It started about thirty years ago, on the day that conductor Jules van Hessen turned to the audience and said good evening. He conducted Mahler’s monumental Second Symphony in an era when drinks were not yet included in the admission price, so concert halls always take a break for extra income. But what do you program in the fifteen to twenty minutes before the intermission, when you conduct such a monumental symphony of almost an hour and a half after the intermission? “Behind this Second Mahler lies a fascinating history, was my thought,” says Van Hessen (64). “So why don’t I tell the visitors a bit more about that in the twenty minutes before the break, with some listening examples played by the orchestra?”
And so ‘Maestro Jules Unveils’ was born, a series in which the conductor brings up musical facts and anecdotes about a classical masterpiece before the break, with the help of visual material, clear symbols and an orchestra, to conduct the piece completely after the break. Soon you will be able to hear Van Hessen talk about Rachmaninoffs Second Piano ConcertoMendelssohns Italian Symphony and Brahms’ Fourth Symphony, which he then conducts with the Philips Symphony Orchestra (where he is chief conductor), the Noord Nederlands Orkest and the Residentie Orkest respectively. He has done about thirty pieces so far.
Van Hessen sometimes even makes discoveries that surprise even musicians or connoisseurs, such as a melody from a funeral march by Mahler, which appears to have been ‘nicked’ from a now largely forgotten opera by Donizetti. He dares to promise visitors of the upcoming Rachmaninov concert such a discovery.
Whistle out the window
His journey of discovery through classical music started at home in The Hague. Van Hessen was the youngest of five children from a Jewish family: father a businessman, mother a housewife. “I admire my parents for their positive attitude. They have not burdened us with the wounds left by the Holocaust. The emphasis was on growth, developing yourself.”
And that’s why all the children got a musical instrument pressed into their hands. Latecomer Jules – “my mother called me the encore” – started on the recorder. “In one of my earliest memories, my mother helped me study for it when I was six years old. ‘Au clair de la lune’. But it doesn’t work, and then I speak the historic words: ‘This is not a musical instrument’, and throw the recorder backwards from one high through the open window.”
His mother did not get angry, but asked what he thought was a musical instrument. “My eldest sister’s boyfriend played the clarinet. She was always talking about that. I had never seen such a thing before, but it mesmerized me. So I yelled, “Clarinet.” My mother arranged a trial lesson. I thought a clarinet had twists, so it was a disappointment that it was a straight pipe. But at least he was big.”
His teacher Jan van den Eijnden became a kind of second father to Van Hessen. “When I was seventeen I played the clarinet in small orchestras. He told me one day that the Church Symphony Orchestra in The Hague was looking for a conductor. Or was that not what was for me? My heart jumped. Of course I couldn’t do anything. I have memorized the scores for the trial game note by note. I joked that I was eighteen. And I was hired. That was a revelation.” Van Hessen later studied orchestral conducting with Louis Stotijn at the Royal Conservatoire.
Between garbage cans
With Hague bluff, Van Hessen managed to arrange a few memorable meetings with great conductors in his younger years. To quote the unapproachable Gennady Rozhdestvensky, as a twenty-year-old student after a concert he lay among the rubbish bins at the artist entrance behind London’s Royal Festival Hall. The Russian sent him to his own summer course, and when Van Hessen was the last one standing there in a knockout race, he was allowed to take private lessons with the conductor in Vienna and London. “The special thing about Rozhdestvensky was that he didn’t have to talk at rehearsals. He could show everything. With a twist of the finger, all the musicians knew what he meant.”
Van Hessen was also allowed an audience with the American conductor Erich Leinsdorf. It was not an unqualified success. “Leinsdorf showed me a Mozart score. “There’s a misprint here,” he said. But I didn’t like it. So I feel like I failed an exam. Leinsdorf did tell inspiring stories, especially about the eternal dilemma: when do you do what the score says, and when do you do what is meant? His book was published a few years later The Composer’s Advocate. That title remains the best description of our profession.”
“It annoys me when people say that Maestro Jules Unveils is ‘classical music for dummies’. Because I respect my audience. And there are people who are afraid to perish by such cries. Keeping them away from the concert hall makes me angry. I want people to feel at home there, and I hope to feed them with stories that enhance their experience of the music, without patronising. I always conclude before the break by saying that a piece remains beautiful even without these tidbits. And if I use a pickle as a metaphor, but you think it’s an onion, that’s fine too. That doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. I try to give the visitors something that can help, but they can also just forget about it.”