Do what you want but do it well

Patrick Gallois is a renowned French flutist and conductor who began his flute studies at the age of 17 with Jean-Pierre Rampal at the Paris Conservatoire. Four years later he was appointed principal flute in the Orchestre National de France under Lorin Maazel.

In 1984 he left the orchestra to pursue a solo career during which he played with major orchestras around the world and conductors like Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa, Pierre Boulez, Karl Böhm, Eugen Jochum, and Sergiu Celibidache. He successfully established his own orchestra, the Académie de Paris as well as his conducting career. From 2003 to 2012 Patrick Gallois was a musical director of the Sinfonia Finlandia Jyväskylä. He has made more than 150 recordings, mostly for Deutsche Grammophon and Naxos labels.

Since 1999 he teaches flute at annual summer masterclasses of the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena, Italy.

We met Patrick during the 5th Tampere Flute Festival in Finland. We wanted to know more about his upbringing, studies with Jean-Pierre Rampal, conducting as well as his source of inspiration.

In all your biographies available online, it seems that you started to play flute at the age of 17 with Jean-Pierre Rampal. However, it most likely started a bit earlier than that. Who was your first teacher, and how did you start playing flute before you came to Paris?

I started to play flute at the age of 9 with an amateur teacher. He was very passionate about music even though he was a painter. He loved the flute so much and had many books about flute and music – so, I was quite lucky.
Then, when I was 13, I went to Tourcoing to study flute with the flutist Albert Carette who initially was the flutist and founding member with Fernand Dufresne of the L'Orchestre national de France (ONF) before its inception in 1934 but moved to Lille and played as a soloist at the Radio Lille orchestra. So, I was very lucky to have him as my teacher at that time.

How would you describe studying with Jean-Pierre Rampal?

For me, it was very important. He basically taught me life and music. I was always asking him “Why?”. “When you do this effect – it’s not speaking and when you do that, it is.” These sorts of questions. It was a very interesting part of my life. So, it was great to study with him, he was so natural. His playing was like breathing. I was fortunate to be able to study with him for 2 years, almost 2 times a week.
I remember that one day he caught me in a corner smoking a cigarette and he made me clear that I should stop smoking right away. And I did, of course!

We all just came from your masterclass where you worked on the Sonatine by Pierre Sancan. You mentioned that you knew Pierre. Can you let us know a bit more about this piece since we couldn’t find anything except that it was written in 1946 as an examination piece at the Paris Conservatoire?

Well, I can’t tell you much, except that we played it together with him. Sancan was teaching piano at the Paris Conservatory at the same time as Rampal.
When you listen to the beginning, the introduction of the Sonatine, it’s really fast. He told me at that time: “I’m doing the café au lait, swirling fast notes in the background while you should play your part as a slow counterpoint to it”. So, this is one of those pieces that this contradiction is possible, when one plays fast and the other plays slow but at the same tempo, somehow it works together.

Unfortunately, the tradition of asking composers to write a new examination piece for Paris Conservatory students no longer exists. It was a good tradition: flute students had to show their technical skills – double or triple tonguing, adagio, andante, cadenza, and fast finale. Nevertheless, today this repertory is an important part of a flute recital.

What are the three most important points or events that have made the biggest impact on your musical career?

When I was 14-16 years old, I was painting quite a lot, doing some portraits for sale. Additionally, I listened to quite a lot of operas and started to like music more and more. And, at the age of 15, I listened to Jean Pierre Rampal at a concert. At that point, I realized that I wanted to be a musician. Still, I could not imagine that I would be studying with him just two years later.
The best lesson in my life was brought by Jean-Pierre Rampal, and it was rather simple: do what you want but do it well. So, this is the beginning of freedom. At the same time, you have to realize that liberty is not anarchy.

Another important point in my life was meeting with Bernstein and Celibidache. Celibidache was a principal guest conductor of the L'Orchestre National de France (ONF) when I was working there as a flutist, and he was teaching conducting at that time as well.

And there’s a story about the space between the notes which come from him. Do-sol and back to do. A bit later I discovered a book by Jean-Philippe Rameau “Observations sur notre instinct pour la musique, et sur son principe” (Observation about our instinct for the music) which explained this concept a bit more. So, when you play do-sol-do you need to find a way how to properly pronounce that. Most of the time we look at this as a horizontal line but in fact, this interval phrase is vertical, this is done to liberate the spirit. Yes, Celibidache was a very important figure for me at that time.

Bernstein also was very important. In the early 1980s he lived in Paris, part-time, composing his Halil. He was coming to me almost every day asking for some advice about it.

