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Bayerische Staatsorchester, Bayerische Staatsoper, BSOrec, orchestra, classical, opera, recordings

Bayerische Staatsoper Recordings: “A Microscopic View Into The Orchestra”

History looms large when you’re 500 years old. The Bayerisches Staatsorchester might know a thing or two about the weight of such a history – but in-house record label Bayerische Staatsoper Recordings renders the present, as much as the present and future, profound, polished, and yes, portable.

The orchestra of the famed Bayerische Staatsoper began life in 1523, when regularized performances started at the Bavarian court. Its musicians became famous following the 1563 appointment of composer Orlande de Lassus, though their output was reoriented with the start of opera performances in the mid 17th century in Munich. Mozart himself led the orchestra in the world premiere of Idomeneo in 1781, which was also written in the city. But it was 1811 when, crucially, members of the Bavarian court orchestra found the Musikalische Akademie e. V. association; that decision led to the creation of Munich’s first public concert series, known as Akademiekonzerte. The orchestra gained particular fame in the latter half of the 19th century in their hosting the first performances of numerous Wagner operas, including Tristan und Isolde (premiered at the National Theatre in 1865)  Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868), Das Rheingold (1869), and Die Walküre (1870). One of the institution’s most famous General Music Directors (GMDs) was composer Richard Strauss, whose father Franz was a noted principal horn player with the orchestra, then known as the Court Opera. But Strauss Jr. was far from the only famous music figure in the position; subsequent leaders have included a who’s who in classical history, including Bruno Walter, Clemens Krauss, Georg Solti, and more recently, Zubin Mehta, Kirill Petrenko, and currently Vladimir Jurowski, who led acclaimed productions of Prokofiev’s War and Peace and Brett Dean’s Hamlet last season. Whether either will see their way to formal releases remains to be seen.

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BSOrec CD releases. Photo: mine; please contact me to reuse.

Bayerische Staatsoper Recordings (or BSOrec), run in-house, will be the label to make it happen. The independent announced itself in 2021 in a rather unique fashion, not with a splashy opera production but via big symphony – Mahler’s immense Seventh Symphony, to be precise. Captured live in 2018 and led by contemporaneous GMD Petrenko, the recording – and indeed label – generated big buzz across the classical world, with many music writers noting the orchestra’s responsiveness to the material. In a review for Gramophone at its release in 2021, Edward Seckerson wrote that “I really thought I knew this work – every facet of it. But Kirill Petrenko has a way of hearing deep into textures and harmonies that is at times really quite startling. He gives us X-ray ears.” The label quickly followed the Mahler release with a DVD of the acclaimed 2019 staging of Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt featuring tenor Jonas Kaufmann and soprano Marlis Petersen. In his assessment at Adventures In Music, classical blogger Jari Kallio praised Video Director Myriam Hoyer while noting that “the orchestral lines are drawn with acute intensity and tremendous sonic beauty.” In early 2022 the label released a DVD of The Snow Queen by composer Hans Abrahamsen and conducted by Cornelius Meister. Based on a fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen, the presentation features Barbara Hannigan and was recorded in late 2019-early 2020. All three releases went on to achieve significant accolades within the classical world, including four big wins at the 2022 Gramophone Awards. It was the first time in the history of the prestigious British organization that a Recording of the Year was won by an audio-visual title; it was also only the second time an orchestra won both the Orchestral and Opera categories. Quite the achievement for a young label.

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BSOrec DVD releases. Photo: mine; please contact me to reuse.

BSOrec marched on, releasing DVDs of  a combined ensemble production of Stravinsky’s Mavra and Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta (released in 2022) and Andrea Chénier (released last month) again featuring Jonas Kaufmann and led by Marco Armiliato. It’s a curious if inspired selection, with an even more curious choice of design; in place of cover photos is bold silver lettering, with not one name larger than the other, set within sturdy holders, each in solid, rainbow-like colours. The eye-catching design, originally by Mirko Borsch, sends a clear message across both audio and video titles, along with the many thoughtful essays and interviews contained within, the majority penned by talented dramaturg Malte Krasting, who knows a thing or two about the role of context.

