The Other Side of Silence
Christian Kluxen is recomposing Victoria Symphony's audience
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Christian Kluxen knows he can be intimidating. Now in his seventh season as Victoria Symphony’s Music Director, he often meets Victorians who, upon being introduced to an actual maestro, respond with a measure of discomfort: “When I say what it is I do, they’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s…interesting.’ I get from them a feeling of solemn fear, like they’re curiously fearful about the classical concert form, unsure how to approach it.”
He understands why. “It’s how I would feel if I was asked to go to Copenhell”—a massive heavy metal festival held each year in Kluxen’s native Copenhagen—“I wouldn’t even know what to wear. I don’t usually headbang—would I have to do that?”
Kluxen feels an artistic responsibility to broaden Victoria Symphony’s style and scope, beyond what established subscribers expect: “I want to give them the music they don’t know they like.” Transforming apprehensive locals into regular concertgoers is one of the many challenges Kluxen and symphony CEO Matthew White face in their efforts to ensure that Victoria maintains a world-class symphony orchestra. Programming is a crucial needle to thread, balancing tradition against innovation.
“I want to give them the music they don’t know they like.”
The symphony’s job, according to Kluxen, is to “make people want to be in a closed room with their emotions for one more minute than they feel comfortable with.” It’s this emotional resonance of the form that he feels is key to attracting new fans. He’s well aware of the imposing nature of classical music, that it feels to some like an intellectual exercise rather than a night of simple entertainment.
“I always say, Don’t think. Don’t think that you have to know anything about classical music. On the contrary, the less you know, the more interesting experiences you can have.” He feels that newer generations are becoming so conditioned to asserting themselves through social media platforms that they are not as comfortable simply experiencing events without engaging with them. “I don’t want to seem like a cultural fascist in any way—the point is that the ability to listen is diminished when you are always required to express yourself.”
Putting it another way, Kluxen says, “What we do in the hall, even though it’s very loud, is really a shadow of silence—the other side of it. So what we mostly give is the opportunity to explore silence.”
“What we do in the hall, even though it’s very loud, is really a shadow of silence—the other side of it.”
It helps that Kluxen’s star is rising. The list of countries with major orchestras he has worked with is staggering, from Scandinavia and Europe to Australasia and the US. In addition to his commitments here in Victoria, he debuts this year as the Principal Guest Conductor of the Turku Philharmonic in Finland, one of the oldest orchestras in the world. All this at the annoyingly young age of 41.
But he really wanted to be a drummer. “My parents didn’t listen to classical music, but they wanted me and my siblings to play something—piano at the very least.” He dutifully started on the piano at age 6 (“I’ve never become good at piano,” he says with a chuckle) then switched to the drums a few years later, which is the instrument he had his heart set on when he joined a Copenhagen boys’ marching band as a young teen. But the band’s leaders had other ideas.
“We were privileged to have great teachers from the Danish Radio Orchestra and the Royal Danish Orchestra, and when you join they put a marching flute in your hand first. If you can’t get a good sound out of that, they figure you can at least bang a drum.” Kluxen’s skill as a flautist kept him off the skins, and by 14 he was conducting the band. He entered the Royal Danish Academy at 19, and by 23 was earning a full-time salary as a conductor. But he credits his time in the marching group with much of his work ethic.
“It was a den of music combined with extreme discipline, up to the border of being too much, but we formed incredible friendships. So music for me has always been something to share with people. It’s very difficult for me to hate anyone I’ve made music with, even if they have treated me badly.”
“It’s very difficult for me to hate anyone I’ve made music with, even if they have treated me badly.”
Conducting, he says, came very easy for him in the beginning, and then became very difficult as he moved into his professional career. “But slowly it’s getting easy again. It’s taken me 25 years for it to lighten up.” He began conducting the Copenhagen youth orchestra, then found a mentor in the conducting professor at the Zurich University of the Arts: “more of a conducting psychologist than anything else.” He soon landed the Assistant Conductor position at the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, where he stayed for three years before his acceptance as Assistant Conductor for the Los Angeles Philharmonic through the Gustavo Dudamel Fellowship, a coveted career launcher. From there he was hired by the Victoria Symphony, taking over from the outgoing Tania Miller in the 2017–18 season.
He brought with him a wide variety of influences, many cultivated in childhood, including seeing Star Wars for the first time as a seven-year-old in the theatre with his father (“I think John Williams is the greatest music influencer of the twentieth century”). He grew up with the legendary Scandinavian composers, of course—Sibelius, Carl Nielsen, et al.—but it’s his connection to the great German virtuosos that generates the most heat: “My dad was from Hamburg, so I grew up feeling more German than Danish. I’m told it’s good when I do Beethoven. And Richard Strauss is one of my heroes.
“I feel like my job is somewhere between an archaeologist and a clown."
Most of this expertise manifests off stage, in the interpretation of each selected work—the story he wants to tell with the score, essentially—and translating that story to the orchestra. “I feel like my job is somewhere between an archaeologist and a clown. You sit for weeks at a desk reading something someone wrote 200, 300 years ago, trying to understand what they meant and why, and you end up realizing that what’s important is what you want to say with it. And then suddenly you’re in front of 80 musicians, after feeling like a grey-haired archaeologist, and you have to be vibrant, a performer, and you have to communicate it all to them.”
So most of the conductor’s work is done before the audience gets involved, but that doesn’t mean the music gets sealed in amber through rehearsal. Kluxen says his job is to make sure the performance doesn’t become passive through repetition, to keep the tempo alive each night, and he will occasionally call audibles from the podium to engage the musicians. “If everything is safe, you won’t feel the real uncertainty and drama of the piece. I want to shake it up. This is the beauty of the Victoria audiences—there will always be the conservative traditionalists, but instead of choosing not to go, they have started attending our pre-concert talks, so they can understand why I chose to do things a certain way.”
These talks are but one of the changes the Symphony implemented after the pandemic break. Kluxen and White were faced with a choice: keep things the same in hopes of building the old audience back quickly, or take the opportunity to make big changes. “We decided to reinvent ourselves, and do something completely new.” Instead of the traditional method of breaking the season up into programs showcasing one style of music in a particular venue—“masterworks,” “classics,” etc.—there is now “just one series: our season.” Shows at UVic’s Farquhar Auditorium, for example, will not just feature Bach, Handel, and Mozart anymore. In the future audiences may experience Ligeti, Webern, Schoenberg, or Saariaho—brilliant composers whose work is worthy of greater exposure.
So far the new approach has been a resounding success, says Kluxen. The feedback has been “crazy positive,” and he’s especially proud that February’s production of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 9—a composer he has been told many times is a hard sell here—sold out to rave reviews, many from unusually young patrons. The plan to create new audiences is working, it seems.
“I want to ask our audiences, What do you feel? This can be an important break from What do you want to express? It’s why I don’t like the word education applied to the symphony. The ability to feel something is more important than the ability to understand it. That is the gift we can give our audiences.”
