Jonathan Berman 

Reflections 

ESSAYS

  • Artistic thought as a Model for Progressive Leadership - click here to read 

  • Orchestral Dialogues Part I - A model for Leadership in the Creative Age Part I – click here to read

  • Orchestra Dialogues Part II – The Orchestra as a Vital Element of a Listening Society – click here to read

  • Leadership Through Reflection –  A conductor’s perspective on the role of choice  - click here to read

  • On winning the Kempinski Arts Programme Fellowship & working with Franz-Welser Möst and Michael Tilson Thomas – click here to read

INTERVIEWS 

New European Ensemble, 12 June 2022

Remembering Oliver Knussen – click here for the full interview

Atelier Crescendo, 22 June 2021

Sounds & acoustics Part 1 – click here - and Part 2 - click here

“For me, I have actually learned a lot from this phenomenon. The orchestras whose sound I love (Vienna Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Paris Conservatoire Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic, Concertgebouworkest or Berlin Konzerthaus Orchestra) all play (or played) in smaller, old fashioned halls where making music isn’t about projecting your sound to the back of the 5000 seater hall, but more about creating warmth. Practically you don’t need to play too loudly in order for everyone just to hear, and so what you can do is discover more colours and nuances in the sound colours.

This idea has been central to my ideal of orchestral sound and, whilst both conducting and rehearsing, I often find myself asking orchestras to play softer, focusing on tone quality and warmth more than projection.”

Atelier Crescendo, 22 May 2021

“As for raising sensitivity to music, one of our great roles as musicians is to bring people into music and show them what joy there is in actively listening to music.

You know, we have a thousand different types of music and ways to listen depending on the functions in our life. We put music on when we go to the gym, we put music on to sleep, to cover awkward silences in a conversation or just as some kind of background. That is all wonderful. I use music like that. But there is this thing which I love, it can be any genre, you sit, you focus and you engage actively your imagination, your sensitivity; you engage and commit yourself fully in following the music. 

I love bringing people into this way of listening and this world of music.  I love showing them different types of music, different pieces of the same composer that they know or letting them see some aspects of a certain piece of music. It really gets me going and I want to share that with people. Musical understanding is not something that you either have or don’t have – a clandestine group of those in the know. There are many pieces, composers which at first hearing I didn’t understand or didn’t even like. But through time, through multiple listenings, through listening to others talk about this music, I have come to absolutely adore these pieces and composers.

I recently filmed a series called Postcards from Vienna, where I talk about Viennese music. Along with an amazing woman called Emily Ingram (co-founder and CEO at Onjam), we made four episodes of this documentary about classical music along with five other classical music movies. They are not just video performances, but videos that somehow visually draw people into the underlying structures, images, ideas, associations, illusions within a piece of music. All of these movies were trying to create, in different ways, environments for people to get closer to this active way of listening and interacting with music.”

BBC Radio 3 Inside Music, 24 July 2021

Introducing music by Knussen, Ockeghem, Debussy, Zimmermann, Beethoven, McLean, Mozart, Schmidt, Flanders & Swann, des Prez, McPhee, Bruckner, Partch and Verdi – click here to listen to the interview & read Jonathan’s script - click here 

London Philharmonic, April 2019

On Knussen’s Two Organa, Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music and Stravinsky’s Danses Concertantes – click here for the full interview

Sinfonietta Riga, November 2018

On why Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8 is Jonathan’s favourite Beethoven symphony – click here for the full interview

Classical Music, 8 December 2016

Meet the Maestro – click here for the full interview 

“Devising inventive concert programmes is something that Berman… particularly relishes. A case in point is the three concerts he put together in 2015 at Southbank Centre: “There was a big festival called Changing Britain where I put words, music, films, projections all together as a show. They lasted an hour and were wonderful; the result was even better than I expected, and we got some very nice praise.’ As a result, he says, ‘People came out of this understanding some of the gnarliest contemporary music, people who said: “I really didn’t like that but I get that it was part of the time”. It’s programming where you can get people to enjoy being in the concert hall even if they don’t like the music, and to understand it, to think, to be active. The more care, the more work you put in, the more chance you have of drawing someone into it.”

**

He also reveals an appetite for the behind-the-scenes, or at least the off-the-podium part of the conductor’s job more generally. It was partly why, when he was awarded a place on the 2014 Kempinski Young Artist Programme, he chose to go to the USA to spend time with the Cleveland Orchestra and New World Symphony Orchestra… “One part of it was to study with both of those two, but another part was to see how those two institutions work because I’m very keen to run an institution – it’s all very well beating five or four in a bar, but you have to understand how they are run.”

**

“I love reading about other philosophies and other cultures and I’m a complete Japanophile. There’s a wonderful thing I read somewhere about Japan which is that the thing that connects everything Japanese is care. It’s a slightly Zen idea, it’s a slightly Buddhist idea, but presented like this in a kind of western way: it doesn’t matter what you do or how you do it, but you do it with care. So you can open a door in a Zen fashion, in an artistic fashion. And actually when you get something that doesn’t work, it’s rarely because someone’s made a wrong choice. It’s actually because they haven’t made a choice.”

London Live Interview, 17 April 2015

On curating and conducting Changing Britain Festival at Southbank Centre – click here for the full interview