Going Where the Music Takes Him-Conductor Lu Shao-chia

"The strings in this section sound a little muddy. A little more individual clarity-express what's in your mind," says Lu, suddenly bringing down his baton, his brow beaded with perspiration. He tells the orchestra to repeat a section of the second movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

It is the morning of January 28, 2008, and Lu Shao-chia and the Taipei Symphony Orchestra (TSO) are rehearsing a charity spring concert they will perform that evening. Despite his international fame, Lu talks with the musicians as he would with old friends he has met again after many years, which is literally true because he has known the TSO and its members for more than two decades. In a gentle but firm voice, he rouses the musicians to develop their own musical vision and to express it in a natural way during the performance.

"He's a conductor of extraordinary skill, he's an excellent leader, he knows how to get us to work together, and he never finds himself in head-on conflict with the orchestra. Because he also attaches great importance to every musician's need for self-expression, we're all eager to follow his lead," says TSO second violinist Chen Chao-chuan, brimming with respect and admiration.

Lu Shao-chia was born in Chutung Township, Hsinchu County, where his father, Lu Yao-shu, was a well-known physician. Like Shinichi Chiaki in Nodame Cantabile, Lu began to play the piano when he was five. The keys of the piano were his introduction to the vast world of music.

"From the time he started school, my father was very attracted to European culture, particularly its music. But when he was growing up, circumstances didn't allow him to learn a musical instrument, so he decided very early on that we would be exposed to music. My parents were very thrifty but they made sure their children had the best musical instruments. There were five brothers and sisters in my family and each of us grew up playing the piano." Lu shows off with a smile his family's grand piano, a Steinway with yellowed ivory keys, and begins to play a Debussy piano piece with consummate familiarity.

As a young child, Lu was praised by his teachers for his perfect pitch. In third grade, he won a regional piano competition for children from northern Taiwan, and was awarded a scholarship to attend a class for musically gifted children established by the Ministry of Education. Lin Cho-liang, who would later become an internationally acclaimed violinist, was one of Lu's classmates.

Although he displayed extraordinary talent at the piano as a young boy, Lu says that because of his passive and introverted personality, like many other children of his generation he bowed to pressure to excel academically and gave up playing the piano to concentrate on schoolwork. After graduating from Taipei Municipal Jianguo High School he majored in psychology at National Taiwan University (NTU). Unlike his elder and younger brother, Lu did not follow in his father's footsteps to become a doctor, but he was admitted to Taiwan's most prestigious institution of higher learning.

To Lu, the most fateful aspect of passing the NTU entrance exam was the fact that it gave him the opportunity to join the university choir. With a smile, Lu admits that he is not particularly fond of singing; he only joined the choir because a former schoolmate and fellow music lover in high school invited him to do so. His main responsibility in the choir was to serve as piano accompanist.

"NTU had no music department, but that lack gave me free rein to develop my musical talent. I felt a real sense of achievement when I saw how much everyone appreciated my piano playing. My years as a member of the choir were very happy, and I also made many friends for life," recalls Lu with affection. The shyness and innocence of Lu's student days still come through.

Lu spent so much time with the NTU choir that he was rarely seen in the Psychology Department, and his fellow students joked that he was majoring in the NTU choir.

Lu admits that he was not particularly interested in his psychology classes, but adds that psy majors did not have a particularly heavy academic workload, which allowed him to listen to his inner voice: "I knew I wanted to follow a musical path."

During his first year at NTU, Lu was a piano accompanist for a violin student of Felix Chiu-sen Chen, the former director of the TSO. It was a unique opportunity and a turning point in Lu's life.

Lu remembers playing a Mozart sonata. Though his performance wasn't particularly inspired, Maestro Chen had the farsightedness to immediately see his potential. Afterwards, Chen told the student, 'This fellow has what it takes to learn to be a conductor.' "I was a bit slow on the uptake, and though I secretly felt very happy hearing that, I blithely carried on with my life the same way as before," recalls Lu.

When Lu was in his second year, the conductor of the NTU choir, who was also a student, asked him to stand in for him during an upcoming rehearsal. Accustomed to hiding behind the piano, Lu initially declined, but after repeated urging he eventually agreed.

