Surprise symphony: Jaime Martin ready to take over as Melbourne Symphony Orchestra chief conductor

Flautist Jaime Martin is champing at the bit to take over as Melbourne Symphony Orchestra chief conductor.

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra chief conductor Jaime Martin outside Hamer Hall in Melbourne. Picture: David Geraghty

Jaime Martin was playing flute with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe when the orchestra in 1996 visited New York with conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt. At Carnegie Hall, the orchestra gave a cycle of the nine Beethoven symphonies, playing with the techniques of historically informed performance and making these well-worn pieces sound like brand new.

Martin was not part of the orchestra when it recorded its groundbreaking Beethoven set with Harnoncourt, but he vividly recalls the response to the New York performances at Carnegie Hall.

“I remember the reaction of the audience – ‘What? This symphony doesn’t go like that!’,” Martin says. “But isn’t that wonderful, fantastic? You can go to listen to something you think you know very well, and hear something different. Sometimes we need to be open-minded, to listen to different ways of doing things. I think that’s fascinating. And in a way, this is what excites me about performing.”

Australian music lovers are also looking forward to Martin’s element of surprise. About eight years ago he swapped his flute for the conductor’s baton, and in June he was named chief conductor designate of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. He has been in Melbourne in anticipation of his first concerts with the MSO since the announcement – although those concerts have been cancelled due to the extended lockdown there.

But Martin has not been idle with his time. During his hotel quarantine, he read up on Australian history, and in particular Indigenous writers: Tara June Winch’s Miles Franklin-winning novel, The Yield, and Stan Grant’s Talking to My Country. And, while Zoom is no substitute for conductor and orchestra rehearsing together in the concert hall, he has been getting to know MSO players and management in virtual meetings from his hotel room.

Not yet widely known as a conductor, Martin has had a distinguished career as principal flute with major orchestras and is steadily building his profile on the podium. In addition to the MSO, where he officially begins as chief conductor next year, he will take up the baton of the Spanish National Orchestra, and his contract as music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra has been extended through to 2027.

After his first concerts in Los Angeles since the pandemic, critic Mark Swed wrote of the exuberant music-making “dispensed by Doc Martin”.

Martin, 55, grew up in humble circumstances in Santander, Spain, the eldest child of six in a small apartment. There were no musicians in his family, but his father enjoyed classical music and played LP records.

Young Jaime wasn’t interested, until he was seven or eight, when his father took him to a concert with a symphony orchestra. He remembers the program like it was yesterday: Tchaikovsky Symphony No 5 and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

“The opening of the Tchaikovsky, the clarinets and the cellos, as soon as they started playing, I had tears in my eyes – I cannot tell you why,” he says. “I think it was the sound. For me, it was amazing. I can describe it like it was yesterday, I was so taken with it. After the concert I said to my father, I want to play an instrument.”

It was the era of Franco’s dictatorship, when culture and much else of Spanish life were constricted. “It was a very different country than it is now,” Martin says. “These things, music and culture, were not promoted terribly efficiently at that time.”

The family could not afford music lessons, but instruction was possible with the local wind band – which is how he came to play the flute and not his preferred instrument, the violin. His studies took him to Madrid and then to The Hague, one of the centres of the early music movement.

“The Hague for me was an extraordinary place,” Martin says. “I was there with my modern flute, and I was in the Conservatory when all the baroque world gathered there – Frans Bruggen was there, Gustav Leonhardt was teaching the harpsichord …

“I remember the first time I heard a Bach violin concerto played by La Petite Bande, with Sigiswald Kuijken. This concert was – wow! You know what I mean? Now we are used to (period instruments), but then it was like rock ’n’ roll.”

During his studies in The Netherlands he became a member of the European Community Youth Orchestra, as it was called then, which attracted leading young musicians and top-notch conductors. The first project after Martin joined the orchestra was a concert of Schoenberg’s orchestral song cycle, Gurrelieder, with Claudio Abbado conducting. He also went with the orchestra on tour to India, with conductor Zubin Mehta and Ravi Shankar, who played a sitar concerto.

As a flute soloist and section leader he had a long association with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, the London-based chamber orchestra founded by Neville Marriner, and with which he made several recordings. Martin would also hold principal roles with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, and the Orchestra of English National Opera.

When sitting in the wind section of an orchestra, he became fascinated by the role of the conductor and their ability to determine the orchestra’s sound. Even familiar pieces played by the same musicians could sound different from a previous performance, depending on the conductor.

“We are the same people, we have a different conductor in front of us, and the orchestra sounds different – I could not understand this,” Martin says. “This is something that always fascinated me. I had long chats with conductors during all my years playing in orchestras. I was happy working in orchestras, I didn’t have the need to do something different. Then, some years ago, somebody asked me to conduct a concert with a youth orchestra, and I thought, ‘Let’s try that’.”

The opportunity was at the invitation of a friend who was leading a summer youth orchestra in southern Spain. Martin had been invited there to teach flute – he was formerly a professor of flute at the Royal College of Music – but the opportunity to conduct an orchestra sweetened the deal. His concert debut as conductor was a program of Stravinsky, Britten and Dvorak.

“I remember saying to Neville Marriner that I was asked to conduct the youth orchestra, and he said, ‘Well Jaime, if you go and do this, in five years’ time, you will stop playing the flute’,” Martin recalls. As it turned out, about five years after that concert, Martin stepped down from the London Philharmonic Orchestra where he was principal flute, and devoted himself to his conducting career.

In some ways, Martin has followed in Marriner’s footsteps as the leader of chamber-size ensembles. Marriner was the founder of the LACO – it started as an ensemble of Hollywood session musicians – and was principal conductor of the Cadaques Orchestra in Catalonia, where Martin is chief conductor. In addition to his many guest-conducting engagements, Martin is also chief conductor of the RTE National Symphony Orchestra in Ireland, and principal conductor of the Gavle Symphony Orchestra in Sweden.

Martin gave concerts with the MSO at Hamer Hall earlier this year, including the world premiere of Deborah Cheetham’s viola concerto, Nanyubak, performed by Noongar soloist Aaron Wyatt – a piece the composer describes as echoing with the sounds of lockdown and resilience. The concert continued with Beethoven’s third symphony, the Eroica, with Martin bringing the orchestra to the work’s thrillingly triumphant conclusion.

As the extended lockdown in Melbourne has caused Martin’s concerts to be cancelled, the conductor is returning to his home in London and to his wife, London Symphony Orchestra principal bassoon Rachel Gough. But there will be many more opportunities for music-making in Melbourne and Martin says he is looking forward to getting to know the MSO and its audience.

“The ideal relationship is when you get the trust from the audience that they are prepared to explore with you,” he says. “I think that’s wonderful.”

Jaime Martin launches his inaugural MSO season on September 28.