BY MICHAEL PROUDFOOT

Thai conductor Trisdee na Patalung’s debut in 2006 at the age of 20, conducting The Magic Flute in Bangkok, was ecstatically greeted by the critics, with London’s Opera magazine hailing him as a genius. He quickly established a reputation in Europe, conducting Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice at the Steyr Music Festival in Austria, working at the Netherlands Opera Studio, conducting Handel’s Belshazzar (directed by Harry Kupfer), Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s La Descente d’Orphee aux Enfers, Monteverdi’s Orfeo, and Rossini’s La Cenerentola. He has also conducted in Scotland and extensively in Italy, with a variety of orchestras and conducted Il viaggio a Reims at the Rossini Festival in Pesaro. Michael Proudfoot asks him about his early years, how he met his mentor, Somtow Sucharitkul, and what he’s up to now.

When did you first show signs of interest in music?

My father and his brother loved classical music, especially, for my father, piano music. Not vocal music: when choral music came on the radio, he’d switch it off. He had a collection of recordings, including Wilhelm Kempff playing the Beethoven piano sonatas, and Karajan conducting the Beethoven symphonies.

My best subjects at school were mathematics, science, English. I wasn’t at all interested in music. We had a grand piano in the house, but I never touched it. My parents tried to persuade me to take up an instrument, but I said “I hate music!”. This really was how I felt at the time.

My uncle’s wife gave piano lessons, and one day when I was 13 I heard her giving one of these lessons. I don’t quite know why it had never occurred to me before, but I suddenly thought, “Wow, what a strange concept, music… ‘organised sound’?” and said that I wanted lessons. I started daily piano lessons from my aunt. At the same time, my father started to teach me the theory of music. That was very important – essential, I think. You are only properly literate, as it were, in music, if you understand the theory of music, and the earlier you study it the better, in my opinion. Since much of the basic theory that is required for one to be able to read music is mathematics-based, I didn’t have such a hard time grasping it.

My father had the score of all the Beethoven piano sonatas, and when I was at home, practising, I started working out how to play the Moonlight Sonata, and after two weeks I was starting to play it. My aunt found out and was shocked. “You shouldn’t do that! It will ruin your technique – you must learn the basics properly before you can tackle those pieces. Okay?” she said. I agreed – but of course, secretly I continued, and started on the first movement of the Pathétique 5 months afterwards. My father heard me playing the Pathétique and phoned my aunt and said “Listen to this!”, and placed the phone near the piano. My aunt heard me playing, and said “I think he’d better find a new teacher”. This was by no means a comment of exasperation. She was a great teacher but I think dealing with my unruliness was a perhaps little tough. After that I started lessons with a prominent Thai piano teacher. I listened to my father’s recordings, and became interested in composing, and decided to have violin lessons, just enough so that I was equipped with a rudimentary understanding of how string instruments worked; something that’s absolutely vital if one wishes to compose for the orchestra.

When and how did you first meet Somtow? 

After I had completed the first half of High School, when I was 16, we had to decide what I was going to do, and I started at on the Mahidol Pre-College Music Program. We were encouraged to go to concerts as part of the course, and one day I was at a concert with some of my friends. I saw Somtow, and I said to my friends “Look, there’s Ajarn Somtow – the famous composer and conductor in the flesh! I will go and ask for his autograph!”. So I did. As he was signing the autograph, I said to him “One day, I want to become a composer and a conductor!”, although I really had very little idea what a conductor actually did. He asked me if I had any compositions I could show him. I had my school satchel with me, in which I always carried around with loads of stuff, including some of my own compositions. I showed him a Polonaise I had written, with an Isaan-style (Northeastern-Thai-style) melody. He was intrigued at such an unusual combination, and at that moment decided he wanted to teach me himself. 

My father agreed, and I went to live and study with Somtow. Initially I continued with the course at Mahidol, but soon gave it up. I could get a far better and wide ranging education with Somtow. Again, my father agreed. “After all,” he said, “Mozart didn’t have a University degree!”. I learned so much from Somtow, not only about music itself, but also about the cultural background of Western Classical music, and much else besides. Also we spoke English all the time. I couldn’t have been here as I am, talking fluently in English, without Somtow.

With Somtow I quickly became engaged as a repetiteur for the opera company [Bangkok Opera, later renamed Opera Siam]. That was an immensely useful experience. I learned to accompany singers, and how to reproduce an orchestral sound on the piano – it was wonderful training, especially for someone who wanted to conduct opera.

If you could take to a desert island the works of just one composer, who would it be? Would you want to take with you recordings, or scores? 

J.S. Bach – no question. I didn’t have to think about it. And it would be recordings!

But Bach is an obvious gap in your repertoire …

Yes – that’s because I have mainly conducted opera, and Bach wrote no operas. When I started learning the piano, I wasn’t much interested in Bach at first. In fact, I didn’t even know what Baroque music was; at the time no one had yet to give me any serious music history lesson. About 18 months after my first piano lesson, I decided to take the ABRSM grade 8 piano exam and had to learn a Bach gigue for it, which didn’t excite me all that much (but at least I managed to pass with merit). Then one day my mother gave me a cassette tape, called Mad About Bach, which included some of the most famous Bach pieces. The first one on the cassette was the Brandenburg Concerto Number 3, played by the English Concert, directed by Trevor Pinnock. It absolutely gripped me, even though I really didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t even know what a harpsichord was at that stage (and even mistook it for a percussion instrument). I must have played the track - Trisdee pauses to do some calculations - more than 2000 times!