The first BSOrec release with current General Music Director Jurowski (from 2022) pairs Brett Dean’s Testament and Beethoven’s Second Symphony, and includes Krasting’s thoughtful interview with the Russian maestro in its liner notes. Releases (all of which enjoy distribution via Naxos) this year have marked the 500th birthday of the Bayerisches Staatsorchester though they also highlight the unique talents of individual sections. Original Grooves by Opercussion, and Voyager by the Munich Opera Horns, both released earlier this year, are a showcase of creative thinking within the recording paradigm. Original Grooves features a creative mix of classical, Latin, and jazz (Bach, Astor Piazzolla, Dizzy Gillespie) in original arrangements by ensemble members. Voyager offers music by Strauss, Dubois, Reicha, and Franz alongside compositions by contemporary composers Urs Vierlinger, Hans-Jürg Sommer, and Konstantia Gourzi. Such interlacing of sounds, with a keen eye on drama, was also realized via the the release of contemporary children’s piece Der Mondbär: Ein Hörspiel mit Musik für Kinder, with music by Richard Whilds/ libretto by Sarah Scherer, and based on the popular German books and animated series. BSOrec’s upcoming audio release is a firm nod to its storied history, if also an ambitious wave to the future. Mendelssohn’s Elias was captured in July 1984 and features a dream team of soloists (Dame Margaret Price, Brigitte Fassbaender, Peter Schreier, Dieter Fischer-Diskau) and choir (Chor des Städtischen Musikvereins zu Düsseldorf), led by celebrated conductor (and former company leader) Wolfgang Sawallisch.

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Conductor and former Bayerische Staatsoper GMD Kent Nagano meets with Bayerisches Staatsorchester in Hamburg September 10, 2023. Photo: Geoffroy Shied

Such an auspicious combination of elements (past/present; theatricality; dramaturgy; passion) could be experienced through recent concerts given as part of the orchestra’s recent European tour, which included stops in London, Paris, and Berlin. Tour repertoire was chosen thoughtfully, a true reflection of not only composer connections to Bayerische Staatsoper (Wagner, Strauss) but to the orchestra’s home city as well (Mahler’s Fourth Symphony was premiered in Munich in late 1901). Past and present mixed in certain programmes, with Ukrainian composer Victoria Vita Poleva’s Symphonie Nr.3 White Internment opening select concerts, and soloists ran the gamut between generations, with violinist Vilde Frang, pianist Yefim Bronfman, and sopranos Louise Alder and Elsa Dreisig. The orchestra’s stop in Hamburg included a visit with conductor and former GMD Kent Nagano; on their home turf in Munich they entertained over 10,000 spectators who had gathered in Marstallplatz as part of an “Oper für Alle” event which featured the music of Schumann and Strauss. Earlier in the month in Lucerne, the orchestra’s performance of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony was interrupted by climate activists whose presence was acknowledged with utmost diplomacy by conductor Jurowski; it was a moment of elegant humanism, a quality deep within the orchestra’s DNA and palpable throughout BSOrec’s output, and its small if highly dedicated team, led by Managing Director Guido Gärtner.

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BSOrec’s Guido Gärtner. Photo: Frank Hanewacker

Gärtner joined the Bayerisches Staatsorchester in 2008 as a violinist, a position he continues concurrent to BSOrec duties. He and I enjoyed a wide-ranging conversation in late summer, which touched on a myriad of topics, including that fashionable thing discussed so often within classical circles now, brand identity. I was also curious to know what advantages perceives Gärtner within the in-house label paradigm – Bayerische Staatsoper certainly isn’t the first big organization to do it (the Berlin Philharmonic is another notable example) but the challenges of the recording industry (and the weight of being 500 years old) are no small thing. What role does (or should) an independent label play in a decidedly difficult classical landscape? How to choose archives? What about new work? Whither relevance (another word so frequently thrown around in the classical world)? And what’s with the BSOrec design? Gärtner has the answers, and then some.

Why have an in-house label?

People might look at the orchestra solely within the context of musical theatre, so for us, being in charge of our own musical well-being, and our own concert performances, is a very strong and vital thing. We don’t just play because it’s fun – that’s a big part – but we want to be seen, and we want people to know what we stand for and why we do what we do. The key is to be accessible and visible; we don’t always travel, but the media travels for us.

With the Mahler 7 release, it was a stunt to start – we are an opera label but we made our introduction with a big symphony. We showed the world that the Bayerisches Staatsorchester is not just an opera orchestra but one of the finest orchestras in the world. By doing that, and doing it successfully, we really made a point, and it worked out really well.

