In Europe’s fiercely competitive classical music world, Australian conductor Sam Weller has a quirky trademark to help him stand out from the crowd. His classic Aussie mullet has helped him get noticed in a scene where Australian conductors – despite the stratospheric success of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s Simone Young – remain something of a novelty. “I have the mullet and moustache, so people know I’m Australian.
It’s sort of a package deal,” he says. “I do know someone in the Netherlands has been like, ‘I can’t remember his name, but get the guy with the ‘tache and the mullet’. It becomes part of your identity.
” Sam Weller with members of Ensemble Apex in the basement of Sydney Town Hall. Credit: James Brickwood But you don’t get as far as Sydney-born Weller has come aged just 26 on an eccentric barnet alone. He also brings to the table prodigious talent, a huge capacity for hard work and a gleeful tendency to bite off way more than he can chew and worry about the details later.
“My modus operandi is to find something to do, then figure out how to do it afterwards,” he says over beers at the Newtown Hotel. In 2016, Weller founded Ensemble Apex, an orchestra composed of mostly young, professional Australian players that has since delivered several sold-out programs in Sydney, including an extraordinary performance last year of Verdi’s Requiem in Dangrove, philanthropist Judith Neilson’s soaring art storage facility in Alexandria. Sam Weller: “Conducting is a physical language and the way I move is because of the way I exist in the world.
” Credit: He graduated from the Netherlands’ National Master of Music in Orchestral Conducting and, most recently, was one of the winners of the International Conducting Competition Rotterdam. It’s been a breathless rise since Weller first strode on to the Concert Hall stage at the Sydney Opera House aged just 16 to conduct his school orchestra. A student at Newtown School of Performing Arts, he had expressed an interest in conducting and sat in on rehearsals for Rossini’s William Tell Overture .
“I printed out a score. I didn’t know what I was doing and sort of highlighted some things that I thought were important. I watched the conductor, trying to figure out how you rehearse things and what’s going on.
Then he went on leave, and he said, ’Why don’t you conduct while I’m away? That performance led to us playing with the school orchestra at the Sydney Opera House on the concert hall stage when I was 16. I was like, ‘That’s pretty cool’.” Weller then went on to study at the Sydney Conservatorium.
“I was a bit weird,” he says. “I did classical saxophone, which is even less employable than jazz saxophone. Saxophone, in a way, was a gateway drug to conducting.
I loved orchestras, but you can’t get a full-time job in an orchestra as a saxophone player, so conducting was a no-brainer.” Scoring one of the top spots in the Rotterdam competition this year has been a huge boost to Weller’s career, propelling him closer to the higher ranks of the conducting world and equally important, getting him noticed. “It’s been a sort of dream,” he says.
“You see these conducting competitions when you’re young, and you think, ‘Oh, that would be cool to one day be there’. This was the first competition that I went into the live rounds, and, basically, my mentor said, just be unapologetically yourself. I went heads down, bum up, studied my arse off, and came out with the chocolates.
” As one of the winners, Weller gets the chance to conduct the Rotterdam Philharmonic in multiple concerts and then, next year will make his debut at Amsterdam’s storied Royal Concertgebouw with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra. Last year, Ensemble Apex staged Verdi’s Requiem at Dangrove in a performance sponsored by Beau Neilson, centre. Credit: James Alcock I wonder from where he draws the confidence to direct players who are mostly decades older than him and how he sets about gaining their respect.
“That’s a huge, huge part of the psychology of conducting,” he says. “These people are all experts in their instruments. And more often than not they will have all played the piece more times than you’ve studied the piece.
“My job then is to work my butt off in preparation, make sure I know it absolutely back to front and then give them a genuine reading of it as to who I am. That sort of manifests in just the way I present myself. “Conducting is a physical language, and the way I move is because of the way I exist in the world.
If I’m true to that, and I’ve done the work, I think I can come off with a convincing interpretation of what Sam’s Mozart clarinet concerto is or Sam’s Mozart Symphony is.” That endless preparation, reading and score analysis is a part of conducting that mostly goes unnoticed by audiences but forms the basis of a successful performance. “With more and more opportunities to work conducting in concerts, I’ve got much more of a strict routine of how I prepare for something.
I discovered last year that when I thought I knew a score, I’d only actually just started knowing the score, and now I really have to go back to the beginning and do it again.” ‘One of the beautiful things is trying to get people who are curious about orchestral music to experience the music ..
. They don’t have to love it, but I think there’s something so special about 80 people on stage all going for it’. Weller created Ensemble Apex as a chamber orchestra while still at the Conservatorium.
It has since grown to full symphonic orchestra size but, until now, the players - many of them from professional orchestras around the country - have been unpaid, with Weller relying on goodwill and favours. Now, thanks to funding from Create NSW and Creative Australia, Ensemble Apex is well on the way to becoming a new professional orchestra. Weller is currently preparing for Apex Festival, a two-part festival of orchestra music that he hopes will grow and become a regular fixture in the Sydney Calendar.
The first program is called Wake Up and Die . Each of the works, which will include John Adams’ Doctor Atomic Symphony and the second movement of Henryk Górecki’s ethereal Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, is connected to themes of life and death. There will also be two Australian premieres, George Crumb’s A Haunted Landscape, and an experimental work by Melbourne composer Kitty Xiao, In flesh ii.
The second program – Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony – might seem oddly conventional in comparison, but Weller is adding a unique spin to the performance. The work will be performed in the basement space of Sydney Town Hall “in the round”, with the orchestra surrounding the audience and the Weller conducting from a circular podium. ‘No walls’ “There’s all sorts of literature and studies on the ritual of the concert performance,” he says.
“And I thought, ‘OK, how do we break down this fourth wall?’ So I thought, no walls. Let’s put the audience inside. It gives them a real tactile experience of the music.
They get to see the sort of blood, sweat and tears up close. There’s plenty of opportunities to hear Tchaikovsky Four in Sydney each year. This is a different way to hear it.
” This unconventional set-up is all part of Weller’s passion for sharing orchestral music with his own generation by breaking down the mystique of the concert experience and presenting an orchestra with players whose average age is about 27 years. “One of the beautiful things is trying to get people who are curious about orchestral music to have the opportunity to experience the music. They don’t have to love it, but I think there’s something so special about 80 people on stage all going for it.
“We are trying to tune into a new audience, and we’re working with a PR team that deals more with dance music and stuff. We have just announced a partnership with Hawke’s Brewery. Next 100 tickets get a free beer.
So get on that.” The Apex Festival takes place on October 11, 12 at Sydney Town Hall..
