David Brophy didn't expect to become a professional musician. The 32-year-old assistant conductor of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, who grew up in Santry, in north Dublin, got involved in music by chance, writes Michael Dervan
He recalls: "We were at Mass one day, and it was announced off the pulpit that the Greenfield Singers, a choir on the northside run by Kevin Scully, were looking for new members. It just so happened he lived on our road, and my folks reckoned this would be a good way of getting me out of the house. So I was kicked into the choir. I think I was about 11."
He was obviously taken by the experience of choral singing, and piano lessons followed when he was about 13. "I didn't think anything about it. I was going to go to the National College of Art and Design. In sixth year I was preparing a folio for NCAD. I had a very enlightened art teacher who maintained that if you didn't go home from school and immediately get out the paintbrush, pencil or whatever you shouldn't be doing it. After Christmas of the Leaving Cert year I took his advice and said I'm not doing art, because the first thing I do when I come home from school is go to the piano."
Turning to music was a brave decision. The last exam he'd passed was grade 4, so he had a lot of catching up to do. He took a year out, practised "probably five or six hours a day", got his grade 8 exam, studied theory for the first time and headed off for the foundation course at Dublin Institute of Technology's Conservatory of Music and Drama to continue the catch-up.
"I had no idea what I was doing. In secondary school I played keyboards in a band, a dreadful band called The Fifth Victim. We used to do battles of the bands in the Earl Grattan on Capel Street, and we did upstairs in what was the White Horse Inn. We played Waterboys cover versions. You know Fisherman's Blues, a great song with a fiddle solo in it? I used to play that fiddle solo on keyboard. That's how sad we were. We were shit."
The turning point came during the foundation course. "Barra Boydell was teaching on it, and he recommended we buy recordings as part of the history course. I went out and bought my first Four Seasons [by Vivaldi], with the English Chamber Orchestra. We listened to the Britten Cello Symphony and [to Britten's] the Sinfonia Da Requiem, which was completely alien to me and I found very difficult. But I was sufficiently curious to listen over and over again. And we had assignments to go to concerts. I just became intrigued. It's one of those drugs which just sucks you in. I'm still intrigued with the whole thing now."
Brophy is graphic about his lack of knowledge. Before DIT he'd been to only a single Music for Fun concert, at about the age of 10. In his year of intensive piano practice it never occurred to him that he was studying classical music. To him it was just a matter of doing the pieces for the grades. He was simply following his nose, being led deeper and deeper into a world that furnished him with ever more fascinating experiences.
"I had Helen Kane for composition in DIT, and if she sees something there she encourages it. I started composing in her class and writing free composition based on biblical texts, for piano and percussion and ad hoc singers, narrators, kitchen sinks and that sort of thing, without having any idea what I was doing. I had no formal training."
And the conducting? "There has to be ego involved in this. Let's face it. You don't wake up one day and go to your career-guidance counsellor and say, conducting is great, OK, I'll do that then. You go to concerts, you see somebody conducting and you think, well, gissa job, I can do that. Then over a long process of time you realise, no, you can't do it, you're dreadful at it. And if you want to do it, it's a long haul."
So he went what he calls "the well-trodden Irish route to Canford", the summer course in Dorset where the tutors include George Hurst, a former principal conductor of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, and the Irish conductor Robert Houlihan. "I went there and had a dreadful first year. I had no experience at all. My first lesson was a complete fiasco." He had to conduct Mozart's Così Fan Tutte overture in front of the whole class and all the tutors.
"George stopped me in bar five, turned to Bobby Houlihan and said: 'You're an Irishman. Will you deal with this type of thing?' He refused to have anything to do with it. It was the biggest put-down. I didn't know how to address the orchestra. My upbeat would come from nowhere. I would just start without warning. When I think back it's appalling. It was a great shock, that course. I thought that was really good, that first day, to get a kick in the ass. It did me the world of good."
It was at Canford, says Brophy, that he "started to get hardened". He decided to go back the next year, then set about getting himself some real-life experience by organising an orchestra and putting on a concert. "I tried that in the college of music and was thwarted by the powers-that-be at the time. I had sponsorship from the Italian Cultural Institute. I had the Peppercanister Church booked, I had players booked and I had a rehearsal schedule done. Two weeks before the rehearsal I was told, you've got to stop this. That really knocked the stuffing out of me. I was that close to getting a gig. But I was told it might jeopardise certain things in getting a qualification. That was very difficult to swallow."
