Ryan Bancroft: ‘It’s great to psych yourself up and get into a mindset of confidence’

Could you give a bit of background on your career so far?

I was primarily a trumpet player growing up and when I fell out of playing the trumpet, I found conducting. At the time I felt incredibly bad at it, which meant my competitive side came up and I really wanted to get better.

I’m from Los Angeles and I studied there for quite some time before eventually moving to Scotland where I studied at the Royal Conservatoire for a couple of years. I got to conduct a lot of wonderful voluntary orchestras, which I was really happy about, and I probably learned the most from them in my life. I then moved to Amsterdam to study at the Conservatorium in a joint programme with the Conservatory in The Hague.

I then got super fortunate, in combination with a bunch of hard work, and won the Malko Competition for Young Conductors back in 2018. To give perspective, the week before I was conducting a musical at a middle school and the week after my life flipped upside down. After that I got to meet the BBC National Orchestra Wales and the Tapiola Sinfonietta up in Helsinki, who are my family now.

Most recently I’ve been appointed chief conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, so I’m super grateful, super fortunate and it’s all moved very fast.

How did you cope with the steep trajectory your career took after winning the Malko Competition?

Thankfully, the competition is incredibly organised, and part of the prize was to have a consultant for a year. At the time I thought, “oh great, I’ll have someone to chat repertoire with”. But, while that’s a part of it, it also helped me adjust. Immediately after the competition I needed to find representation because I went from having no dates to over 50. The adrenaline was incredibly high for a very long time, and I definitely lost a lot of sleep because everything was so electric, but people have been incredibly supportive, and I’ve got a good circle around me.

It’s not a natural thing winning these competitions. It’s amazing when it does happen and it did take a lot of hard work and a lot of luck but to go from studying and doing whatever you can to make a buck to being in front of people you’ve respected your entire life, week after week after week. There’s a learning curve there for sure.

Is there anything that you wish someone had told you to prepare you for that?

This may sound cliché, but probably the importance of saying “no” and really listening to your gut instinct about everything. I have people who are incredibly supportive in my life that have said these types of things to me since the very beginning, even before conducting, but when all of a sudden, a tsunami of content, programmes, music and travelling starts to come your way, there is a lot of adrenaline that comes with it and a lot of excitement. You can lead yourself to a form of exhaustion which is not helpful for any human being. Now I simply want to do well and look after my own mental health. That’s paramount.
Ryan Bancroft conducts the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, August 2019. © Jan-Olav Wedin

You’ve been announced as the new chief conductor for the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra (RSPO), starting from the 2023/24 season. What are you most looking forward to in this new role?

I could probably name a million things, but two come to mind. On a simpler side, I’m looking forward to meeting a bunch of Swedish composers that I’ve never met before. The country just so happens to have one of the biggest concentrations of amazing composers in Europe and I’m excited, simply, to have coffee with them.

On a second note, I’m excited to be able to make music in a different way. Every orchestra you go to has a different culture and is made up of individuals with different wants and needs and different stuff going on. Every group does a different amount of work. The Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra is incredibly fascinating to me. Intimidating, yes, but also fascinating. Above all, I feel I can be completely myself there and the way I approach music just seems to work.

The RSPO’s executive and artistic director Stefan Forsberg praised the ‘fabulous chemistry and truly sparkling energy between Ryan and the orchestra’. What would you say are the hallmarks of a successful conductor-orchestra relationship?

The hallmark of any good work relationship is being able to listen to each other and make an unending attempt to understand each other. With the RSPO I know I can go to any individual in the orchestra – and they know they can come to me as well – and talk about our hopes and dreams and what we want to achieve. We can also be very honest with how we feel the rehearsal is going and what we feel we should improve.

From my experience, this is also where the best type of music-making comes from. It’s when something veers off in a completely different direction. We’ve rehearsed for spontaneity and for moments of magic to happen, but we’ve also not over-rehearsed things so there can be dialogue that we haven’t had before.

I noticed from my first few rehearsals with the RSPO just how malleable we all felt. We had shown up prepared, we had the piece that was in front of us, and we exploited that. We dug between, under, around and through the notes to find interesting colours. I felt that it was easy to be flexible with the orchestra.

