A musical score is full of secrets – the conductor’s task is to hear them

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The energy changes when Jaime Martin walks into a room. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a concert hall, a meeting room or the bar attached to a distillery, there’s a sudden feeling of both alertness and joy.

Jaime Martin has been the MSO chief conductor since 2022.Credit: Simon Schluter

That, he says, is part of being a conductor. They set the mood, and the ripple effects from there can be astonishing.

As a young musician, years before taking up the baton, “I found myself fascinated by figure of the conductor”, he says.

He was curious how, sitting in the same room, surrounded by the same colleagues, the sound would change completely depending on the person at the front of the room. He always wanted to know why. The answer, it turned out, was energy. “Different people create a different state of mind for the orchestra,” he reflects.

Martin was born in Spain in 1965. “At that time, Spain was a dictatorship,” he says. Martin mentions this because, when he was growing up, pursuing a career in music in his home country wasn’t really feasible. “Dictatorship [does not] try to encourage the arts because the arts make people think make people feel free,” he says.

Originally, he had wanted to play violin, but the only way to do that in Santander was via private lessons.

“I’m not shy to say I come from a very humble family,” he says. “We were six brothers and sisters, we lived in a flat on the third flor with no elevator, and [had] 65 square metres … so I couldn’t have asked my parents to pay for music lessons.” But, through a program at the local town hall, “I found I could learn the flute for free”.

With the flute, he thrived. After moving overseas, he performed with orchestra after orchestra – but his fascination with conducting never faded. It was when he was principal flute for the London Philharmonic that an opportunity to conduct an orchestra in Sweden arose – and so he stepped down a new pathway in his career.

Now chief conductor for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, he is in town to head up a series of performances to close out the year. The day before we speak was, in theory, a rare day off for Martin, though he confesses that he spent his evening going over the score for an upcoming concert – despite it being for a series of symphonies he has done many times in the past.

“It will sound like I’m a bit of a freak,” he says with a laugh. “But it was so peaceful. I found myself in front of the score looking at this amazing music and I had a fantastic time.”

Conductor Jaime Martin leads the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra at their opening gala, February 2023.Credit: Laura Manariti

When a concert is on the horizon, Martin’s approach shifts depending on whether he has conducted a work before or if it is entirely new. Even if it’s the former, however, “I try to look at it as if I’ve never done it before.”

If a piece of music is new to him, the process starts months before performance.

“Usually, what I like to do is start finding out about the composer, even before I open the music,” he says. “I want to try and understand a bit about what happened at that time for this person, what stage in life it was, and what was happening at that time in the country where the composer was working.”

From here, he holds out as long as he can from listening to past recordings to form his own understanding of a work in his mind. “No preconceptions,” he reflects. After that, he actively seeks recordings out, “to get the feel of the piece from different eyes or ears”.

It’s different again for a new work – of which the MSO has plenty on the horizon, with 12 world premieres in its 2024 season. Here, Martin normally has access to the composer directly, and can ask them questions about what is behind the music.

Knowing what the composer was going through while creating a work allows Martin to understand a piece more deeply and translate the truth of it for an audience. At first, maybe, a particular work sounds sad, “but actually the composer is not trying to describe sadness”. He pauses. “As a conductor, I have to play with emotions.”

As part of the upcoming Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody, the evening will round out with a performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No.10, which Martin describes as “an extraordinary [illustration of] what was going on in the Soviet Union at the time”. Shostakovich was “afraid of Stalin and was afraid for his future”, Martin says.

The score is full of secrets and layers, details that even the most attentive of listeners is unlikely to pick up, but which all weave together to create the overall feeling and story of the symphony.

“There are so many little messages hidden inside,” Martin says animatedly. He points to the many times the composer uses his own initials as musical notation, and the fact the second movement is “very short and ugly and aggressive” in a potential reference to Stalin. There is the rising terror that forms the backbone of the symphony that builds to an intense high and then stops, in a suggestion that “after all that, we will prevail”.

Martin explains how he listened to the symphony when he was a young boy not knowing anything about it and enjoyed it. “But once I knew what happened during that time, I was almost terrified listening to this music and I think it’s extraordinary,” he says. As a conductor, bringing this context to a performance enriches the experience.

When Martin returns in March 2024, one of the new works he is most excited to work on is a composition by Deborah Cheetham Fraillon. “She’s completing The Planets, and she’s writing Earth for us,” he says.

Once again, working with a living composer gives both Martin and the orchestra the opportunity to connect with a work on a different level, to create a back and forth between artists. “Sometimes even the composer changes things, according to what he or she hears, and I think that I think that’s very nice – it feels like the music is alive somehow,” says Martin.

Jaime Martin will conduct the MSO’s performance of Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody at Hamer Hall on November 30 and December 2, and at Costa Hall, Geelong on December 1.

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