First Person: Edo de Waart
Dutch conductor Edo de Waart is best known in Hong Kong as the music director of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra. The maestro talks to Penny Zhou about careers, classical music and Frank Zappa.
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My father was an opera singer. My mother was a homemaker but was also in a big choir. So I heard a lot of singing at home and had piano and oboe lessons when I was a kid.
I got a government grant to study at one of the two conservatories in Amsterdam at 17, among a group of people who all later became concertmasters, soloists and conductors. It was an amazing convergence of talent, but I didn’t know that at that time.
Was I a model student? Haha! I’m glad all my teachers are either not alive or not here. I was very good at the oboe, but I was never a model student in anything else.
It was so bad that when I told the conductor of the conservatory orchestra that I wanted to try to conduct, he said to me, “Well, I guess it’ll be good for your character,” meaning he didn’t think I was talented enough to make it work, but it’d be good for my character to stand up there and take harsh criticism from everybody.
When I won my first conducting competition at 23 in New York, people thought I was 16. I always looked 10 years younger than I was, until recently.
I had been to the States before that. I played with a quintet on a ship that brought 900 students from Rotterdam to New York. We played five, six concerts on it. It was a tiny, smelly tub.