An article published in the CalArts Alumni magazine in 2018 describes you listening to American rapper Cardi B and Indian classical vocalist Aruna Sairam before performing in the Malko Competition final. Has this concert preparation changed at all in the four years since?

I listen to all sorts of music. Pop and rock music has been incredibly important to my entire life. I personally see no difference between Joni Mitchell and Mozart, but that’s just me. I find because I’ve been listening to that type of music a lot longer than classical music, I don’t have to analyse it like I would in my classical mind. It opens up a sort of natural ability to just listen to music.

Ryan Bancroft conducts Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, Nobel Prize Concert December 2021. © Niklas Elmehed

In the interview you say it helps you to ‘get hyped’. How important is this process to the final product?

In terms of being “hyped up” for a concert that’s very much something that I’m still involved in. It’s great to psych yourself up and get into a mindset of confidence. I get incredibly nervous for first rehearsals and everything after that tends to be a piece of cake. Especially the concert, because we can remember everything that we collectively worked on, completely throw it out the door and just have a blast that evening. I can be incredibly relaxed because of that, but that’s not always the best frame of mind for me to be in for a concert. If I’m too relaxed, is it special?

So, I need coffee at least 30 minutes before a concert.  Even if I already had lots of coffee during the day, I need an extra jolt just to simulate some sort of nerves. Then, maybe four or five minutes before the concert, I put myself into the headspace of the piece, or at least what the piece means to me.

Finally, before walking on stage, there might be the tiniest amount of nerves so I have to tell myself, “it’s just mom’s living room”. You can do no wrong by your mom! It could be the Philharmonie in Paris or it could be the Royal Albert Hall in London: no matter where I go, it’s always just mom’s living room.

The Conductor prize you won at last year’s Royal Philharmonic Society Awards was given in tribute to Bernard Haitink, who had passed away the previous month. How important are luminaries like him to your current conducting practice?

Where would we be without Haitink? Where would be without Claudio Abaddo or Willem Mengelberg? I heard this great quote that “a composer is a sculptor, like Michelangelo making David and it’s the most glorious thing on the face of the planet, and it’s the musicians’ (and in this case the conductor’s) job to make the statue move”.

The thing that is so similar about all those conductors is the importance of the score and what the composer has in mind. I aspire to that all the time. When I’m studying music and asking myself what I’ll do here and worrying it’s going to be too hard, I just do what’s on the page and fight for that. That’s the job. Of course, you have to look behind the notes but it’s all there. These are constant lessons from these conductors.

Abbado is my personal favourite of our departed friends. When people speak about him, they say the usual things – “He was a very humble man, a deeply musical man” – but sometimes they also say, “Yeah, his rehearsals could be a bit boring because all he ever said was ‘listen’ but then when we got to the concert it all made sense”. What a great, simple, but incredibly profound lesson to be able to realise that really, it is just about listening.

You have two Proms coming up this summer with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. What can we expect to see at these concerts and what are you most excited about?

You can expect to see me very happy, that’s for sure. We have a lot of different music that’s being showcased this year. One of the pieces I’m incredibly lucky to be doing is Caroline Shaw’s Entr’acte at my first prom. It’s one of my favourite pieces to perform and to rehearse. I’m shocked that it hasn’t been done at the Proms yet, so that’s why I’m lucky that we got it in somehow.

The second prom is going to be a hoot. We have something that I’m pretty sure is going to make history at the Proms: the premiere of Gavin Higgins’s Concerto Grosso for Brass Band and Orchestra, which is as resonant as it sounds. Gavin has just finished the piece and I was messaging him right before starting this interview. He said, “I’ve given you a big bada boom ending, so I hope you’re happy about that.”

Audiences can expect a lot of colour: the biggest crayon box you can possibly get from both proms for sure. They will be seeing something they’ve never seen before, which is this piece by Gavin Higgins, and they’ll get to see some of Wales’s best musicians on stage in London. It might be a little bit loud, but all in all, it’s going to be a spectacle and very special.

Ryan Bancroft conducts the BBC National Orchestra of Wales at the BBC Proms on 3 and 8 August 2022; www.bbc.co.uk/proms