A TREASURY OF SOUND

Main image An aerial view of the Royal Danish Orchestra in 2018 Bottom images Musicians of the orchestra’s viola, cello and double bass sections

There here is a sport among Copenhagen’s music critics. It involves attempting to define the distinct playing style and sound culture of the Royal Danish Orchestra while speculating as to how much those things are connected to the ensemble’s age. With a playing history dating back to 1448, this is the oldest orchestral institution in the world.

Det Kongelige Kapel (‘The Royal Chapel’), as it is known locally, is the house ensemble for the Royal Danish Opera but also gives symphonic concerts throughout the season at Copenhagen’s modern opera house. The ensemble has counted great composers among its members (Dowland and Nielsen) and has worked with a string of iconic conductors: Bernstein, Boulez, Furtw㭧ler, Karajan, Klemperer, Knappertsbusch, Kubelik, Ormandy, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Rattle and Walter, to name just a few.

Whoever’s on the podium and whatever the repertoire, this orchestra’s distinctive sound is unmistakable. Of course, it is also ultimately g indefinable, which only makes the exercise of trying to define it more tantalising. ‘The strings always strike me as producing a certain noble, cultivated and humanistic sound,’ says Thomas | Michelsen, a Copenhagen critic for 25 years, now I with the daily broadsheet Politiken. ‘It is a sound that has a wonderful depth to it. But despite the weight, it is never punchy or imposing.’ The | words ‘depth’ and ‘darkness’ recur frequently in conversation with many journalists, fans and orchestra members.

A handful of orchestras foster and preserve deep-rooted playing styles that ride out generational and acoustical change. But the Royal Danish Orchestra has, in part at least, a more tangible

$ factor at play: a collection of stringed instruments dating from a period spanning four centuries.

The principle remains, as with a number of | European orchestras, that the players use S instruments in the possession of the ensemble. g ‘This was the king’s personal orchestra, but when opera came to Denmark and orchestras moved indoors, it became the theatre orchestra we know today,’ says Kenneth McFarlan, second violinist Ԡsince 1983. ‘The king provided the musicians with the best instruments, and the Royal Theatre [the umbrella organisation of the Royal Danish Opera] took over that obligation. Over the years, the collection has grown bigger and bigger.’

McFarlan has spent some years attempting to rationalise and audit the collection of upper strings. ‘Some instruments have purported to be something other than what they are; our slowly refining expertise has proved that recently,’ he says. Many upper strings bear the stamp of Christian VII of Denmark, who reigned from 1766 until 1808, but it’s believed the stamp outlived the monarch.

Meherban Gillett (right) has done much to update the instruments of the orchestra’s double bass section

’THIS STRADIVARI IS SENSITIVE; YOU HAVE TO NAIL IT AND PLAY IN TUNE. BUT IT’S A DAILY PLEASURE IF YOU TREAT IT WELlL – CONCERTMASTER LARS BJOAR

The musicians performing in April 2018

What we do know is that the collection contains, in its upper strings, two each of Stradivari, Guadagnini, Storioni and Gragnani instruments. In those sections there are thirteen made in Italy between 1600 and 1800, seven from 19th-century France and two German violas from the 1600s. The cello section contains a Nicolas ati and the bass section a Girolamo Amati II, two Panormos, a Thomas Kennedy and two instruments by John Lott I. The Royal Theatre also owns the 1741 ‘Kreisler’ Guarneri ‘del Geson permanent loan to the violinist Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider.

The crown jewels are the two Strads. The earliest is from 1691, the ‘Fletcher, Red Cross Knight’, now in the hands of concertmaster Tobias Durholm. ‘It has a very concentrated sound; Tobias finds it difficult to play in quartets with it, because it doesn’t blend so well,’ says McFarlan. The other Strad, the ‘Yoldi- Moldenhauer’ from 1714, is regarded as the sister instrument to Itzhak Perlman’s ‘Soil’. Lars Bjo尬 the concertmaster who’s currently using it, picks it up to play, suggesting I listen out for overtones. ‘You don’t have to do much to get them,’ he explains. ‘Just find a double-stop, get it absolutely in tune, and it’s like the opera singer who can destroy the wine glass.’ He does this, and the overtone spectrum is clear as day. ‘When I’m in shape, it gives me what I want,’ he says. ‘It is sensitive; you have to nail it and play in tune. But it’s a daily pleasure if you treat it well. These instruments certainly contribute to the brilliance of the orchestra’s string sound.’ McFarlan adds: ‘You can almost feel it in your stomach.’

