Chasing radical creativity

​2025…
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You wouldn’t think that I, a classical conductor, would have had to travel halfway around the world to be reminded about creativity — but here I am.

I’ve spent the past nine days shadowing Vicente López Romero, one of the Barenboim-Said
Fundación’s early music teachers, as he takes classes of three-to-five-year-olds on summer camp in Polígono Sur, Seville’s most socio-economically depressed area.

Vicente is a master improviser. He riffs on the first thing a kid says, does, sings to him, building a whole lesson from a single gesture or sound — a ball, a mosquito, a few hummed notes. The spontaneously-occurring motif is woven into songs, dances, stories, rhythmic games, all united in their focus on aural skills — getting the kids to recognise timbres, harmonies, melodies, rhythms, and react accordingly.

On our last day, pairs of claves became motorbikes, light sabres, horses, Pinocchio’s nose, houses, all because one kid started playing with his claves like they were building blocks, and before you could blink, Vicente had woven it into the dance. 

Vicente says that creative stimuli are at the heart of learning for all ages, but especially little kids. What impresses me most, though, is the freedom this quite brilliant creative play requires, coupled with being present with, and responsive to, your musical partners — even if they’re only three.

I’m already wondering how I can weave more of this creativity into my own rehearsals. What would it look like for a classical conductor to be creative in rehearsal with an ensemble? Conducting is already a creative act — bringing the score together with a group of people is a new process each time — but how could Vicente’s radical creativity look in an adult context?​

2026…

In February 2026, I find myself back in Sevilla. I’ve leapt into the void — resigned my job in order to spend some time figuring out all the things I’ve feel I’ve been missing in the rehearsal room. This is mostly to do with orchestral and operatic work, but in the past few days I’ve been back on the classroom floor, posing as an unsuspecting mamut (mammoth), while Vicente’s musical cues, played on the keyboard, trigger an avalanche of tiny pre-historic people first to shoot me with bows and arrows, and then to cut me up and eat me for dinner. Not what I was expecting when we set out to visit the schools that morning, but that’s life with Vicente. He tells me he has now written one hundred songs for his classes; back in July, the tally was eighty.

Joseph and I have continued our conversations about excellence. My time visiting other orchestras before arriving in Sevilla has been eye-opening; watching Jukka-Pekka Saraste rehearse Bruckner, and Roberto Gonzales-Monjas rehearse Mozart, both with the Oslo Filharmonien, has been a masterclass in musical imagination. There was very little that these two conductors did not trust the orchestra to fix without interference from them; instead, they focussed in their own very different ways on how to transform the sound. Gonzales-Monjas used almost impressionistic descriptions of colour and texture for each phrase; Saraste worked constantly on how each phrase handed on to the next, so that eighty minutes of Bruckner felt both like the blink of an eye, and as if time stood still. 

Okay, I know, it sounds a bit over the top — but the Oslo audience rose to its feet immediately and in unison after each performance. So it wasn’t just me.

Back in Sevilla, I start to consider that I have witnessed these key elements for exceptional music-making — creativity, imagination, responsiveness — in two places: in truly great professional orchestras, and in Vicente’s classrooms. It feels to me, I tell Joseph, that what emerges in the middle (and it’s a vast middle) is pedantry, an interminable focus on technique, and on being correct, whether with pitch, ensemble, interpretation, and so on. Perhaps part of my quest to learn is to find out how to return to that state of freedom and play which I’ve now seen in the rehearsal room.

It’s not as easy as it looks. I have my first chance sitting in the small town of Pilas, an hour outside of Sevilla, where the Fundación has its annual chamber music workshop. The young musicians range in age from about early teens to early twenties, and they are mentored by an outstanding selection of professional musicians. One afternoon, I sit in on the Beethoven Quintet for Piano and Winds. The tutor, Norberto, invites me to comment, and I do — on the ensemble’s accents. 

And there you have it. My default position is still pedantry. I’ve been trained for years in it. I have so much more to say about music than this, but it’s evidently not what I lead with. As my wife would say, ‘every day’s a school day’. Too right, and on some of them you learn more humbling lessons than others.