(gentle bright music) (soft airy music) - I am the maestro, Nathalie Stutzmann, and I'm the music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.

- You had this decades-long career as a singer, as a contralto, and then you started learning from the conductors you were working with, and you founded your own small baroque ensemble that you could lead and sing with.

And then what was the turning point where you started getting invitations to lead other people's orchestras?

- Oh, I started from the beginning.

I mean, my little ensemble was nothing to do with my conducting.

It was just because I wanted to sing the Baroque repertoire because I realized there was so many great scores that I haven't approached, and I thought it would be a joy to combine my two passions.

I was a woman and I was a singer, so two very bad things to jump on the podium.

And the five first years were really terrible, and it was just like very difficult to combine.

But there was many nights I wanted to give up, but I didn't.

- By age 15, you already knew you wanted to conduct and you were in a special music school with a conducting class, and the teacher only let the boys stand in front of the orchestra to get experience.

How did that make you feel?

- I felt just horribly frustrated and injustice and frustration.

First, I didn't really understand, I said "Why?"

It took me a while to understand it was just because I was a girl and of course, I had no role model at that time.

So when I was watching conductors, it was always men and even all the musicians in the orchestra were mostly men.

People forget sometimes that it's not only new to see women conductors, but it's pretty new to see women playing in the orchestra.

I was following the course just because I was passionate, but it was very clear to me that it was impossible to do something really big, and I wanted to do something big.

I didn't want to just conduct in a corner, and so I just left the dream in my brain and I was very lucky that I started singing lesson, and I got very quickly concerts and engagements and I won a competition and then things went very fast.

- I'm curious how you learned about conducting, because it seems like a difficult thing to teach.

It's so individual to each person.

- Like Georges Prêtre always said, "You don't learn how to conduct.

You are a conductor or you're not."

Conducting is really a talent.

What you learn is the score.

What you learn is how to rehearse, how to deal with the acoustic, how to deal with a group of people, how to convince the musicians, the psychology, you have millions of things to learn.

But the conducting itself, not really.

I was asking Seiji Ozawa and Simon Rattle, both of them.

I was singing a lot with them at that time, and I said to them about my dream and I said, "Please let me know if I have any talent, because if I don't have, I don't do it because I don't want to be ridiculous."

So they gave me a chance to conduct.

They looked at me and they said, "You have to do it."

- You recently had a couple of enormous opera house debuts conducting Mozart at the Metropolitan in New York and Wagner in Bayreuth in Germany.

What was it like to step into that pit of the opera house that Wagner designed especially for his own colossal operas?

- It was one of the biggest moment of my life, I must say, because it was a childhood dream, first of all, I have always been a Wagner fan and I went to Bayreuth 30 years ago as a student, and I listened to amazing performances there and to be then, myself, sitting on this seat where all legendary people have been sitting and succeed, like it happened to be, was one of the biggest realization of my life.

- You grew up in a musical family, there was always live music around you.

Did you also listen to music on the radio?

- I actually discovered, almost, a half of my repertoire through radio because we had few recordings at that time it was not so easy to get the recordings.

Part of my childhood, I was in a small city and there was no CD shop, so only when I came to Paris and big cities, I was buying thousands of recordings.

I'm a recording lover, so I have a lot of recording now.

- Even now when people have access to so much music through the internet, what do you think the value is of broadcasting for accessibility to everybody?

- Well, you know, of course there are still people who cannot travel, who cannot move, who cannot go out from home.

So the fact that we are able with the technology to bring the music to their house is wonderful.

Even if I am convinced nothing can replace the live music experience.

It's great when the filming is good, I mean, you really feel like you are into it and it also brings sometimes a different aspect.

For example, in our hall, unfortunately, we have no space for the audience behind.

So for people who likes to watch the conductor, they cannot see me up from facing.

So with the camera, they can catch a little more my interactions with the musicians, and I think it can bring a plus to the understanding of music.

- [Sarah] At a concert in the hall, the audience sees you conducting and they hear the music emerge in the moment, but what goes on before concert night to make that possible?

What sort of preparation do you do by yourself or with the orchestra?

- There is, first of all, a very long process for the conductor to study the score very deeply, because as a conductor, you have so many lines that you have to study first just to be able to build up the interpretation, the architecture, know exactly what you want musically before you come in front of the orchestra.

Then we have rehearsals together, but very short process.

It's only two days where we have to make that happen.

So that everything which happened at the table just with the score under your eyes, has to happen through the musicians, the orchestra playing.

- So if you've worked out in advance what you think about the piece or how you want it to go, how much room does that leave for spontaneity?

- It's actually the hard work that you do before which allows you to be spontaneous because the liberty comes only from the hard work you do before.

The composers aren't giving us a lot of indications apart from their genius and the notes and everything they give informations about to guide us about what they imagine, but it's not enough.

I mean, to make this score alive, you have to put your own vision, you have to put your own life, your feelings, your emotions, and then once you respect the score and know exactly and play what is basically in the score, then you can add the liberty, the feelings, and what happens in the moment.

So every interpretation will be a little bit different every day, even if you have a very clear vision.

So we have to always be in the moment.

This is the most important.

- The documentary "My Boléro" follows you as you explore the backstory to this famous piece of music, it was originally a ballet.

What made you think, "There's more to this than just a sexy piece with a climax."?

- Well, it's really a piece that, of course, as a born-in-France conductor, I was asked to conduct many times and I always said no because there was something which was missing for me in the understanding of the piece.

Many versions I heard were very colored and sometimes very beautiful, but I didn't feel really the dark side of it and the drama behind it.

And I had a friend who is a musicologist who is running a new wonderful edition from the Ravel scores who point my attention on the ballet version, the original ballet version, which has some difference in the orchestration.

And then I did this research to understand why and how and what was the ballet story, and suddenly I felt like, "Now I understand this piece, and now I'm ready to conduct it and to perform it."

And it was really a big discovery for me, and I hope it will be for our audience.

(bright marching music) (bright marching music continues)