The story behind the Halil is very simple. There was a 17-year-old guy, a flutist who was happy with his life but got killed during the 1973 Yom Kippur war. The Cadenza is about this flutist dying, and 5 minutes before the end of the piece there’s no more solo flute. Just 2 flutes in the orchestra. So, the flutist is dead, but the memories are coming back, and the future comes in the form of this long note by the soloist at the very end.
So, Bernstein wanted me to play it, but I was not a soloist at that time, I just wanted to be a musician. Coming from a small town, being just a musician was enough for me, and I haven’t changed my mind about it even today.
Still, people occasionally asked me to play some solo concerto and I usually declined, but when Sir Neville Marriner arrived and asked to play Ibert’s Concerto for a TV broadcast from the Champs-Elysées, I finally agreed.
There were all my teachers at the concert hall: Jean-Pierre Rampal, Maxence Larrieu, Alain Marion – and I had a good time. So, this was the first time when I played solo with the orchestra.

After that experience, I realized that I could lead the orchestra. You don’t really have to move a lot to lead an orchestra, you need just to be there. The musicians have ears and experience, they know the music. Besides, they are very professional, it’s not like 40 years ago. So, there’s no need to move a lot if you conduct. If you are in the music, everybody understands what you want and move along.

In the beginning, I didn’t know that, and I experienced this for the first time when we played with Jean-Pierre Rampal as a soloist. This is the teacher that wakes me up (Rampal).

That’s what I like when I teach – to wake up young artists on their ability to experience the miracle of music. I am ready to fight for that, to experience the magic of music. Unfortunately, sometimes, to have a musical career you have to play the same over and over again, and even worse: to be always the same. There lies a danger of killing the creativity, the magic. The musician becomes a name, an image, no more than a yogurt sold by a factory.
The public most of the time expects the same things, and that’s normal. But for musicians sometimes it’s a bit sad, to play the same concertos from year to year up to the point that you don’t want to play that piece anymore. I have been in a situation where I had to play one concerto for a whole month. Of course, I like to improvise, I like to discover different things in this music, and that’s the beauty of the day then.

You have played with many great conductors. Which ones did you enjoy playing the most as a flutist?

Well, there are so many. A lot of good German conductors, and Celibidache, of course, he was a miracle. I remember the first time I played with him. We came to rehearsal that started at 09:00 and up until noon he worked with a doublebase group. Then was a pause until 14:00, and then he said “flute”, and the doublebases had to listen. This was very interesting to see how everything was unfolding like a puzzle. It’s like taking apart a car’s engine and then putting it back. But this is possible only if the conductor has a clear vision of what he wants.
What is the vision for the conductor? Having the feeling for this music, how to approach it. The conductor is like a stage director and musicians are his actors. He puts these actors together and there is a story that comes out of it. That's why reading scores are the most important thing to do because every single day you will find there something new.

What was the reason for you to take the musical director position at the Jyväskylä Symphony Orchestra in Finland?

When they approached me for the first time, I said “no”, because I was living in Toronto then. Besides, I consider myself more as a musician, and not as a conductor. Eventually, I agreed, since I was conducting more and more. If you are a musician, everything you produce comes from your hands. When I read the score, I sense the music and get a feeling of it.
You know – when you play a concert as a soloist, you play the concerto for 15 or 30 minutes and you are done while everybody continues to play the symphony together, it's like a big party on the stage for everybody for which you are not invited. This is one of the reasons I like to conduct more and more.

Did you meet Jorma Panula?

Of course, he is a very good friend of mine. And I have played with him many times as a soloist. Besides, he used the Jyväskylä orchestra for the Jorma Panula conducting competition. One time he invited me to be a jury member for his competition, but I refused “I’m not a conductor, I’m just a musician”.

Here’s the thing. If you have a question, you’ll find a response every day. And every day the response will be different. When I conduct a symphony, I erase everything that was done before, and I write a new version of it every day. It’s like a book. If you read a book 10 times, every time you’ll notice different things. When you approach a symphony, it’s the same.
If you write down some things in your score or parts, it’s a professional thing to do, but I don’t want to be just professional. Being a professional means that you have a job, but I don’t want to approach music as a job, because music is passion.

What inspires you? Do you have a hobby?

When we work on some piece of music we try to be in that present moment. What I am doing now, today.
And that’s my approach to life as well – being present in a moment. That’s why we love to go on long hikes together with my wife, with a backpack on our shoulders, sleeping in a tent. We have walked over 2000km together, we went to Paris, Spain, we have done almost all the French paths of Santiago de Compostela, now we have begun to do the Roman path of Santiago de Compostela. Sometimes we have a week, sometimes two for this.
During the Covid we managed to walk 1 month non-stop: 700km. After that kind of experience, eventually, you understand better what it’s like to be an immigrant.

When you walk, you feel that present moment very well. Besides, you meet different people, and the people you need to meet. If you are professional, you don’t have time to see and meet all those people. That’s why it is very interesting to do the same symphony with one orchestra and then with a different one. In this way you experience something totally different, and that’s fantastic, it’s like a miracle.
Being able to conduct for me is a liberating feeling since I don’t have to practice as much as I had to, and I can fully enjoy the feeling of being in that moment, especially with a good orchestra.
What else liberates me is that I do everything in the moment, feeling and sound of the wind.