Bach became my favourite composer and has remained so ever since. I feel that his music is the perfect marriage between intellect and beauty. With all the incredible cantatas, the masses, the passions, and the vast variety of instrumental works, his oeuvre is more than enough to keep one emotionally fulfilled for the rest of one’s life.

After 2006, and your debut conducting The Magic Flute, you had a varied international career. But the last three years you’ve worked mainly in Thailand. Why’s that?  

After my contract with CAMI finished, I came back to Thailand. I originally intended to have a sort of ‘long vacation’; a whole year in Thailand for the first time for several years. It’s my home, and where my friends and family are - and the food that I love. I wasn’t sure what would happen next. I had commitments with the Siam Sinfonietta, with Opera Siam, and as resident conductor of the Siam Philharmonic. But the ‘vacation’ was short-lived; the opportunity to orchestrate and conduct a musical, Somtow’s Reya – the Musical, came along. It was based on a TV soap opera, written by Somtow’s mother, Thaithow, and was a great success. I found it interesting to work with singers who were not classically trained. After that, many other engagements followed. I had many commissions from top Thai rock stars to transcribe their music for orchestra, and opportunities to work more with non-classical musicians, and I found that I could make a decent living here in Thailand. I’m not sure now how I would get back into the European music scene as I’d always had an agent, but I have plenty of work here at this point.

How much of a say do you like to have in the direction of an opera production: how closely do you like to work with director? What do you think of ‘concept opera’, or ‘regietheater’?

I like to work closely with the director. After all, it’s the combination of the music and the display of human emotions, as well as other visual aspects that will end up taking you places emotionally and is this not why we go to the opera?

Personally, I think a ‘good’ production is one where all the deep emotions locked inside the music and the words are recognised by both the conductor and the director, who then work ‘together’ to squeeze every ounce of drama out of score, that will then go on to emotionally affect everyone in the hall. But in order for this to happen, the conductor has to be able to see and hear in his head how the director’s directions will fit in with the music and, indeed, how the whole package will affect the audience. Also, if one finds that the director has interesting ideas dramatically - ideas that the conductor may not have anticipated - he should be able to change or adapt his musical interpretation to best realise the full potential of the director’s interpretation… within reason, of course.

Conversely, the director should also understand, for instance, that some incredibly delicate and heart-wrenching arias may only require the singer to be more or less stationary and simply sing beautifully to be effective dramatically (less is more, they say), and that having some comic character dodging around in the background at the same time may not necessarily contribute to the conveyance of intense emotions the singer is trying to achieve (speaking from experience, of course). But in the end, I suppose this is all subjective. Having said that, I’ve been fortunate enough to have had the opportunities to work with such great directors as Harry Kupfer, and Sir David McVicar, from whom I’d learnt so much.

I want to be moved as I conduct opera, and I want the audience to be moved. The excuse sometimes given for radical new productions is that we’ve had so many traditional performances we need something new. But even if we’ve had a thousand performances of this opera, we should ask “How many of those thousand have been truly emotionally fulfilling performances?”.

I know you are in favour of Historically Informed Performance practice …

 Generally, yes, but only because I personally feel it best brings out what the music has to offer dramatically, and not because we’ve discovered it’s how they used to do it back then, per se. In other words, I’m mainly looking at this from an artistic point of view, not an academic one. For instance, there’s nothing quite as sensual as when you hear a certain musical passage with a harmonic tension, say a minor second, played without vibrato, with a small amount of messa di voce, before it resolves; or the excitement one gets from the raw sound of the Baroque timpani, say, at the beginning of the Christmas Oratorio; or the crisp articulation and a strong sense of pulse or groove that enable you to literally be able to dance to everything. Not to mention the fact that the composers wrote their pieces with the performance style of their period in mind, and obviously if the composer is any good, he would know how to compose a piece of music that will work best with the performance practices of the time. 

Now if 300 years later, people are playing the same music, but with more modern counterparts of their instruments, with a different way of interpreting what’s on the pages, and they still manage to make that music come alive - which I believe is the whole point - then that’s great and I will enjoy that just as much as any historically informed performance. Indeed, there are plenty of historically informed performances where the music fails to come alive. It really depends on the interpretation, in the end.

Again, this is all subjective (that’s my disclaimer here). However, what isn’t subjective is what we’ve proven to be true as far as period performance style is concerned, through such evidence as letters and books. All I can say is, there are people who like Raymond Leppard’s interpretation of Cavalli’s La Calisto, and others who like René Jacobs’s. Personally, I prefer the latter. That’s all.

What ambitions do you have? 

 If I could stand on the podium in front of the Concertgebouw, the Berlin Philharmonic, or the Vienna Philharmonic, or La Scala – that would be it, for me!