One evening, as he was listening to a recording of a Wagner opera and worrying about how he would conduct the rehearsal, Lu suddenly began to conduct an imaginary choir. He spent the whole evening air conducting with a sense of intense exhilaration.

"That evening I felt certain that I'd found what I wanted: 'I want to be a conductor!'" recalls Lu.

Lu clearly remembers stepping onto the conductor's podium for the first time and seeing the singers' attentive and encouraging looks: "When I cued them to start singing, there was silence, and then everyone roared with laughter." Lu had been so nervous that he had tried to bring the singers in too early. Fortunately, despite Lu's initial awkwardness, the singers cut him slack, because he was the choir's "favorite son." The rehearsal lasted two and a half hours; when they started, Lu was still trying to find his bearings, but by the end he was gesticulating with gusto and everyone was following his every move and singing in beautiful harmony. Lu had never felt such satisfaction.

After that rehearsal, Lu formally began to study conducting with Felix Chen.

The first time they had met, Felix Chen had recognized that Lu Shao-chia had the potential to become a great conductor. Now he became a pivotal mentor in Lu's life.

"He is a man of extraordinary musical sensibility and perception. He always keeps pace with the musicians' tempo and style, which is an indispensable quality for a good conductor," says Chen, who knows whereof he speaks.

Chen taught his students by stimulating and inspiring them in an informal and free atmosphere, which happened to coincide with Lu's preference for learning by means of slow and independent exploration. Under Chen's guidance, Lu progressed by leaps and bounds, and not only became the conductor of the NTU choir, but was also "loaned out" to other NTU orchestras.

After graduating from NTU, Lu decided to go to Indiana University to major in piano. He planned to switch to a double major in piano and conducting during his second year. Before Lu left for America, however, Felix Chen told him that if he really wanted to become a conductor, experience working with a symphony orchestra was more important. If he was willing to stay in Taiwan, he could be an assistant conductor in the TSO and the year after he could take part in an international conducting competition and have real shot at international success.

But Lu was determined to go overseas and didn't listen to him. It was only after he got to America that he realized that Maestro Chen had been right. The conducting students in Indiana were also quite a bit less advanced than Lu was and there was not much he could learn there. "I therefore wrote Maestro Chen asking him whether I could still return to Taiwan. He wrote back saying that he would be glad to have me back, so I broke off my studies and went back to Taiwan," recalls Lu.

Because Maestro Chen has always recognized and valued people of talent, when Lu was assistant conductor of the TSO he gave him plenty of opportunities to mount the podium. Chen talks with great relish of one particular occasion when the TSO was going to perform Verdi's Rigoletto and he asked Lu out of the blue to conduct the second performance of the opera.

"I conducted our first performance of Rigoletto. The program listed Lu Shao-chia as the conductor for the second day's performance, but Lu wasn't aware of this because he had only been to the piano rehearsals. He was 27 at the time, and quite a few members of the orchestra and veterans of the classical music world questioned my decision to let a kid mount the conductor's podium. But Lu accomplished this difficult task with remarkable poise, and the performance was a great success. Even the Italian tenor who had come to Taiwan to sing in this opera was full of praise for the skill with which Lu had handled the music and the house. That's when I knew that his apprenticeship with me was completed," recalls Chen.

Under Maestro Chen's careful guidance and training, Lu progressed amazingly fast. A year later, Lu's application to study conducting at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia was rejected on the grounds that he was too old; instead he went to the much older Vienna Conservatory, where he began his long musical journey in Europe.

In 1988, while studying at the Vienna Conservatory, Lu won the first prize of the Besancon International Competition for Young Conductors in France; he is the only Taiwanese conductor to have achieved this honor.

The most effective way for an unknown Asian conductor to gain name recognition on the international classical music scene, which has many musicians of enormous talent, is to compete in international competitions. In 1988, during his first year in Europe, Lu won the first prize of the Besancon International Competition for Young Conductors in France; he is the first and only Taiwanese conductor to have achieved this honor. Seiji Ozawa, the current music director of the Vienna State Opera, also won the first prize in this competition when he was a young conductor.

