The Orchester symphonique de Québec (OSQ) will announce the appointment of its new musical director on Wednesday. The duty learned that the choice fell on a 40-year-old German, Clemens Schuldt, until recently conductor of the Munich Chamber Orchestra. Clemens Schuldt will take office in September 2023.
The choice of Clemens Schuldt is one of the surprise nominations reserved in recent years by certain orchestras in North America, such as Detroit with Jader Bignamini or Toronto with Gustavo Gimeno.
This is not surprising in itself, however, since Schuldt had been announced as one of the four “finalists”, alongside Emilia Hoving, Anu Tali and Jordan de Souza, for the position vacated by the departure of Fabien Gabel in the summer of 2020.
Clemens Schuldt becomes the twelfth musical director of the orchestra founded in 1902. Among his predecessors are Edwin Bélanger, Wilfrid Pelletier, Pierre Dervaux, Yoav Talmi and Fabien Gabel.
Thunderbolt
The most surprising thing about the announcement is the timing, since the OSQ was in the middle of the “second round” of its selection process. In this context, Clemens Schuldt was to come to direct the 8e Symphony from Dvořák on January 18. It is now as “designated musical director” that he will appear before the orchestra.
Director general of the OSQ, Astrid Chouinard denies any haste: “We formed a selection committee representative of all the active forces, clearly established the profile sought with a grid applied to each candidate and surveyed the musicians. We evaluated about fifty potential candidates. Between 15 and 20 chefs came to Quebec. All the grids, all the encounters, all the comments pointed in the same direction. We went to the obvious and seized an opportunity. And to program the next seasons, the sooner we know, the better. »
Conducting 80 very competent musicians is a very difficult thing. It’s good to see it from both sides. By living the life of an orchestra with various conductors, I have seen the influence that the conductor can have. But within the orchestra, I was also able to develop my own taste.
A thunderbolt in February 2022 in the “Linz” Symphony of Mozart and Don Juan de Strauss will therefore have been enough to seal the musical destiny of the OSQ for the next four seasons, the duration of Schuldt’s initial contract. Is love at first sight really meaningful? The question was put to both Astrid Chouinard and the lucky one, joined in London, where he conducted the BBC Orchestra. For Astrid Chouinard: “When you meet a chef twice, it’s not a big deal either. After the concert, we continued the exchanges. Evidence led us to go in that direction, and there was a common will. » For Clemens Schuldt, we can explain that love at first sight leads to a nomination « when the orchestra has already seen a number of candidates, when it is well engaged in research and when it knows what it wants and what that he does not want”. “He looked at my profile, what I was doing in Munich; if confidence is established for the future, yes, we can decide. From my experience, you notice very quickly whether there is chemistry or not,” he summarizes.
Slow process
A native of the city of Bremen, Clemens Schuldt trained as a violinist. He has played with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie (DKP) in his city and the Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne. He did not participate in the legendary Beethoven cycle by Paavo Järvi and the DKP in Lanaudière. “I played the Beethovens in Warsaw and the Schumanns in Bonn with Paavo Järvi, in addition to tours in Japan and Kazakhstan”, tells us this “passionate violinist” who dreamed of playing in a string quartet.
Schuldt learned lessons from his years as a violinist. “Paavo Järvi’s Beethoven was a revolution in terms of articulation and energy, because everyone had participated in developing the interpretation and Paavo Järvi’s merit was to accept the ideas. I learned that from him: a great chef doesn’t necessarily have to decide everything, he can listen. Schuldt recognizes that with a large orchestra, you have to avoid chaos. “Not everyone can start talking on rehearsal, but I always say, ‘Come and see me at break time if there’s anything unclear or you have a suggestion.’ »
Schuldt took conducting lessons when he was a violinist in Cologne. “Directing 80 very competent musicians is a very difficult thing. It’s good to see it from both sides. By living the life of an orchestra with various conductors, I have seen the influence that the conductor can have. But within the orchestra, I was also able to develop my own taste. It would have been madness to say at 20, “I want to be a chef right now.” I didn’t have a clean and deep vision of music. I needed my twenties to develop as a musician. So I wanted to learn the mechanics of steering. »
The motivation to be a conductor, Clemens Schuldt finds it in the study of scores. “There is a moment when I hear things and I say to myself: ‘This is how this symphony by Mozart or Beethoven should sound.’ In the models, Clemens Schuldt quotes in particular Carlos Kleiber and the Bruckner recordings of Günter Wand, the latter for the “mixture of rationality and passion”.
In his programming, the chef, whose notoriety is confined for the time being to the United Kingdom and the Germanic sphere, has been bold enough to go beyond the curiosity attributed to the public here. “He won’t be hard to temper, as he’s bright and pragmatic, full of ideas and interested in all facets of his job. We, internally, know our customers well, so we are there to support them,” Astrid Chouinard tells us. As for Clemens Schuldt, his wish is “to establish a relationship with the public such that if in a few years we offer something new or unknown under my direction, the public will say to themselves: ‘It’s going to be exciting, interesting to discover.” In his eyes, “if the energy of conviction emanates from the stage, the audience will be surprised and convinced and fewer and fewer people will wonder what we are going to play. They will come to the concert and trust us”.