Tafelmusik’s Rachel Podger: Communication is Key

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Adjusting to life in a new position in a new country comes with a unique set of challenges. Rachel Podger has approached the task with a combination of communication, collaboration, and curiosity.

The award-winning British-born musician was named Principal Guest Director of famed classical ensemble Tafelmusik in April 2023; she formally launched the 2024-25 season in her new capacity in Toronto last month, with an all-Mozart program. “Musically, they are so incredibly responsive—I just love the energy in the group!”

Podger first worked with Tafelmusik in May 2012. As well as being the founder and artistic director of the Brecon Baroque Festival in Wales, and her ensemble Brecon Baroque, she was the first woman to be awarded the prestigious Royal Academy of Music/Kohn Foundation Bach Prize in October 2015. Other accolades include Gramophone Artist of the Year (2018), and Ambassador for Early Music Day (2020), an event hosted by REMA, the network for early music in Europe. Her list of collaborators include a-cappella octet VOCES8, vocal ensemble I Fagiolini, pianist Kristian Bezuidenhout, conductor/harpsichordist Masaaki Suzuki, and early-music superstar Jordi Savall.

Podger’s position as Principal Guest Director marks another step in Tafelmusik’s creative evolution. The role isn’t intended to replace that of the traditional Music Director, a position which transformed since 2022 and resulted in the current model of three Artistic Co-Directors: orchestra members Brandon Chui, Dominic Teresi, and Cristina Zacharias.

“We have a really nice rapport discussing programs,” Podger says. “It’s like: ‘Hey, what about this and that?’ or ‘How would that fit?’ or ‘That would go along with this piece and we’ve got this instrumentation!’ and ‘Have a listen to this!’—and then you’re sending something off from whichever country you’re in. Sometimes one of them will send me something, too—mostly Dominic Teresi, who’s the bassoonist in the group; he’ll send me a link and say, ‘Hey, have you considered this piece?’ And I’ll think, ‘I don’t know that work but okay, let’s think about programming it’—and the other way around, too. So it’s very nice.”

Rachel Podger with Tafelmusik. Photo: Dahlia Katz

The group’s new album, Haydn Symphonies 43 & 49: Mercury & La Passione, was recorded live during Podger’s return to Toronto in 2023. “It felt like a kind of homecoming,” she says. Released Oct. 11 on all major digital platforms, the album is the ensemble’s first recording with their new Principal Guest Director.

Later this month, Podger will lead Tafelmusik on a five-city, seven-concert tour of South Korea; she returns to Toronto in 2025 for concerts in January/early February and early May. Those presentations will feature well-known classical names (Handel, Bach, Vivaldi, Telemann) together with works by composers whose names (Avison, Pisendel, Reichenauer, and Corelli) may not be well-known outside of early-music circles. “Tafelmusik’s following is very loyal,” Podger says, “so you can actually serve up something that they might not know. It just depends how you present it and how you introduce it to the audience.”

That open communication connects directly to Podger’s role as an educator. She holds an honorary position at both the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and the Royal Academy of Music and is also on the Historical Performance faculty at Juilliard, where she led a concert of Baroque music with Juilliard415 (the school’s primary period-instrument ensemble) last month. “In teaching, ideas are constantly refreshed and recreated to make them relevant for a particular student or a particular group of students,” she says. The focus on experiential refreshment extends to concerts and specifically to the use of spoken introductions, a practice which is becoming common across the orchestral world.

“It is a nice icebreaker,” Podger says of the small talks conductors will often initiate prior to the performance of a piece. “I think it’s good that the audience can get an impression of the music, and what it means to you on a personal level as well.”

Podger’s father is a pastor who sang as a young man. “He was a choral scholar at Cambridge and he used to put on concerts that I played and sang in,” she recalls. “He did these kinds of introductions because he thought it was important to explain a little bit to people—and so for me it was just completely normal to do that.”

Collaboration is another element sewn into Podger’s musical approach. “It’s a very kind of democratic outfit,” she says of Tafelmusik. “I think some directors don’t really like the fact that (in rehearsals) people are speaking out from all over the place—from the back of the section or from the wind players or the brass players. I love that! I’m interested in what people have to say.”

The most important thing is that “everything always comes from the music—I know that’s maybe a bit of a soundbite, but it’s true. Obviously, I’m at the front but I see myself more as a kind of facilitator, and that makes for good music-making. Isn’t that what matters?”