A conductor should understand his or her choir members in order to bring out the best in them.

When it comes to choral conducting, most people will agree that it takes a lot of great technical knowledge and musical ability. However, German conductor Nicolas Fink, one of the most well-known choral conductors, believes that a deep knowledge and great understanding of musical technique will only make a good conductor.

An excellent conductor, on the other hand, possesses more non-technical and non-musical abilities that can make a choir reach its full potential, he said. One of those abilities is people-management skills.

“I think that [people management] is one of the aspects of choral conducting that sometimes people forget about,” Fink told The Jakarta Post in a recent interview.

“Most of the time, conductors do not realize how much influence they have on the results [of their choirs]. If they are not good at people management — how to make people at ease and confident, doing the right things at the right time — then their choir will not perform well,” he added.

Born in Switzerland, Fink has spent most of his life honing his skills as a conductor both as a practitioner and as a mentor.

Fink completed his studies with distinction in choral conducting from the Lucerne Conservatory, where he also studied voice, earning his concert diploma as a baritone.

He furthered his training through his participation in multiple international master classes in conducting and in singing, and he was a conducting fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center summer academy in Massachusetts, the US, in 2006.

From his experience, most of the time, a choir and its conductor face a problem that always revolves around the same matter.

The problem, according to Fink, is the conductor’s lack of ability to anticipate the potential problems that might rise in their choirs, in other words they do not spend enough time to get to know their choir members at a deeper level.

“As a conductor, you need to know in advance what will make them struggle musically or what notes are difficult and then anticipate the problems. You also need to be able to hear what is really going on,” Fink said.

“Being a conductor, on one hand, you need to know exactly what you want and you need to hear the music that you want to hear. At the same time, you need to hear what is actually happening in the room. Hearing what is going on is much more difficult and it takes a lot of experience to have this ability,” he added.

Another non-technical aspect that Fink believes an excellent conductor must possess is the ability to set aside their ego and be humble.

“To be an excellent conductor, you must be able to identify when it is your fault. I see a lot of conductors yelling at their choirs for not singing right or getting frustrated with the choir because they do the same mistake over and over again. Most of the time, the responsibility is ours. It takes a lot of experience to know this,” he said.

As a mentor, Fink has conducted workshops in many regions and he recently visited the Satya Wacana Christian University (SWCU) in Salatiga, Central Java, for a master-class session with 11 Indonesian conductors.

The selected conductors consisted of nine participants from various cities in Indonesia — Aldo Randy Ginting, Andy Jatmiko, Benyamin Franklin, Billiam Heriono, Caspar, Kristian Wirjadi, Lucia Adriana, Rebekka T. Wattimena, and Sarah Charista Winata — as well as two lecturers from the SWCU Language and Arts Faculty Music Arts Study Program — Eriyani Tenga Lunga and Juanita Theresia Adimurti.

For one full week, the conductors had the rare opportunity to learn all of the aspects of choral conducting in a master-class session with Fink.

After the master class was completed, the conductors had the chance to lead the SWCU choir and perform choral repertoires from top German composers such as Felix Mendelssohn, Johannes Brahms, Anton Bruckner, and Josef Gabriel Rheinberger.

Fink said that the idea for the master-class workshop for Indonesian conductors began a year ago when he and his choir were invited by the German cultural center Goethe Institut in Indonesia to an event that celebrated the legacy of German culture, which include its choral style.

“We had some concerts with university choirs in Indonesia and that’s where we noticed that there was an interest in German music and also the German school of conducting. So we wanted to give something more,” he said.

— Photos courtesy of Goethe Institut

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