ARTIST FORUM: MARCUS RUDOLF AXT
Marcus Rudolf Axt has been President and CEO of the Bamberg Symphony since 2013. During his tenure, the orchestra was selected for best concert program in Germany (2017/18) and received the Bavarian State Prize for music (2020). Born in Straubing, Germany, Axt has studied musicology, theater sciences and German literature
A RT I S T F O R U M
at the universities of Bayreuth and Bologna, Italy. Before his tenure at Bamberg, he worked as Managing Director of the Bonn Beethovenfest and as Director of Artistic planning at the Berlin Philharmonic.
WFIMC: This summer, the Mahler Competition was held, very successfully, for the seventh time. The collaboration with the Bamberg Symphony is a very unique one, and your jury is- quite extraordinary, to say the least… Marcus Rudolf Axt: I think this jury is particularly exciting because we have people from different disciplines and with completely different perspectives. And that's what distinguishes conducting competitions from the other disciplines. The main question is: who has the personality to win such a competition? And there is another question: is this winner also able and has the potential to deliver „in the wild“ what is promised in the protected space of a competition? We actually talk about this with the jury right from the start. I find the different perspectives extremely exciting. Especially with John Carewe, this old wizard, who has seen everything and everyone. He knows every trick and doesn't just look at the technical aspects, although he is a teacher, but also says: " is this really someone, is he/ she a „stage animal” or something else? And of course I also look into that. I watch the conductors from the audience's perspective, from behind, just as my audience gets to see them. Other jurors would sit in the orchestra or behind it or look at the monitor to see what's going on with the candidate´s facial expressions and gestures. It's exciting, of course. But we are approaching this phenomenon from different angles.
This means, your jury is not sitting together in the hall, but in different places? Correct. They are all spread out in the hall. It's quite funny, sometimes people in the audience ask: where is the jury sitting? They aren’t seated in one place but sitting here and there… Barbara Hannigan would sit at the back of the hall, under the organ, John Carewe always sits in the orchestra with his score and takes a chair somewhere between the violas. Then we come together after each round in the competition and report, from different perspectives, and in every respect, both from what we've seen and from what our profession is. I have never experienced that in other competitions- I think it's really a special feature here in Bamberg. It's a lot of expertise that we have gathered here together, and above all, they are all taking part from the very beginning, from day one till the end. We do not just observe single performances, but also the development of our candidates throughout the competition. Everyone can have a bad day sometimes, but maybe their preliminary was outstanding, so we might give them a second chance. The orchestra also has a representative on the jury. She is a member of the orchestra board, but she does not vote on her own- she goes to the different sections after each performance and collects opinions, sometimes even votes. Then she’d return to the jury saying: I have 37 to 73! Or sometimes just opinions or comments. Sometimes she might say that the brass players really liked someone, but the strings could not follow at all. The rest of the jury will never decide anything completely against the orchestra, so the representative from the orchestra is in a very powerful position.
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