Music Makers: In Conversation, with conductor John Andrews

Music Makers: In Conversation, with conductor John Andrews

In this series, we look beyond the formal lists of biographies and CVs to explore the repertoire artists return to, and the music they feel most deeply connected to.

Today we are delighted to share the responses of conductor John Andrews.

Piece you hum round the house / sing in the shower

To the extreme annoyance of my family, I don’t hum around the house, but rather I tend to grind my teeth to whatever’s in my head, and as a consequence can never remember it...

First piece you remember studying or conducting

I set myself to memorise the Beethoven, Brahms and late Mozart symphonies in my late teens (how my life has changed!) and it was probably the Eroica that I first put really concentrated effort into studying.

A piece/work you return to professionally

As a freelancer I don’t get a lots of choice in this but I love to come back to Dvořák’s Stabat Mater and Vaughan Williams’ Dona Nobis Pacem as often as I can get away with it. But my love of exploring new repertoire has tended to mean that I don’t get back to these pieces (and the operas of Mozart, Rossini, and the 19th-century symphonists) that often. But absence does make the heart grow fonder and the revisiting of them all the more rewarding.

Last piece of music you deliberately chose to listen to:

I find it difficult to listen for pure pleasure now, which I suppose is always the risk when you make your love your job. It will have been either Renaissance polyphony or jazz - something I’ll never be called on to have a professional opinion of...

Work you feel most emotionally connected to

Both Don Giovanni and Le nozze di Figaro were formative early experiences that I feel deeply connected to; also both the Fauré and Duruflé requiems are now linked to the passing of people very dear to me.

A work you would love to conduct one day

SO MANY! Boris Godunov, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Die Walküre, Falstaff in the theatre. The Symphonies of Emilie Mayer and Grace Williams, The Elgar oratorios and the War Requiem; but I’m also always looking for the next discovery!

To find out more about the work of John Andrews, please visit his website → https://www.johnkandrews.com.