Also with us, during a break from rehearsing Mahler with current chief conductor Alexander Vedernikov, is concertmaster Emma Steele. As a relative newcomer to the ensemble, originally from Chicago, she has personified the Royal Danish Orchestra’s need to renew both its human and technical resources.

Weeks earlier, Steele took delivery of her own new instrument, sourced and obtained by the Royal Theatre through its instrument fund: an 1802 violin by Francois-Louis Pique. ‘He worked together with Nicolas Lupot, maybe in the same shop, making Stradivari-type instruments,’ says McFarlan. ‘Lupot is ultimately considered the superior maker, but when he was young he delivered violins to Pique, as Pique was unable to produce enough himself.’

Steele plays the opening bars of the Sibelius Violin Concerto on her Pique, and the most noticeable quality is its combination of smoothness and brilliance, with an uncommonly rich lower register, a distinct bite and an ability to fill the room. ‘I can really dig in and the sound doesn’t break,’ she says (her bow is by James Tubbs). ‘The French instruments from 1800 to 1850 are still often very healthy,’ says McFarlan. ‘It’s much harder to find Italian instruments from the period that haven’t got lots of repairs on them, which can affect power.’

Concerning power and depth of sound, it’s the leader of the orchestra’s bass section Meherban Gillett who urges me to look at the bowing used by his colleagues in the upper strings: ‘They’re playing way over, close to the fingerboard, getting that round sound,’ he says. Only in such fine instruments, with their ‘inherent qualities’, is this warm and rich sound possible to achieve by playing with the bow further away from the bridge, according to Gillett: ‘With those Strads the concertmasters are playing in the very darkest registers that they can.’ I ask Steele about that sound. ‘Because we’re an opera orchestra, we’re all about colour: trying to create colours and, for our concerts, thinking about which conductors we can invite who will develop and work with this distinctive string sound.’

The upper string collections have been growing for centuries. Many of their instruments would have been known by Nielsen, who was a second violinist with the orchestra for 16 years, and by Grieg and Sibelius, who both wrote for it. Today, the sound is characterised by that diversity of periods, and it has been added to recently by new-build instruments which demonstrate that ‘the standard of making is better than it has been at any point since the golden age in Italy’, according to McFarlan. ‘We have to replenish the collection, so that we don’t just have 18th-century instruments. We regularly order new ones to make sure we are using equipment from different times – that is a deliberate policy in the violin section. The violas have done the same.

Upper strings during the 2011-12 season

Checking musical markings before a 2014 concert

The orchestra’s strings produce a ‘cultivated, noble and humanistic sound’

TOP LEFT PHOTO NATASCHA THIARA RYDVALD. TOP RIGHT AND BOTTOM PHOTOS CHRISTIAN ALS

Violist Sune Ranmo, who joined the orchestra in 1984, points out that what you lose with new instruments is national identity: ‘The downside is that the regional way of making instruments is disappearing. There is a more unified way of making today, but I like it when you can hear where an instrument comes from: if it’s from Turin, Verona, Paris – or from a part of Austria or Germany.’

He produces one of the orchestra’s prized violas, a Jacob Meinertzen built in 1698 which came into the orchestra almost new in 1701. It is one of the oldest in the collection. ‘You can hear it’s a German instrument,’ says Ranmo. ‘It’s sweet, with maybe not as big a sound as an Italian model, but it’s a very good orchestral and chamber music instrument.’

If the upper strings collections have been shaped over time, the double bass collection has been revolutionised in the space of a few years. In 2010, British double bassist Gillett was appointed to the section leadership following freelance work in opera orchestras around Europe. ‘Each of them was lacking quality instruments, compared with the privately owned basses I was sitting next to in British orchestras,’ he says. He saw that the Royal Danish Orchestra’s bass section was, in hardware terms, its Achilles heel. He describes what he encountered as ‘a collection of two halves: instruments that had been around for hundreds of years and a fleet from the 1970s and 80s’. There was insufficient power in a bass section that had been conceived for the smaller opera house (built in 1874) but which had been in use for all performances until 2004. Gillett convinced his colleagues that replenishing the collection could bring huge benefits.