Lu recalls with a smile that because he never expected to win the Besancon competition, he had also registered for another competition in Tokyo.

"The trouble was that because the two competitions were held at the same time and I could not be in Tokyo for one of the shortlisting rounds of the competition, the judges decided that I did not qualify to compete. The day after the Besancon competition, I flew to Tokyo as I had originally planned to do because I still wanted to attend the competition and learn something from it. The organizers of the Besancon competition were stunned because they had planned several press conferences and interviews, as well as a meeting with the judges, for that day, and they couldn't believe that the winner had already left France."

Lu says with a smile that he was still a student in this those days and did not think in career terms, which is why he could still let big opportunities slip through his fingers.

Great talent eventually rises to the top. In 1991 and 1994, Lu won the Antonio Pedrotti International Conducting Competition in Trento, Italy, and the Kondrashin Conducting Competition in Amsterdam. He also conducted a concert with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Netherlands' premier symphony orchestra.

Lu met his future wife Tu Wen-hui while they were studying at the Vienna Conservatory. She has inspired and encouraged him to put greater emphasis as a conductor on each work's musical essence and the ideas the composer wanted to convey.

Just as he was becoming well known in Taiwan, Lu's fame soared following a performance that was as unforgettable as it was unforeseen. In 1994, Sergiu Celibidache, one of the giants of the classical music world, was scheduled to conduct a concert tour in Taiwan with the Munchner Philharmoniker, but unexpected heart surgery prevented him from traveling. Faced with this emergency, the Taiwanese organizers thought of asking Lu, who had recently won several international conducting prizes, to stand in for the world-famous conductor. Maestro Celibidache agreed and Lu returned to Taiwan for the occasion.

Lu had very little time to rehearse with the Munchner Philharmoniker in Taiwan, but he bravely decided to go ahead and conduct in their entirety the two works Celibidache had been scheduled to perform: Bruckner's Eighth Symphony and Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. Lu was not afraid to be measured against Maestro Celibidache by the discerning audience and the musicians of the Munchner Philharmoniker

To everyone's surprise, the concert ended in thunderous applause. Even the musicians of Munchner Philharmoniker, who have no false modesty concerning their own accomplishments, were full of praise for Lu. The following year, they invited him to Europe as a guest conductor.

From 1994 to 2006, Lu Shao-chia was first capellmeister of the Komische Oper Berlin and served as general music director of the Staatsorchester Rheinische Philharmonie as well of the Koblenz Theater.

Lu's career went from strength to strength from 2001 to 2006, a period during which he was the music director of the Hannover Staatsoper, a first-tier opera company with an orchestra of more than 100 musicians. He worked closely with artistic director Albrecht Puhlmann to reorganize the opera company, recruit new musicians and talent, and produce and perform many operas of the highest quality.

During his second year as music director of the Hannover Staatsoper, Lu conducted Leosv Janacvek's Jenufa and Richard Strauss' Elektra. Die Opernwelt, the foremost opera magazine in the German-speaking world, named the Hannover Staatsoper, along with the Stuttgart Opera and the Salzburg Summer Festival, as the best opera houses of the year. A number of music critics also rated Lu the best conductor of the year.

Although Lu raised the musical level of the Hannover Staatsoper to new heights, he also had to contend with a prolonged economic downturn in Germany. The opera company faced unprecedented pressure to tighten its budget, Albrecht Puhlmann-with whom he had a very happy working relationship-retired from his post as artistic director, and Lu did not see eye to eye with the man who replaced him. Lu therefore decided, much to the public's regret, to leave the Hannover Staatsoper.

Since Lu Shao-chia gave up his post as music director of the Hannover Staatsoper, his professional and musical horizons have opened up.

Looking back over his 11 years as music director of German opera companies, Lu says that Germany has a long musical tradition and opera is an integral part of people's lives. Even cities with a population of 60,000 have their own philharmonic orchestras and opera houses whose performance quality and repertoire are highly professional and varied. In sum, Germany's rich "music is life" tradition is truly admirable.

