CONDUCTOR Rowan Harvey-Martin says there’s a fine balance between bullying and getting performers to “play their hearts out for you”.

“I think I have a good balance without beating them over the head,” she says and when Harvey-Martin takes up the baton to conduct Mendelssohn’s oratorio “Elijah” on April 16, it’ll be her tenth year as music director of the Llewellyn Choir.
A brilliant violinist and member of a musical family that partly grew up in Canberra, Harvey-Martin has just taken up the full-time directorship of strings at Canberra Girls Grammar School. Before that, she was conductor of Canberra Youth Orchestra and can be seen regularly performing with the Canberra Symphony Orchestra. You wonder how she fits it in.

“We have a daughter in college and a son in year 8, so I don’t want to run around anywhere – that’s why I’m here,” she says. That might also explain her reputation as a hard taskmistress.

“I’m there to work, I’m not there to have a lovely meeting eating cookies and drinking coffee… if I’m not at rehearsal I go home to my family,” she says.

Called the most popular oratorio next to Handel’s “Messiah”, “Elijah” is sheer drama as the prophet Elijah battles it out with the acolytes of the pagan god Baal, aided by a fiery column from Jehovah.

Harvey-Martin counts herself lucky to have baritone, Douglas McNicol from State Opera SA, with top Canberra soloists Rebecca Collins, Christina Wilson and (husband) Michael Martin leading the 120 voices of the Llewellyn Choir.
The Mendelssohn work is “a very big sing for the choir”.

“The story is fantastic, with lots of fire and brimstone,” she says.

However, Harvey-Martin is no fan of the trend for turning such performances into visual spectacles.

“They are oratorios, I don’t think they need to be acted out, that’s not how they have been written,” she says.
She laments that some audiences have lost the ability to concentrate.

“We don’t have time, it’s rush, rush, rush,” she says.

“Some people want to put lovely pictures on the stage, but I want it just to be a beautiful performance – just listen to the choir and the music.”

The Llewellyn Choir’s “Elijah”, Llewellyn Hall, 7.30 pm, Saturday April 16, bookings to premier.ticketek.com.au