Paolo Bortolameolli: "Being a musician is a reckless decision"

Paolo Bortolameolli during one of the concerts with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Marco Borrelli (LA PHIL)

Paolo Bortolameolli (Viña del Mar, 1982) recalls a visit he made several years ago to a museum in New York.

In one of the rooms, dozens of six or seven-year-old children were sitting on the floor, stunned by a painting by Picasso, while they listened to the explanations of his art teacher.

He says this rising talent of classical music was moved by that "experience of active contemplation".

Several years later, he continues to believe that something like this happens every time he stands in front of a symphony orchestra to breathe new life into the masters of music.

“Later I understood that exposing a child to art is not a vertical exercise.

It is the other way around, what we must do is encourage a natural impulse.

When we have a child who does not speak at home, what you do to communicate is nurture him with artistic stimuli: you make him sing, dance, paint with his hands.

It is instinctive to provide it with art”, explained Bortolameolli, associate director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, one summer morning outside The Ford, an open-air theater in the Californian city.

“Why, when we grow up, does art stop being a playful experience and become an elitist separation?” he wondered.

The musician was then preparing a concert with the British composer Devonté Haynes, who enjoys fame within the

circuits thanks to his Blood Orange project.

This was just one event in Bortolameolli's busy summer schedule, where he first conducted the San Francisco Symphony with a program of works by Johann and Richard Strauss;

he gave concerts in Mexico with the Azteca Symphony, the youth orchestra of which he is artistic director, and headlined one night at the imposing Hollywood Bowl.

He is now in France, where he refines the details of

that Gustavo Dudamel will present at the Paris Opera.

The Chilean, right-hand man of the Venezuelan star, will take over in October and November from Dudamel in the Puccini classic.

"There is an innate understanding between us," confesses Bortolameolli, who already co-directed

of Mozart at the Liceo de Barcelona.

“Gustavo has transformed from someone who trusts me and gives me opportunities to someone who treats me like a colleague.

It has been a very nice development”, says the Chilean, who came to the United States a little over a decade ago to study first at the Yale School of Music and later at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, where talents such as the pianist André Watts and violinist Kim Kashkashian.

Deborah Borda, who was the president of the LA Phil, proposed to Bortolameolli to become one of the beneficiaries of the Dudamel Scholarship, which since 2009 has offered a two-month internship with the Venezuelan genius.

What was a temporary program became an invitation to become part of the family as assistant conductor of the Philharmonic.

After two years, he was promoted to his current position.

To make his debut in 2018 as a conductor at the Hollywood Bowl, a colossus with capacity for 16,000 people, he chose the seventh symphony by Antonín Dvořák.

“It is the best of his symphonies.

The most difficult and the most challenging, but it was also a gesture of youth.

It is daring and takes a more expressive risk, with a more complex architecture, full of counterpoints”, says the director, who has a didactic vein when talking about music.

Proof of this are the Ponle Pausa capsules, which can be seen on YouTube, where the director explains some of the secrets of the great composers.

In

, a book that Bortolameolli dedicates to his son Andrea, he describes himself as a child who gave his first piano concerts in his living room.

His maternal great-grandfather was a musician who left Chillán, in central Chile, to go to the conservatory in Santiago, where he studied piano and composition.

Despite this training, the great-grandfather devoted himself to law.

Even so, the musician grew up with uncles who took out the guitars in barbecues in which red wine flowed and Silvio Rodríguez was sung.

Bortolameolli, who speaks at the frenetic pace of the Presto, says that one of the conductor's most important tasks is to remind his colleagues why they wanted to be musicians.

“It is a reckless decision.

Whether you come from a family of musicians or not, from a family with money or not.

To say that one is dedicated to this means that there was a moment of irrepressible need to be.

That energy is so powerful that I feel that, even off, it can be remembered.

It is a mission that a leader must have”, affirms the director.

Another crucial attribute of an orchestra conductor, he says, is that of being a communicator.

“A director must convey an idea.

A composer may have more knowledge than a conductor, but if you don't know how to communicate it to an orchestra it would be just that, knowledge.

What you need is that the orchestra wants to follow you,

After his turn directing

In the French capital, Bortolameolli will focus on his native country, a place from which he does not intend to disconnect much.

He follows from a distance, but with great interest, the process of the plebiscite with which Chile will decide whether to adopt a new Constitution or continue with the current one, from the times of the dictatorship.

In the spirit of celebrating the new times that the South American nation is experiencing, the director will stage Mahler's eighth symphony in January, which has never been staged in his country due to the great logistical challenge it represents: two choirs with 300 people, one more with 80 children, in addition to the 140 musicians of the orchestra.

All this to celebrate 30 years of the National Youth Symphony Orchestra.

“In the end, we brainstormed (think intensely) to do it with a very nice format and celebrate all the Chilean talent.