Charles Hazlewood

"I remember going to see an orchestral performance. I had never been to a classical concert in my life. But I am watching this and thinking about the co-ordination and the teamwork — one starts and one stops, just fantastic. So I spoke to my players about the orchestra — how they are the perfect team."     -Sir Alex Ferguson - manager of Manchester United Football Team

Hazlewood describes the challenge of creating this perfect team. With humorous anecdotes from his own career conducting orchestras around the world, (including hostile jokes from notoriously reluctant brass sections), Hazlewood illustrates one of his key themes, trust. Trusting oneself, delivering a strong and clear framework whilst creating a trusting environment in which each player is enabled to shine, whilst ‘binding’ the collective to achieve the best possible performance.

This session often culminates in Hazlewood getting his audience singing in 4-part harmony.

In this honest presentation Hazlewood shares his journey to becoming an effective leader, from musical nobody to conductor of world renown.
Hazlewood draws out the key qualities he needed to find in himself in order to command an orchestra: confidence, clarity, persistence and openness, and how he learned them. He focuses on two key experiences: his sometimes turbulent, and even dangerous, journey creating a world-class opera company from the poorest South African townships and the struggle to establish and eventually launch the world’s first paraorchestra to millions around the world at the London 2012 Paralympics.

When I walk into rehearsal with an orchestra, I have an idea of the speed I want the piece of music to go, but as we rehearse a new consensus speed emerges. This new speed has more value because it’s been collectively ‘decided’. I’m no longer afraid of being seen as lacking vision or consistency. What I now know is that success is about adapting to the context and allowing the best to surface’.

The work of a conductor is not to march an orchestra through a replica of a well known work: to do so is but to puff air into a lifeless relic. To make a performance fly, to convince an audience, a fresh performance interpreted and ‘owned’ by the people playing the music is essential.

Sometimes there is no score and new music for a show is required. Rather than hire a composer, conductor Charles Hazlewood describes the process by which he creates new music with the talent in hand. Drawing on the qualities and experience of the individuals in a group - be these singers, actors, instrumentalists of any nationality, color or physical impairment – fresh and vital work can be created with (always) limited time resources.

This process will be playfully demonstrated with a group of locally hired singers, who, in a short time frame, will 'create' a short improvised piece.