Jonathan Lo – Favourite Things
Each week Reaction Weekend brings you Favourite Things – interviews with interesting people about the skills, hobbies, pleasures and past times that make them who they are.
Jonathan Lo is Music Director of Northern Ballet, Principal Guest Conductor of the Xi’an Symphony Orchestra (China), Principal Conductor of the New Bristol Sinfonia, Haffner Orchestra and Music Director of the King’s College London Symphony Orchestra. He is on the conducting staff for The Royal Ballet, Covent Garden, and will be conducting performances of The Nutcracker and Romeo & Juliet for the 2020-2021 season. The first performance will be streamed on the 9 October.
Alice Crossley spoke to Lo from The Royal Opera House where rehearsals are underway for the new season. The troop is able to perform with strict testing and hygiene regimes with the dancers kept in “cohorts”, helped by many of the dancers being couples, so they do not have to socially distance.
These are a few of Jonathan Lo’s favourite things.
Cathedral choirs
I love hearing a choir in a cathedral or church setting because choral music was what got me into conducting in the first place. This was a big part of my early integration and understanding of British culture. I moved to this country from Hong Kong when I was 14 or 15, mid-teenage years, and it was tricky. I went through all the usual trying to find your clique and tribe. Joining the chapel choir at boarding school really took me out of my comfort zone, but I finally found my space.
Every time you hear a choir there is that real sense of humanity. In a cathedral or a church you are standing in a space that was built, often over hundreds of years by various people who were all dedicated to one common need for a spiritual home for spiritual comfort, and that, I think, is a very human, rather than religious thing. One could argue that people are not really there to worship but to find spiritual nourishment. It is the form of music that still tugs on my heart and makes me cry.
Flying
Flying, but not in the conventional commercial sense. I fly single-engine planes and motor gliders as a hobby; it is so cathartic. I have a job that occupies my mind all the time, but when you’re sat in the cockpit, especially flying basic single-engine aeroplanes, you don’t have the capacity to think about work. If you do have a moment of spare thought, you find yourself admiring the view and being taken on a journey. And that’s very therapeutic for me.
I also find a lot of analogies between flying an aircraft and conducting. When you are in charge of an orchestra, it is like you’re in charge of an aircraft. An orchestra will have a mind of its own; it is a well-functioning machine. If you try and yank it too high, try and over-control it, then the machine will not behave for you. And, you have all your weather to consider and it is the same working in a theatre with an orchestra, you have everybody’s unique personalities to consider. Flying is so very different from what I do as a career, yet I can find so much resonance with it.
Village cricket
I love village cricket. I started out playing at school because I happened to be in the same school and same chapel choir as Alastair Cook, the ex-England Captain, so there was a lot of cricket going on. It was another really great way to get into British culture. The sheer casualness of it is lovely, everybody is going to play cricket together, nobody’s being paid to do it: we’re all doing it because we love it. That in itself is something to be celebrated.
I also love the feel, sound and smell of cricket. The smell of cut grass in the summer, the sound of the bat and ball, the smell of your hands after you’ve been holding on to the ball and it has rubbed red onto your palms. It makes me think of long summer days, the sounds and smells that beckon a pint at the pub. Just thinking about it now I’ve got a massive smile on my face.
Stargazing
There was one birthday where I got given a telescope, and it still sits in my office. I remember using that for the first time and seeing the moon and realising how bright it was. That was really moving for me because it makes you feel tiny. As a conductor, we spend a lot of time putting on the facade of being the centre of attention. Having that experience of stargazing in the middle of a crisp, clear night you think, oh my god that light took 10 billion years to get to my eyes, the whole universe functions on a completely different timescale to the vanity and ego associated with conductors. It lines up with one of my favourite quotes by Carl Sagan, “for small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.” By love, I don’t think he means romantic love, it simply means being able to make a mark on somebody’s life. As a conductor, we hope to mark people’s lives for the better. Just the act of looking at the stars reminds me of all of those things.
Polaroid cameras
I know this is a clichéd and woke millennial thing but I love my Polaroid camera. Recently, we were up in Inverness dolphin spotting. It was incredible, you could see dolphins right from the shoreline on this little bit of the beach. We were sharing that tiny area with a dozen professional photographers, pointing to shoot the best picture of the dolphins. I got my Polaroid out and took a picture of a tiny speck, you couldn’t even make out it was a dolphin. But I loved that I could stick it straight into my travel journal. There was no time to worry if it was Instagramable, if the horizon was straight, or if I had followed the rule of thirds. I wouldn’t travel anywhere without my camera now because it forces me to step away from my phone and just live in the moment.