It is just nine years since Thierry Fischer, the new principal conductor of the Ulster Orchestra, made the much-travelled journey from instrumentalist to conductor. He didn't make the transition the easy way, by moving sideways from a well-established career as a soloist, with a name likely to carry him straight into lucrative conductorships and recording deals. Instead, he worked from the bottom up, with a starting point that was, as he puts it, a matter of luck.
Music became his vocation at the age of 16. The choice was a defining moment in a period of his life that was bereft of a sense of direction. One day, he realised that music and the flute were where his future lay. He was musically gifted and it was, he says, a good decision. "Everything went very easy. I knew I wasn't making a decision for an impossible profession for me." But the news took his best friend by surprise, and he even found himself a bit embarrassed about it, "because all my friends were more into motorbikes and rock music, and I was just a flautist".
His musical experience extended beyond the flute, of course, and the most important musical revelation of his early life came from performing in the chorus of the B minor Mass of Bach. This, he says, "was like an atomic bomb in my being".
Having made his decision, he followed up the logical consequences: he is, he says, the sort of person who takes one thing at a time. He went to the Geneva Conservatory "to have my virtuosity prize", and then studied with the Swiss flautist AurΦle Nicolet, who became a second father to him - "Such a complete way of teaching, not just the fingers and the embouchure, but also wider issues, such as politics." He sought a job, worked in the opera orchestra in Hamburg, spent a year with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Colin Davis, then landed a contract to play in the orchestra of the Zurich Opera.
This was no ordinary contract and no ordinary time for opera in Zurich. Nikolaus Harnoncourt was a regular there, bringing his experience in the world of period performance to bear on Mozart operas with an orchestra using modern instruments. Fischer was brought in to substitute for players close to retirement who couldn't meet the demands that Harnoncourt was making in terms of vibrato and playing style.
He had already found himself fascinated by Harnoncourt's recordings of Mozart symphonies, listening to them again and again and wondering why, as he puts it, "I hadn't heard such beauty before". For him, under Harnoncourt these Mozart symphonies were "absolute truth", so the impact of working with the conductor is not hard to gauge. It may sound trite in the way many an exaggeration does, but there's a resonance in Fischer's voice that explains what he means when he suggests that finally he found out "what music is about".
Harnoncourt transformed the experience of playing in an orchestra and gave him, for the first time, "a complete sense" of what he was doing there. And at the same time, he expanded his horizons further, as principal flautist of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe.
Sitting in an orchestra under an inspirational conductor is still a far cry from standing in front of an orchestra yourself, of course.
There was no grand plan in Fischer's mind, mapping the route. He had always thought approvingly of conductors as the architects of what went on in orchestras. But it was the plight of an amateur choral conductor in Geneva, looking for a replacement, that gave him his first break. The original conductor had suffered a nervous breakdown and handed over not only rehearsals but also his concert to Fischer. The young flautist made enough of an impression on his debut that the orchestra's artistic director, who was moving on, offered him the orchestra as a result of his first concert.
He transformed and professionalised the Collegium Academicum, turning it into the Geneva Chamber Orchestra. The Chamber Orchestra of Europe began to feed him opportunities, and, as his diary began to fill up, he made the formal move, in 1992 abandoning the flute for the podium.
When I ask about the challenges of his early conducting days, he initially deflects the question. He was getting such pleasure from the experience of conducting that he hardly thought about it as a challenge.
He'd found something that made him "happy every single day". It's more recently that the true demands have emerged. "Now, slowly, I'm beginning to see the challenges more clearly. I have more knowledge. I know much better what I want."
He admits that when he started, he was so happy just to be conducting that he didn't see the priorities clearly. Now, "the more I open a score, the more it speaks to me. Every two or three months, I see a difference in how receptive I am".
He lists the challenges. "First of all, what I like in conducting is that you have to develop so many sides of yourself. You have to have a very precise concept of sound: of articulation, speed of bow, speed of wind projection, of the general sound, how you can help an orchestra to do what the composer asks. You also have to be able to communicate, because there is nothing worse than a good idea badly explained."
This, he says, almost amounts to a bad idea, and communication was one of his limitations when he started. "I was so enthusiastic. I arrived with fantastic ideas - well, what I thought were good ideas - and the orchestra couldn't react. I was too complicated, too philosophical or whatever."