So for the Mahler CD and the Die Tote Stadt DVD we had two real gems, especially with Kirill Petrenko being one of the greatest of his art, and the orchestra under him being on top also. We knew that together there was something worth sharing and exploring. We always aim to show how much is happening in one house, so the recordings recognize the versatility of the orchestra but also the entire system in our house, and how deep and broad it all actually is. We knew from the beginning it wouldn’t be just operas, or just concerts we would release, but everything this house produces, which is why we decided to release ensemble work as well.

Marstallplatz, Munich, Bayerisches Staatsorchester, music, live, outside, classical, Oper fur Alle, Muenchen

Bayerische Staatsoper’s Oper für Alle concert featuring Bayerisches Staatsorchester performing at Munich’s Marstallplatz, September 16, 2023. Photo: Wilfred Hösl

How does that label change or influence your position within the classical ecosystem of Munich?

It’s amazing – we have this relatively small city with this extremely large amount of fantastic musical institutions and ensembles like the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Munich Philharmonic. At the BSO we are always telling a story; I always say, it’s stopping the heart. A C# minor chord is never just a chord but a statement, part of a larger story. That goes for onstage work as much as recordings. What makes the orchestra so special is not that it’s the oldest one in Munich but it’s actually an orchestra whose DNA derives from theatre music: there’s spontaneity; there’s agility. But every orchestra stands for itself, and there’s enough space for all of them, especially in a city like Munich, which has so much music, and more widely in the state of Bavaria. We are very happy where we are. The Bayerisches Staatsorchester is identified as a theatre orchestra, as an opera orchestra, and we’re not trying to get away from that, but the point we’re making is we have even more to offer.

In terms of strategy and artistic development, it’s important to develop this awareness – if you want to survive as an orchestra I think it’s very important everyone knows why you exist. The education programs; the concerts and chamber concerts; the children’s pieces; things done within the community; the recordings: if you have all of these things to offer, it’s difficult to say you’re irrelevant. Relevance is everything to an orchestra.

Relevance seems very connected to BSOrec’s brand – what was the thinking behind its cultivation?

Being your own brand is powerful. Our in-house label gives us the freedom to choose which repertoire we want to release, because we genuinely like it. But more importantly, this choice gives us the possibility to influence how we are being perceived, not only as a label, but also as an artistic institution. As opposed to a major label, in our case the institution and the label are the same brand. That is an absolutely important element that gives us a lot of freedom.

How does this sense of freedom help to attract audiences, especially those new to the art form or those who know you exclusively for opera?

We can show what’s actually in the orchestra –who we are, what we do and where we come from.  We can of course show what incredible musicians we have. There are so many different people with so many different interests and styles. There’s also the possibility for that thing I mentioned before, storytelling: we tell stories about Strauss’s father, who was a horn player; we tell stories about various aspects of contemporary music; we offer tales on new aspects to well-known music that has been here for a long time. The label offers a microscopic view into the orchestra. The first archived recording being released is also a very important block in the overall idea of the label and tells its own story.

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Wolfgang Sawallisch in rehearsal. Photo: Sabine Toepffer

How do you find new approaches for archived recordings?

It’s an interesting question. For this latest release, Mendelssohn’s Elias, the statement is: it isn’t an opera; it isn’t a symphonic work; it’s an oratorio. It shows the versatility of the orchestra but first and foremost it shows the excellence. The cast and the orchestra are a dream team. It’s not that they just convened for this one thing and took off to various places when it was finished; all of these singers were often guests in the National Theatre back in those days. It’s not just one moment in the history of the house but shows the general level that was here in 1984. Also, this piece was premiered for both the Münchner Opernfestspiele and the 88th German Katholikentag (Catholic Convention). It’s music composed by someone with a Jewish background who converted to Protestantism. Sawallisch was also making his own statement on unity and religious beliefs.

When I first listened to the recording, it didn’t take me long to realize this is something we have to publish, because it was a moment, because there was so much energy in the room, and you can really hear it. In so many ways it felt like the perfect way to start the archived releases for the label.

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Conductor and Bayerische Staatsoper GMD Vladimir Jurowski speaks with composer Victoria Vita Poleva before Bayerisches Staatsorchester’s performance in Berlin, September 11, 2023. Photo: Wilfred Hösl

What is the role of new compositions then?