He has since rebuilt the bass section from his own chair outwards, combining the experience of his time in London with his belief in the Royal Danish Orchestra’s ‘noble, gentlemanly sound’, one that ‘searches right at the extremities of expression’. He pushed the idea of a London-style fleet that would match the darkness of the upper strings with a powerful but warm, cushiony bass. The first new instrument that arrived, funded by the Danish charitable organisation the Augustinus Foundation, was Gillett’s own in 2011: a Vincenzo Panormo bass from 1802 that sat in the LSO for around two decades in the hands of Thomas Martin.

The Royal Danish players have a ‘beauti fully backward way’ of thinking about their sound

’FOR THE FIRST TIME OUR COLLEAGUES COULD RELY ON THE BASS SOUND AND KNEW IT WOULD BE BLENDED AND BEAUTIFUL’ – DOUBLE BASSIST MEHERBAN GILLETT

Instruments at the ready from the orchestra’s fine collecti on

TOP LEFT PHOTO CHRISTIAN ALS. MIDDLE RIGHT PHOTO CAMILLA WINTHER. PANORMO PHOTO ARPEGGIO PUBLISHING

It proved, in Gillett’s words, ‘a Trojan Horse’. He set about an acquisition project, prioritising London-built instruments by Panormo and acquiring, among others, the bass he built for Dragonetti, one that produces ‘an almost unbelievably dark and creamy sound’.

The instruments were soon noticed, bringing a thrilling depth to the bass sound — pulverising in the heavy Strauss operas, but warm and agile in Mozart and the Italian repertoire. ‘Suddenly we felt trusted by our colleagues: for the first time in the new theatre, they could sit on the bass sound and knew we would sound in tune, blended and beautiful. The orchestra had a new foundation,’ says Gillett.

With a full complement of instruments by Panormo, Lott, Amati, Kennedy and amateur maker Johan Henrik Schnabel (former bassoonist with the orchestra), it wasn’t just the sound of the bass section that changed. ‘The instruments gave us the chance to change our style,’ Gillett says. ‘You could see how they influenced the section. What these basses ask for in our playing is more refinement, more sophistication and a much wider range of techniques.’

In rebuilding the section’s hardware efiectively from scratch, Gillett had to persuade Denmark’s ministry of culture — which in most cases purchased the instruments and donated them to the theatre (or deducted the outlay from its budget over an extended period of time, interest-free) — that they were solid capital investments. ‘We were picking winners. We had to.

Gillett ‘s Panormo bass

It was a new development for the orchestra’s instrument collection, traditionally based on slow-burn acquisition rather than reactive shopping. But the instruments have much the same efiect as those that have been in the theatre’s possession for centuries: apart from underpinning the orchestra’s deep, dramatic sound, they attract players to the ensemble. ‘At the time I was appointed, we knew we were going to have a big generational changeover in the section and we knew that these instruments would play a part in recruitment and retention,’ says Gillett. ‘I was once informally told, on a trial for a coprincipal job at a London orchestra, that I needed to invest in a better instrument.

Having these basses means we can recruit based on quality of player, not on the level of their personal financial investment. It helps in a hard-working opera orchestra to have equipment that gives you that deep satisfaction.’

Gillett says his London-styled section has ‘changed the bass world of Denmark and Scandinavia’. But if it has changed the sound of the Royal Danish Orchestra, it hasn’t altered its course. The bass sound is, Gillett says, ‘one that starts from the foundation, not with the person that sits at the front’. The words summarise his view of the orchestra’s ingrained sound culture.

‘In other orchestras, the basic framework has greater priority: rhythm, playing in tune, playing on the beat. These things almost completely dissolve here. The feeling of being a little bit at sea can be disconcerting for new players. The fact that there isn’t always something you can hold on to means you have to find out what makes most sense, individually and as part of the greater organism. I don’t really know another orchestra that has such a beautifully backward way of thinking about its sound.’

It is in the DNA of an opera orchestra to listen reactively and shift colours with dramatic instinct. The Royal Danish Orchestra’s constitution has engendered other qualities: breakout chamber ensembles are rife, and the orchestra chooses its own conductors for symphony concerts (recently Mariss Jansons, Thomas Sondergard and Marek Janowski). ‘We tend to prioritise musicality and sound quality in auditions,’ says Ranmo. ‘But you clearly hear the difierence in the instruments. I quite often play with other orchestras, and when I come back, I just love the sound that comes out of our orchestra: dark, deep, luscious, warm.’