor in the most noble sense of the word. Her ways were very Socratic, in the sense that they were focused on questioning rather than on answering. This was a very enriching and stimulating process, which makes me say that I definitively have learned as much from her -if not more!- after I had left her than while I was her student. Indeed, with such a prospective method, one is forced to go for a kind of permanent personal investigation within oneself.
After Boulanger and Markevitch, I still spent some time with two very different professors who were in plus very complementary to each other: Franco Ferrara and Hans Swarowsky.

When did you decide to become a conductor? What attracted you about this profession?

Amazing as it may seem, I decided to become a conductor at 5 already! It was of course only a child's dream, like other children want to become policeman, tramway, bus driver or pilot. Needless to say, I have discovered with the time that the profession is very different than what I thought it was then. But I still love it as much!

You work with leading symphony and opera orchestras. Which of them do you really enjoy going back to?

I have enjoyed most of the orchestras I have conducted, because I consider every orchestra as unique, and every concert as a special one. Sometimes I have of course been happier than others, but this is at least as much due to myself as to the players I work with. Every orchestra is different, and no concert is like the preceding one: because of the people, because of the works we perform, because of the circumstances we are confronted with. That's what makes performing be permanently a new experience. Routine is a performers' most dangerous enemy, and I believe this attitude is the best antidote to it!

And to which compositions? Which of them are close to your heart?

If I had to take one composer on a desert island, I definitively would take Mozart. But it would break my heart to have to miss the others! I feel basically very Central European oriented (my mother was born in Kosice, my father's parents were Polish): so besides Mozart Haydn, Schubert, Beethoven, Brahms, Dvorak, Mahler, Bartok and many others are close to my mind. But I love French music (Ravel, Debussy), and I have recently approached French opera with pleasure (Massenet, Gounod). I also have performed just about the entire oeuvre of Stravinsky, all Tchaikowsky symphonies and many by Shostakovich, and I have been responsible for the world premiere of over eighty contemporary works. The truth is that I like to vary my repertory, and also to vary the sizes of orchestras I conduct, from contemporary music ensembles to symphony orchestras, via chamber orchestras.

As music director you worked in your native Belgium, then in Mexico and also Israel. Could you, to some extent, compare the mentality of the musicians in these countries?

Musicians are human beings, and as such their mentality corresponds to the country and culture they live in. Like in ordinary life, the traveler should know and understand this, and he should always be aware that in order to get a particular result, he is not to say things exactly the same way from one place to the next one. What finally matters is the result, and this can only be achieved by trying to express oneself appropriately and by aspiring to a mutual understanding. It certainly is one of the main and most enriching challenges of my profession.

Over here you conducted the Czech Philharmonic in 2008, for example. Could you draw general conclusions from your experience with Czech musicians?

To be honest, I feel that Czech people are born musicians. One could almost say that any Czech who is not a musician, is a mistake (I hope that Czech non-musicians will forgive me for saying this...)!!! There are only a few countries about which I would make this statement. Amazingly, the one other country which comes immediately to my mind is Cuba. I was there recently for the first time, and I haven't yet recovered from this experience, which tells you how overwhelming it was!

In May 2009 you accepted the position of Associate Professor of Music and Director of Orchestral Studies at the private Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. How would you assess this role to date?

I have always been interested in teaching, though I would never dedicate myself entirely to this activity. I think it helps oneself formulating things better, and if one can in plus help others with these thoughts, why not do so? But I consider myself primarily as a performer. In Pittsburgh, I am basically asked to conduct concerts with the school's excellent orchestral ensembles. We perform in town, but also yearly in Carnegie Hall in New York, as we do in other cities. Of course, I also teach the few graduate students who I take in the class, and who assist me in my work with the orchestra. So, I now share my time between the States, touring the rest of the world ... and enjoying my home in Belgium.

Is there any particular motto you live by? In your private or professional life, or even one which is universal?

"It is more important to surpass oneself than to overtake the others."