innegan Downie Dear is speaking with the faraway look of a man in love. Which he is: with an orchestra. At the end of June he travelled to Bavaria, climbed on to a podium, removed his face mask and conducted the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra. Several days and four rounds later, he was the winner of the €30,000 Mahler Conducting Competition, which, in its first year, 2004, was awarded to Gustavo Dudamel, now the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. If the whole episode has the quality of a dream that is hardly surprising, particularly given how shattered professional music-making has been in the UK since March. In the semi-final of the contest, Downie Dear got to conduct a particular passage of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony – the end of the third movement as it slips into the fourth. It is some of the most transcendentally beautiful music ever written: the strings hover in such airy stillness that you almost forget to breathe. “As soon as I knew I’d be able to do that bit with them once, I didn’t give a fuck what else happened,” he says, when we meet after the end of his fortnight’s quarantine. “Because just to do it once is a joy. Especially in the quiet playing: to feel like you have some magical sense of what the sound means to you and you try to show that, and the musicians try to respond – that was enough. There are sounds they made at the end of the third movement I will never forget.” It is indeed true love. And requited, it seems: the orchestra has already invited him back to conduct them. “That means more than any prize could,” he says. Given the pandemic, it hadn’t been at all certain that the competition would go ahead. “I was seriously considering not doing it,” he says. “I have never done a competition. I have always thought that they didn’t necessarily give the best picture of what conducting is about … In conducting, you have a certain amount of time – longer for an opera, shorter for a concert, even shorter for a last-minute jump-in – and somehow you have to get an orchestra’s sound from one place to another. And I’ve always felt that the truest sense of that is the longer view.” His first love is opera, where the rehearsal period is indeed long – and preceded by months or even years of planning with collaborators. He was to have conducted Britten’s The Turn of the Screw this June at the Linbury theatre at the Royal Opera House, before it was cancelled; it was 18 months ago that he first started talking to the director, Natalie Abrahami, and the designer, Michael Levine. “That’s how you make a proper show,” he says. “That’s how you make something that’s going to really be a synthesis of what’s going on up there on stage and underneath, in the pit.” Lockdown started pretty abruptly for the 30-year-old. In February, he made his main-stage debut at the Royal Opera House, conducting a couple of performances of Gerald Barry’s wild, strange Alice’s Adventures Underground (the main conductor for the show was composer-conductor Thomas Adès, whom he’d been assisting). Then he was in Düsseldorf, conducting a new ballet. As he came off-stage after the dress rehearsal, one of the clarinetists told him: “Oh, the whole thing’s just been cancelled.” He came home to the UK, to his girlfriend’s family home on the Lincolnshire-Yorkshire border. “For quite a long time, I read a lot, listened to a lot of music, but I didn’t feel like studying scores.” He helped out his girlfriend, soprano Olivia Warburton, who was putting on a series of online concerts under the banner Sunday at Six. “Then it became apparent the competition was going to happen.” He began to look at the music set for the competition – aside from Mahler Four, it was Mozart’s Symphony No 26, Webern’s Variations for Orchestra Op 30, Helmut Lachenmann’s Tableau, and a premiere by Czech composer Miroslav Srnka called Memory Full. And then he got excited. He knew the Mahler, but didn’t know the Webern as well as he might – and when he really sank himself into it, was completely overwhelmed. “It reminded me of the first time I sat down with Bach’s D Major Fugue from book two of the Well-Tempered Clavier. I had this feeling that the music was so perfect that there must be some kind of higher power …” (It’s not only music that he reserves this kind of passion for: after finishing watching Michaela Coel’s electric BBC TV series I May Destroy You, he had to go out and smoke four cigarettes one after the other, just to calm down from how good it was; she and Alan Bennett make him proud to be British, he says.) At any rate, the sheer perfection of Webern’s construction made him hear the Mahler differently, and the Lachenmann in turn, and all the works opened themselves up to him as interrelated and intimately connected, “a whole school of thinking about sound”. By the time he arrived in Bamberg – and had got over the terror of the first encounter with the orchestra, which is always, he says, much worse than a performance – he was ready. “We found this constellation where they played like gods, it was wonderful music, and I had the best time. Somehow on this day, in this insane year, it all fitted together.” Downie Dear has theatre in his bones: his father is playwright Nick Dear, his mother, actor Penny Downie. After music at Cambridge, he studied piano accompaniment at the Royal Academy of Music. He was inspired to work in opera after watching Richard Jones’s production of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg – the Welsh National Opera production of 2010, which premiered in Cardiff, then came to London. He was 20. He can remember moments of it in vivid detail – how certain scenes were lit, the way the set was “so verdant and so green and alive”. He adds: “I love the mechanism of theatre. That’s why I find it intolerable sometimes – and why I want to do it.” Conducting wasn’t a lifelong ambition, but a few important encounters set him on his way. One was playing the piano for David Syrus, former head of music at the Royal Opera House, to see whether he could get some work as a rehearsal pianist. “He had one lunchtime free that month and he gave it up to hear some nobody play Rheingold.” Another was with the composer-conductor Richard Baker, who, when Downie Dear was assisting him, told him that he should take conducting seriously. A third was Adès, who hired him to play the piano in the orchestra for his opera The Exterminating Angel, which premiered at the Salzburg festival in 2016. While he was there, he took a train over to Nuremberg one day to meet the “overwhelmingly supportive and generous” conductor Simone Young. She took him on as her assistant for productions in Zurich, Munich and Vienna. Back in London, Downie Dear works with his own young company, Shadwell Opera. It was with artistic director Jack Furness that he went to see that Meistersinger, a decade ago. I’ve seen some of their productions at Hackney Showroom in east London – a big warehouse-type space with no pit, so the orchestra, made up of super-talented young musicians, was visible alongside the singers. He likes that lack of a boundary between the stage and the musicians. During lockdown he’s been thinking about the possibilities of technology – how the Sunday at Six concerts attracted a far-flung audience who could feel intimately connected to the performers; how the live-streaming of the Bamberg competition rehearsals meant that “people were given keys into the music that you wouldn’t have in a concert”. The last big production for Shadwell was the “beautiful and magical and fun and rhythmic” Where the Wild Things Are, Oliver Knussen’s opera of Maurice Sendak’s classic story. They made it for just short of £90,000 – very little for opera, especially with 48 musicians involved. In a way that’s somewhat unusual in classical music, they conceived of the show, which was staged at Alexandra Palace in London and toured to Russia, entirely and completely from the audience’s point of view – that is, largely eight- and nine-year-olds. In London the company put on workshops for 180 children and gave them free tickets; most of them showed up, many bringing their parents. “They made their own wild things in the workshops, and the first thing they saw when they came was their work exhibited,” he says. “It clicked. There is an amazing German word – Ereignis, event. It was an event.” The next project will be to commission, for the first time, a new opera. They are at an early stage, but again thinking about everything from the point of view of the audience they want to reach. “It’s about making the best possible work and making people feel that it belongs to them,” he says. Which seems a pretty good ambition for a conducting career, too.