The idea was always to give contemporary music a real platform. We started with Mahler, yes, then released Die Tote Stadt; we knew those two would have momentum and be successful. They would give the label a good entrance into the world and get everyone interested in the next release. The next release after them was a contemporary opera, Hans Abrahamsen’s The Snow Queen, a project not many labels would have taken on. The other thing we released was Beethoven 2 – by the way that was the main piece played in 1811 at the inaugural Akademie concert – and that symphony was combined with a contemporary piece by Brett Dean. His “Testament” relates to the Beethoven immediately and also showcases Vladimir Jurowski’s approach to music and programming, which I find highly interesting.

For the Voyager release there was a contemporary work by Konstantia Gourzi, who wrote it specifically for the Munich Opera Horns. The entire album circles around her “Voyager 2”, which I find very strong, and which was chosen by the musicians themselves, as was the contents on the whole album. We didn’t intervene, because I like to think musicians have fantastic ideas when it comes to this kind of a project.

I like the idea of the Trojan Horse: as was seen with the Beethoven release, it’s good to combine the big great old repertoire with something brave and new, something that speaks to our time, and gets attention because of the combination. It’s an approach Jurowski uses a lot, and it works when you do it well. You have to find a good balance between everything and I’m sure the label will try to keep going in that direction.

To what extent does BSOrec’s package design reflect this balance?

When you see releases from other labels, you see the piece in big letters, or more often these days the singers, and in small letters you see the institution – the house isn’t the main thing. If you put those productions from all these labels in a row, everything looks different and what you recognize is the piece. But if you now put all the BSOrec releases together, it’s very clear which institution is behind it. It’s clear. The idea is, it isn’t about pictures, it’s about institution, and many different repertoire styles; it also signals a certain quality, and a certain idea or concept, all within one house. The door you open to all of that looks the same. I won’t tell you which colours are next – that’s the magic trick! But it’s always nice that people ask about that particular thing.

Interesting the DVD features Jonas Kaufmann and Marlis Petersen in what was a very acclaimed production but their photos aren’t on the cover – that’s a brave choice!

It equalizes. Some love it, some hate it. Whenever you see it it sticks out, and that of course is the oldest trick in the branding book: recognizing a logo or a certain style. And that style has to match the idea, and have the quality of the physical in terms of how the products feel when you touch them. All of this is important, but all of it, entirely, has to precisely match the musical content, the production content, but also, the written content. This is why I’m so grateful to have Malte on the team. The booklet, the music, the style, the sound, the way it feels in your hand – it all has to be one experience and it has to be a fine, subtle, and beautiful combination to give you one beautiful experience.

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Bayerisches Staatsorchester performs under the baton of  Bayerische Staatsoper GMD Vladimir Jurowski in London on September 19, 2023. Photo: Geoffroy Shied

Top photo: Bayerisches Staatsorchester on the stage of the National Theatre, Bayerische Staatsoper. Photo: Nikolaj Lund.
Originally published 9 September 2023.
Edited and republished 23 September 2023.
Christian Immler, opera, singer, performer, artist, vocal, classical

Christian Immler: Balancing New Projects & Old Favorites

Since our last conversation in early 2021, bass baritone Christian Immler has been busy. As was the case with many artists, the bass baritone’s schedule changed dramatically as a result of pandemic-related lockdowns; his approach to music, as you’ll read in our recent conversation below, didn’t change but intensified and expanded, particularly within the realms of score study, synergy with colleagues, and active public engagement.

In December 2022 Immler performed with the Czech Philharmonic and conductor Semyon Bychkov in the lauded world premiere of Prager Symphony, Lyric Fragments after Franz Kafka (Symphony No. 4) by contemporary German composer Detlev Glanert. Based directly on the work of Franz Kafka (including his letters, short stories, novels, and fragments from his notebooks) the work is an immense, daring exploration of the lyric symphonic form, with scoring for orchestra and two voices (bass baritone and mezzo), spread over twelve sections. As the composer told Bachtrack just prior to the premiere, the work is “a psychological landscape, where two people tell us something about ourselves: a story of life from the very beginning to the end, plus all human circumstances you can imagine: being witty, the pain of violence, happiness, and so on.” Prager Symphony will be presented again later this year, with Bychkov and Immler – in June, with the Concertgebouw and Gewandhaus respectively, and the UK premiere happening in November with the BBC Symphony.

