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Friday 9 January 2009

Poetry in motion

Henrietta Bredin talks to Peter Manning about taking risks and creating opportunities

Manning strikes me as a classic example of someone who, while very far indeed from being foolish, is certainly prepared to rush in where angels fear to tread. Not having done something before would never present for him any sort of an obstacle. Back in the Eighties he left his job as leader of the London Philharmonic Orchestra to become a founding member of the Britten String Quartet, and from the very start of playing with them he was commissioning new music. When he asks people to do things, they tend to respond favourably.

‘It’s up to people like me to push things a bit, I think. There’s a lot going on culturally in this country but it can become a bit monochrome and I’m not happy about that. I like mixing things up. It’s taken me a long time to get where I am now, but as a performer I’ve probably been at the top of my game for quite a while and it seems natural to expand into this producing role. This will be the first major musical treatment of any work by Seamus Heaney and he’s tremendously excited about it. When I first approached Faber, his publishers, about The Burial at Thebes, they said all the usual cautious things but he just said absolutely, go for it. Which was wonderful.’

What Manning seems to do is create circumstances in which an organic creative process can flourish, with boundaries blurring at times between the roles of conductor, director, composer and writer. ‘Absolutely. It’s not that I’m writing Dominique’s music for her but I’ve been talking to her now for five years; we’ve shared everything from late-night conversations to breakfast, she knows my family well, I know her parents in Trinidad. So in terms of the shape of the orchestra, what sort of sounds should happen, how to keep a balance between the poetic reality of the text, the narrative and the theatrical element, our thinking has become entwined. We know what we want. As a conductor or artistic director, the first thing you have to think about is the very exact nature of co-operation. There has to be a real practical working arrangement between stage performers and musicians, and the primary creators. Seamus is incredibly open to that and Derek Walcott is extraordinary as a director. He works with performers in ways that can surprise them as much as it surprises the audience, changing a response to a passage by the way he interprets it. It’s a kind of alchemy — fascinating.’

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