“I never had the discipline to be a concert pianist,” says the trim, fresh-faced Alexander Soddy, 42, an Oxford-born former boy chorister who went on to become a choral scholar at Cambridge. “I was always an incredible sight reader. Just by looking at a piece, I had already got to 80 percent.” Then came the slog: drilling the piano part into his fingers, alone in his room six hours a day. Now that he’s a conductor, with orchestras and soloists to play with, the final stages of preparation for performance are where his heart lies.
We spoke last February, when Soddy was taking a lunch break between rehearsals for the Metropolitan Opera’s umpteenth revival of Franco Zeffirelli’s vintage La Bohème—the vehicle for his house debut, in 2017. Everyone knows it’s not the conductor who sells this title season in, season out. Still, Puccini’s score doesn’t play itself. Though hastily assembled, Soddy’s unheralded return engagement achieved a freshness, atmosphere, flow, and moment-to-moment imaginative acuity that proved transformative.
Between his Met Bohèmes, Soddy also aced high-stakes debuts in diverse, demanding repertory at the flagship houses of London, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Dresden, and other music capitals. From November 5 to 26, he’s on the podium at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala for Robert Carsen’s new production of Così Fan Tutte. Mozart’s off-kilter heartbreaker was planned as a debut, too—but in October 2024, La Scala called Soddy in early.
Here’s why. Just as David McVicar’s new multi-season production of the “Ring” cycle was about to get going, the top-gun Wagnerian Christian Thielemann had to pull out for tendon surgery. In an unusual arrangement, Soddy and Thielemann’s big-league contemporary Simone Young, 64, were brought in to split all conducting responsibilities fifty-fifty—rehearsals as well as performances. By now, the project has reached the three-quarter mark. In March, it will be Soddy who brings McVicar’s (until now) magisterially uncluttered vision across the finish line with the first presentation of the cycle in its entirety, culminating in the premiere of Götterdämmerung.
While opera seems to be monopolizing his calendar, he’s no less committed to the symphonic literature. But growing up, he was struck by the fact that the old masters of the baton he most admired in both realms had little or none of the formal training in conducting that has become the rule today. To a man (and back then they were all men), they came up through the opera house, pinch-hitting in the orchestra pit or on the concert stage as chance and institutional priorities required. As a student at Cambridge, Soddy began in much the same vein.
“It was in my personality,” he says. “I loved the voice. I loved languages. I loved people and working with singers. I loved the process maybe as much as the goal.” Plus, he had those demon keyboard skills. “Very quickly, I saw what I could do. Very quickly, I was accompanying.”
In 2005, he took his first job at the Hamburg State Opera, an old-style house that cultivated an encyclopedic active repertory. As repetiteur in a backstage studio, he functioned as rehearsal pianist, drill sergeant, and swami, all rolled into one—the singers’ sword and shield, ever at the ready with musical, linguistic, and interpretive support. “And I had the chance really just to be thrown onto the podium,” he says, “often in very tough conditions. But at that level, the orchestras are so good. So you need to go down a bit and actually work out, What am I doing? Is it clear? Do I actually have the real craft that I need?”
Over three seasons as principal conductor of the Stadttheater Klagenfurt, in Austria, plus another seven as general music director of the Nationaltheater Mannheim back in Germany, he methodically built up his arsenal. Now he’s in a freelance phase, ready to spread his wings wherever his fortunes take him. “There’s no better training than the opera,” Soddy avers. “A great operatic conductor nearly always can become a great symphonic conductor. The two can work very much hand in hand.”
Così Fan Tutte is on at Teatro alla Scala, in Milan, from November 5 to 26
Matthew Gurewitsch writes about opera and classical music for AIR MAIL. He lives in Hawaii
