words yvonne teh

With a new chief conductor, the City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong finds two heads are better than one.

It takes two for the City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong (CCOHK) – not to tango but, as founder, artistic director and principal oboist Leanne Nicholls says, “We work two years in advance.” So even though, at the time of our conversation, the CCOHK is a couple of concerts away from completing its 2007-2008 commitments, it has already engaged conductors for the next couple of seasons and decided on the composers for the special concert series after the upcoming break.

Chief among the conductors for the 2008-2009 season will be Frenchman Jean Thorel. An unusual maestro, Thorel believes in taking things into his own hands: he has a website but not an agent and so on his first visit to the Fragrant Harbour in 2005, he went personally knocking on the doors of the territory’s leading orchestras. After introducing himself at the CCOHK (an orchestra he first came to know about via the internet!), he and Nicholls ended up sitting down and talking for two hours straight!

Two years after that fruitful meeting, in October 2007 Thorel found himself wielding the baton for the CCOHK’s Sound the Trumpet concert whose programme included the Hong Kong premiere of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No 2. During that visit, as a guest conductor he noticed the orchestra showed much unexplored potential and also thought it needed a chief conductor “to give landmarks and directions for the work”.

Coincidentally, he wasn’t alone in his conclusion. “We were thinking along the same lines,” says Nicholls. “Actually, we thought about the same thing at the same time!” Up until then, the orchestra, which has been in existence since 1999, had only worked with guest conductors – or even sometimes performing whole concerts without a conductor at all – but it was obvious the time was ripe for a change in operating style.

However, Nicholls knew that a chief conductor for this particular orchestra would need quite special qualities as, she says, CCOHK’s position in the cultural scene is very clear. “Our works are less mainstream anyway, and maybe even more so because [normally] there’s not much possibility to hear the works we perform in Hong Kong anyway. We want to do everything from Baroque to modern and crossover. [We needed] to find someone open-minded enough to do that, but to do it well. Baroque, you have to know how to play; you have to know the style. It’s not something that, if you haven’t studied or know about, you can do, really.”

She acknowledges the large number of available conductors but many “for Baroque especially, don’t have that extra string to their bow! What we don’t want to do is to play old styles and play them not so well. What we want to do is to put a mark on them and we have been looking for someone who can do that.”

Finally, on April 18, came the announcement that someone had been found and, starting this September, Jean Thorel will assume the position of chief conductor of the CCOHK. An experienced wielder of the baton who formally studied conducting for both orchestral and ballet performances, Thorel began conducting orchestras in his early 20s but knew much earlier that he wanted to be a music maestro.

The permanent conductor of Paris’s Stringendo Orchestral Ensemble since 1985, Thorel has also been in demand as a guest conductor throughout Europe – particularly in Scandinavia where his first concert was “so difficult that nobody wanted to do it”. Conduct it he did, and very successfully too. But while he will continue to honour his commitments in France’s capital and accept guest conducting invitations elsewhere in 2008-2009, Thorel says, “I really want to support Leanne’s work. I don’t intend at all to come over only for conducting and making rehearsals and to say goodbye after that.”

Instead, his plan is to fly in to attend meetings and so on, and to oversee auditions for the CCOHK, as he did during his most recent visit to Hong Kong. In addition, among other things, he will work with Nicholls to pick the music the orchestra will perform over the course of an entire season. “It will be a joint effort,” says Nicholls, “and that’s where orchestras are moving these days.” So it really does take two for the CCOHK: two years advance planning by two at the top!