It’s a bonus when an interview augments the creative process, and that’s how it felt during this transatlantic Zoom conversation with Koen Kessels, music director of both The Royal Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet (from his home in Antwerp) and Swedish composer Mikael Karlsson (from his base in New York). Karlsson has composed the score for Hotel, Morgann Runacre-Temple’s new work for BRB, which Kessels will conduct; but until our tripartite chat the two had not met. In this interview it seemed that I wasn’t the only one taking notes!
Hotel is the new work in a triple bill under the generic title “Into the Music”, which opens at Birmingham Hippodrome on 21st October, the middle part of a programme which will start with Jiří Kylián’s Forgotten Land, his visualisation of Benjamin’s Britten’s magnificent Sinfonia da Requiem, and concludes in the late Uwe Scholz’s interpretation of Beethoven’s vibrant Seventh Symphony.
A subtitle for “Into the Music” could be “Out of Stuttgart” since Kylián created Forgotten Land for Stuttgart Ballet, in 1981, the year before he left to begin his long career at Nederlands Dans Theater. Ten years later, Scholz also made The Seventh Symphony in Stuttgart. “Into the Music” has been curated by BRB director Carlos Acosta, but it also represents something of the legacy of John Cranko, director of Stuttgart Ballet from 1961 until his death, aged just 45, in 1973.
“It doesn’t often happen to have music of such a high standard,” says Kessels in reference to the programme’s title. Kylián described Forgotten Land as being made “in the idiom of a musical choreography”, a phrase that Kessels borrows by adding: “These are what I would describe as very musical choreographies. […] Scholz was an accomplished musician, and he articulated his vision of the music through an expert analysis of its structure,” explains Kessels. “Both works show a deep understanding of musical structure and sensuality with choreography that goes deep into the music to create visual imagery that enables audiences to enter the mind of the composer.”
Kessels sees this quality of musicality in the choreography of Runacre-Temple (as always, supported by Jessica Wright, her partner in Jess and Morgs Films). It is the second time in quick succession that they have collaborated with Karlsson, having worked together on Scottish Ballet’s Coppélia, which premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in August.
Karlsson already had a strong track record in composing for dance, having worked with Alexander Ekman on several productions, including A Swan Lake and Midsummer Night’s Dream. Describing his process of working with choreographers, he says: “It’s about creating an empathy with what they are trying to build. With Hotel, I had the benefit of just having done Coppélia with Jess and Morgs. They have a peculiar sense of mischief – something they share with Alex (Ekman) – and I like that because I know that they’re not going to just make a pretty piece. I tried to dive into the quirky side of what they do and bring the rhythmical side of what I do so that we could then decide on a sound together. We had used a lot of strings for Coppélia and so, for Hotel we’ve used woodwind and percussion with contrabassoons and bass clarinets creating an aura of mystery in wheezing, creaking sounds. I gave them a lot of music and they picked what worked and what didn’t before we came to a unified whole.”
Karlsson believes in producing the music early and working closely and iteratively with his co-creatives. He is currently composing an opera version of Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia. It is not to premiere at Royal Swedish Opera until autumn 2023 and yet he has been sharing the music with librettist Royce Vavrek and other creatives for over a year already. “Providing musical ideas early can be a release for the choreographer because the panic in their working arrangements is having to make decisions very early when they don’t yet have the answers. I can help by giving them music to lean on, which might open up possibilities in terms of the choreography and so that they can synchronise video, which Jess and Morgs do so well. I’m not sharing my music early to impress; I want to be helped; I want everyone to get there with me.”
Karlsson is impressed by the humour and pacing in the work of Jess and Morgs: “They have a very sneaky way of creeping up and turning on you by, for example, exploiting dramatic value from something that might initially seem silly. Boring dance and boring opera are doubly boring, but they can also be amazing, and it has to do with pacing and with disarming people through surprise. My music also aims for that.” Kessels and Karlsson have never previously worked together, hence this interview being their first meeting, and the BRB music director will not conduct the opening shows in Birmingham due to a clash with performances of Mayerling at Covent Garden. Thomas Jung, the inaugural Constant Lambert Conducting Fellow at The Royal Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet, will conduct the programme, although Kessels will return to conduct Hotel when the programme comes to Sadler’s Wells in early November.
Kessels speaks of the vital importance of commissioning new works for ballet, and he praises the former long-term BRB director David Bintley for introducing the Ballet Now commissioning programme, which has provided the wherewithal to create Hotel. “David was always looking to commission new music for his choreographies, and he sought the most interesting composers available. Ballet Now has already enabled several commissions, accumulating new music in every season.”
What is Kessels’ advice to composers coming new to ballet? “Writing for ballet will open up new opportunities for any composer but it is important for them to understand Minkus, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky and Prokofiev, and then, when they understand the ballet repertoire, they need to experience rehearsals to understand the requirements of movement, and only then should they look for their own unique language.”
Karlsson adds that “knowing how to write for dance takes time. […] Composers have to understand that – unlike the concert hall – writing music for dance is a medium where your work is not the only focus. When writing for dance you have to leave space for the other creative aspects; mostly the choreography, of course.” There are other compensations in composing for dance, as Karlsson notes: “Phillip Glass summed it up pretty well when he said that one of the most wonderful experiences about writing for dance is that the music gets rehearsed. If you write for an orchestra, just for concert, you’re lucky if you get an eighteen-minute rehearsal for a twenty-minute piece.” Kessels agrees: “There is double the time for rehearsing music for dance than for the concert hall. In opera and ballet, there are also several performances of the same production, whereas you would be lucky to get even a second concert.”
I ask how music composed for performance in the concert hall changes when it becomes a score for dance. Kessels relates an anecdote of working with Thomas Adès on The Dante Project. The first part (Inferno) was originally commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic for concert performance, but when it was expanded into the score for Wayne McGregor’s ballet, Adès treated his own music differently. “He was asking dancers if the music was too fast or too slow. In a symphony orchestra, you take the energy from the musicians but with dance, there is the added dimension of the energy coming from the stage. It was great to see how Thomas knew that he had to meet the needs of the dancers when he came to conduct for ballet.”
What about the different dynamics of working directly with a living composer? “I love it when the composer is around!” says Kessels. “When I’m leading rehearsals, I ask the composer to speak directly with the orchestra, which breaks with the nineteenth-century tradition of the composer only speaking to the conductor, who then has to explain his intentions to the orchestra. It’s great when the musicians can be let directly into the composer’s confidence.” Another aspect of working with living composers is that their scores change. “Thomas Adès took his score of The Dante Project home after every rehearsal or performance, and every day musicians had notes to change some little thing. So, he continually improved his music. Joby Talbot and Max Richter are the same. It’s a process, and the process hardly ever ends.
“Writing for dance places the composer in a position of incredible privilege with dozens of people trying to help you make this thing work,” explains Karlsson. “Composers who haven’t previously wanted to write for dance often turn to it later in their careers. They appear hungry to embrace it, because of this experience of getting to work as part of an enormous team, of getting to understand the connections and the emotional element that dance brings to their music, and to approach a very different type of listening experience from the audience. I can only recommend the experience to any composer, but it takes time to figure it out and you learn on the job by making lots of mistakes!”
This article was sponsored by Birmingham Royal Ballet.