Toughness in the face of adversity is something Brophy seems happy enough to learn. He understands that he's setting himself up for criticism and potshots by standing on the box - musicians rarely talk of the podium: they call it the box; the conductor's baton is a stick, a concert is a gig and a violin is a fiddle. And as the knocks are inevitable, why shun them or complain?
Brophy is a familiar face, sitting in the choir balcony, at the NSO's Friday subscription concerts. He became, as he puts it, "a Friday-night junkie", absorbing all he could from watching conductors in action. In time he got occasional work playing piano with the NSO and got to see "what happens at the coalface". He became apprentice conductor to the National Chamber Choir, sitting in on rehearsals and playing piano for them, and was deeply involved in their education work, as well as getting the occasional concert to conduct. He also conducted the capital's oldest amateur orchestra, the Dublin Orchestral Players.
He worked out that, if he was determined about it, the opportunities in Ireland could measure up quite well against what he might find abroad. And, as he needed tuition, he eventually approached a conductor working here, the NSO's Gerhard Markson, who took him on, teaching him one to one, in a room, without a sound being made. Brophy would conduct all the details of a particular piece for an imaginary orchestra, with Markson sitting in front of him, working out from the movements of hand and eye, and the attitude of body, how much his young pupil had absorbed. The tuition ended up being "life lessons, about people skills, psychology", as well as dealing with the musical and technical challenges of conducting.
Today Brophy has conducted both RTÉ orchestras and worked with Opera Theatre Company, Lyric Opera and Co-Opera. He made his Ulster Orchestra début in January and has been invited back to conduct at the Beautiful Night concert, which will be staged in Belfast and Dublin on May 1st. Negotiations are under way for his début with Opera Ireland next year.
To be considered for conducting work by RTÉ he went through a formal audition process, which is how he landed his first concert with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra. Three years ago he was appointed to the new position of assistant conductor with the NSO, which has brought him not just concert exposure but also a CD that was distributed last year with the RTÉ Guide. Behind the scenes it also obliges him to prepare all the repertoire of the orchestra's house conductors - Gerhard Markson, Alexander Anissimov and William Eddins - and be ready to stand in for them if the need arises.
In the event, the dramatic stand-in came last October, when Vernon Handley, a guest conductor, was indisposed. He ended up taking on, at no notice, a programme he hadn't prepared, including two works, Vaughan Williams's London Symphony and Bax's Tintagel, that he had never even studied. He did this at a time when he was also in rehearsal for his first La Bohème, with Lyric Opera. He had to learn the new repertoire, and work with limited NSO rehearsal time, as he couldn't disrupt the overlapping La Bohème rehearsal schedule. Deprived of sleep - and boosted by copious consumption of coffee - he did both performances. A line from this newspaper's review of that remarkable NSO programme speaks volumes: "Some of the warmest post-concert applause was from the players."
When he took up his new role with the NSO he made a point of talking to the orchestra committee. "It's really pointless me doing this job", he told them, "and taking rehearsals and conducting concerts, if you don't tell me what you've problems with. If you don't tell me, how the hell am I to learn? I have to learn from you people: that's the way it is. So for God's sake talk.
"And they have. They've been really great, sometimes in rehearsal and sometimes privately afterwards."
Brophy's directness and passion are evident in everything he talks about. He's committed to new music, has recently become fired up about traditional Irish music, gets hot under the collar about the state of music education and wants to go back into education to learn about historical performance practice.
He measures himself by strict standards. At lunchtime today he conducts a contemporary programme of works by the Irish composer Fergus Johnston and Witold Lutoslawski. On Friday, he'll stretch himself through a target he set himself when he took on the assistant conductorship: he will conduct the NSO in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. "I'm a great believer," he says, "that everyone gets the breaks. The only question is whether you're ready for them or not." He's clearly not in the least shy about finding out.
David Brophy conducts the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra in Fergus Johnston and Witold Lutoslawski at lunchtime today and in Milhaud, Bartók and Stravinsky on Friday evening, both at the National Concert Hall