He admits that some of his early failures were so depressing that they led, literally, to "crying on the way home". He knew the problems were his, however, and never wavered in believing he would solve them.
What he wants now is to find an authenticity, not to engage in role play when he's in front of an orchestra, and to be humble in the service of composers. He likens the conductor to a marionette, with the composer controlling the strings. "You are just a transition, but a very important one. Without this transition, nothing can exist in music. Then you also have to listen to orchestras."
Ideas that seem good when a conductor studies a score, he says, may be negated or overtaken by the collective wisdom of the musicians on stage. "It's very interactive, actually. The challenges are to be able to communicate, to show, to inspire, but also to listen. I think that real musical authority is in dialogue. If it's only a matter of, 'I want it like this. Shut up, do it, and see you tomorrow', then it becomes power. And I think power has no future at all, in any branch of life, especially in music. Power is nothing. I draw a big distinction between authority and power.
"A big group like a symphony orchestra needs an authority. Otherwise they are lost, and then you end up with compromises. Probably the worst compromise is mezzo forte."
The tendency of orchestral musicians is to play safe, to seek some sort of middle ground. "You have to look for extreme sounds, to have the Utopian idea to play louder than loud and softer than soft."
Authority and ideas are not enough. Fischer describes enthusiasm as "a very basic pedagogical way of communication. Of course, sometimes you have your mood and you're not very happy of a morning. It's also good for an orchestra to see that the conductor is just, you know, a very normal guy."
In his stride, thinking about the challenges of conducting, he decides to encapsulate them in a single word. "If I have to say one word, I would say freedom. As Beethoven said very often: 'What's life without freedom?' And maybe freedom for a member in an orchestra is to realise, and admit, and accept that his sublimation is not going to evolve in his own sound but in the sound of the group he belongs to."
Given the attention and energy musicians give to the cultivation of a sound, this is a potent paradox. And for the conductor, there's another freedom, that of being surprised by the unexpected in concerts. "I must say, the Ulster Orchestra is fantastic for this. So far, they have been reacting so positively to the kind of spirit I'm trying to create as a conductor. Even two weeks ago we did a BBC week with a very hard programme, a Honegger symphony, a Frank Martin piece, Arvo PΣrt, unknown pieces for them. And in the concert I was able to do things we'd never rehearsed."
He used to think his experience as a performer had influenced his conducting, and count his blessings for the inspirational conductors he'd managed to perform with. Now he thinks the opposite. "When you're in front of the orchestra you cannot repeat. You cannot imitate. You have to have your own ideas. Otherwise it just doesn't work."
Harnoncourt, obviously, has been a major influence, as has Claudio Abbado, whose attitude to concerts was such that, on tour with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, doing, say, the same Schubert symphony 18 times in three weeks, he was always "able to make you so fragile", to make the moment special, as if somehow unpredictable.
That's a quality Fischer must have thought about a lot over the past four years, as chief conductor of the Netherlands Ballet Orchestra, with which he has done runs of many of the principal works of the repertoire. With 60 or 70 performances a year to conduct, including a run of 14 performances of Le Sacre Du Printemps in three weeks' time, "this was my school". And if you want to hear strange stories about the quirks of dancers and choreographers, Fischer is your man.
The only ballet to make it into his first season in Belfast is Copland's Appalachian Spring. It's part of the season's theme of "Visions of Utopia", which he sees as "an inspiring theme, for the public as well as the orchestra", declaring: "I believe in symbols, in the force of symbolism."
He suggests the choice was influenced, unconsciously, by the fact that the concerts were for Belfast, "not Stuttgart or Basel". And he hopes that the music in the concerts will "touch extremes about love, about death, about yourself". The ultimate aim is to "try to touch perfection, knowing very well we will never manage it".
Thierry Fischer's debut programme as principal conductor of the Ulster Orchestra is at the Waterfront Hall, in Belfast, on Friday. He conducts Unity Of Being, a work commissioned for the Visions of Utopia series from Deirdre Gribbin, Berg's Violin Concerto (with Augustin Dumay) and Mendelssohn's Symphony No 2 (the Hymn Of Praise)