"But in some respects they are also very rigid. In some opera companies, musicians have such unassailable contracts that when their musical performance becomes uneven or actually gets worse, or they show little respect for their work, it's very hard to replace them with better musicians. Performance styles are also relatively fixed and it's difficult to get musicians to accept new ideas. They are like a big truck that cannot make a sharp turn. Asian orchestras are much more flexible, and therefore better, in this respect."

Now that Lu is no longer tied to a single opera company, his professional and musical horizons have opened up. Last year he conducted several major operas as a guest conductor for the Stuttgart Opera in Germany and the Gothenburg Opera in Sweden. In the second half of this year, Lu is scheduled to conduct operas in Sydney and Melbourne in Australia, while in Europe he will be collaborating with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin and the Gothenburg Opera.

Although Lu has lived and worked for many years in Europe, he has never forgotten his Taiwanese roots and despite his busy schedule he makes a point of coming home to Taiwan every year to perform as a guest conductor with the National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra and the TSO. Lu spares no effort to help improve the level of Taiwan's philharmonic orchestras.

Asked about the future of Taiwan's symphony orchestras, Lu earnestly emphasizes that Taiwan's classical musicians are already very good. The stringed instrument players in particular are certainly as good as those in small and medium-sized symphony orchestras in Germany, but here in Taiwan we lack confidence and often wonder whether our classical music sounds sufficiently German.

Lu believes that truly good music knows no borders. Beethoven's music, for example, does not have to belong exclusively to Germany; it can also be "our music."

"Musical expression is intimately related to language, culture, and national characteristics. Taiwanese society is very responsive, very lively, and very good at absorbing and accepting what others have to offer. We ought to make these qualities work for us to establish a classical sound with a 'Taiwanese flavor.' The fact that we perform the music of German composers is no reason to copy foreign performance styles. That makes no sense at all."

Lu Shao-chia may be a world-famous conductor but he has the modesty to say that he still has much to learn. In this respect as in others, his wife, the composer Tu Wen-hui, is a constant source of encouragement and inspiration.

Asked how he met his wife, Lu recalls with a smile that when he arrived at the Vienna Conservatory she was already a student there and went out of her way to help him. She was a very warm-hearted person and the way they thought and felt about music was very similar, so they were naturally drawn to each other.

"She was a great inspiration to me. When we first got to know each other, whenever we went to a concert I would only focus on the conductor, but she always knew how to appreciate the music and often didn't even know who was conducting. I had never before given the music itself much thought."

Thanks to Tu Wen-hui's influence, whenever Lu takes up the conductor's baton he tries to express the work's musical essence and the ideas the composer wanted to convey. Under his wife's guidance, he has also tackled many contemporary classical music works. This is really a case of husband and wife complementing each other beautifully.

Felix Chen (right), the former director of the TSO, was a pivotal mentor during Lu Shao-chia's early career. In this photo, the two conductors are pictured with Italian tenor Bruno Sebastian during a TSO debut performance of Verdi's Otello.

As the soul of the orchestra, Lu is accustomed to the limelight and wary of its dangers. He says, "Conductors tend to be put on a pedestal and can get attached to power and forget what they've been hired for. A good conductor ought to approach the music with humility and honesty. Music is the most important thing; not the fame and power that come with it."

Lu Shao-chia's favorite conductor is the late Carlos Kleiber, the son of the Austrian conductor Erich Kleiber.

"Kleiber only had eyes and ears for music. That's the kind of conductor I also hope to be. If I have one distinguishing feature, it's probably the fact that I like to stand together with the musicians and not to bask in applause on my own," says Lu.

Lu also has some heartfelt advice for budding Taiwanese conductors: "If you love music you have to be able to endure solitude and be psychologically prepared to work your heart out without expecting anything in return for many long years. It takes hard work to harvest sweet fruit."

Lu Shao-chia's words of wisdom speak volumes about his meteoric career in the fiercely competitive world of classical music.

In third grade, Lu won a regional children's piano contest and was awarded a scholarship to attend a class for musically gifted children established by the Ministry of Education.