Conducting Stories: Myths & Mysticism in Concert

We all love stories. Stories inspire us, intrigue us and scare us; they make us laugh, give us a different perspective, draw us in and, even if just for a split second, transport us away from the everyday. Most of all, though, stories bring people together – whether that’s around a fire or around the dinner table.

We all love stories – and we all love the people who tell them well. That’s why I’m particularly excited to be conducting the City of Stoke-on-Trent Symphony Orchestra in its ‘Myths & Mysticism’ concert in March, which is full to the brim with stories that do all of the above and more, all told through music by a 65-piece storytelling orchestra.

The very next day after our concert in Stoke-on-Trent, film stars will take to the red carpet in Los Angeles for the annual Academy Awards ceremony – or the Oscars, as they’re more commonly known. Among the nominees will be living composers whose music has added that extra-special subconscious dimension to the films on which they’ve worked. You need only try watching Jaws with the music muted to realise how much of the emotional heavy-lifting the music is doing; Jaws just becomes some guys on a fishing trip where the fish aren’t biting for most of the film without John Williams’ iconic score.

But long before there were moving pictures on a screen music was telling powerful stories. Some of these were hot off the press, but some were so old they had become folklore by the time the music was written. Take, for example, one of the highlights of our programme on 14 March: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade.

Scheherazade is, in many ways, the story of all stories. Of Indian, Persian or Arabic origin (or possibly a mixture of the three), and often framed within the series of stories called the Arabian Nights or 1001 Nights, the story tells of the cruel and vicious Sultan Sharyar who, upon finding his wife in bed with the palace cook, is convinced that all women are faithless. Sharyar decides that he will marry a different woman every day before having her executed the day after before she can be unfaithful (how this solves the root problem, I’m not entirely sure, but I suppose there were very few people in his court prepared to question the policy or suggest an alternative). Enter Scheherazade, who is set to be the Sultan’s next victim.

Scheherazade, it seems, has the gift of the gab, and begins to tell the Sultan many stories, some of which we know today as Sinbad the Sailor or Aladdin with his magic lamp. Clearly a shrewd operator, Scheherazade makes sure that she ends each story on a cliffhanger before going to bed, leaving the Sultan desperate to hear how it ends the following day and therefore unable to have her killed. This goes on for 1001 nights (hence the title of the collection of stories) until the Sultan finally relents and drops his nasty vow altogether.