Along with learning and performing the Glanert work, the bass baritone also released the album Das heiße Herz (Alpha Classics) with pianist Andreas Frese, featuring the music of Robert Schumann and contemporary German composer Jörg Widmann. Released in mid-2022, the work features songs from Schumann’s 1849 cycle Lieder und Gesänge aus ‘Wilhelm Meister’ (text by Goethe) as well as the composer’s 1850 cycle ‘6 Gedichte von N. Lenau und Requiem’; the world-premiere recording of Widmann’s Heisse Herz (The Burning Heart) comprises the album’s second half, with Immler conveying a stunning (and stunningly controlled) level of musicality, sometimes utilizing sprechstimme to exude the emotional intensity Widmann’s writing necessitates. A review in Opera News early this year (which singled the album out for its monthly Critics Choice designation) noted the degree to which Immler “shows a performance artist’s mastery of the work’s considerable demands, as does the fearless (pianist) Frese, who thunders, tremolos and occasionally slams the keyboard or strums the inside, in addition to playing with great tenderness when called upon.”

Our recent conversation began by my asking Immler about his fascinating forthcoming release (on Alpha Classics) of virtually unknown music by Wilhelm Grosz (1984-1939) and Robert Gund (also spelled Gound; 1865-1927), all set to texts by a range of celebrated European writers, including Eduard Mörike (1804-1875), Joseph von Eichendorff (1788-1857), and Clemens Brentano (1778-1842). The music project sees Immler reunite with pianist Helmut Deutsch, with whom he previously collaborated on a gorgeous 2021 album showcasing the largely unknown music of Hans Gál. The thought of Immler and the pianist reuniting for a project featuring music few know well (or are aware of at all) is a needed bit of hope amidst a still-difficult classical environment.

Immler is just embarking on an extensive Northern European tour, performing the work of another composer whose works he knows well; St. Matthew Passion is being presented by famed Bach conductor Masato Suzuki and the Netherlands Bach Society in twelve different locales between March 25th and April 8th. Before the tour began Immler took time to offer thoughts on everything from covid-related cancellations to the earthy writing of both Bach and contemporary composers. Immler is always inspiring to speak with, whether he’s discussing the finer points of scores, sharing the realities of singing works of rarely-heard composers, or how the simple act of breathing informs and influences musicianship; our recent midwinter exchange was, quite simply, a joy.

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Christian Immler and Helmut Deutsch. Photo: Marcus Boman

How’s your work with Helmut Deutsch coming along?

It’s great! We both love this repertoire. There are cases where something will seem like a good idea and then you work with someone, in a duo, and it’s one person pulling the other – but not with Helmut, not at all. We both pull in one direction. With this repertoire, it is really a total discovery. I’m not unused to reading through unfamiliar repertoire but this time there is the added thrill of manuscripts – that’s all there is  – so we had to transfer them into Sibelius, all these songs composed as lieder. We did a test run for an audience of around ten people, and had to preface it with, “this is most likely the very first performance of this song cycle!”

What has your process been so far?

Helmut has been cursing me – playfully – for introducing him to this repertoire. The Grosz is very difficult to play; there are so many things are happening at the same time in the piano lines, and he says he needs a few more fingers. Nobody realizes how difficult it is, again, because this repertoire is so unknown. We don’t talk very much, a couple of times we verbalize what we want but the rest is push-pull, and listening.

Listening seems vital, whether it’s for a duo project or for larger performances, like Glanert’s Prager Symphony.

A lot of people can listen if they don’t do anything else, but if you have to do your work, playing and singing, and listen at the same time – that’s a special skill set, because you need to do what you do, and intrinsically listen to the other person at the same time. Helmut knows the text, and I know his piano part very well; sometimes I’ll look more down to what he’s doing and not only to my singer’s part. You have to process a lot at the same time. Also, we need to breathe – everybody knows that – but you wouldn’t believe how many conductors ultimately have no idea what that means; Semyon does. He and Helmut both use their breath as a means of expressivity, and it makes all the difference. When they intuitively run out of breath, they renew themselves. So it’s natural, we both do it. If you have well-written repertoire that breath comes very naturally anyway, but if it’s mediocre writing, and the phrases are really long, you think, “okay, I have to take an odd breath here” but it doesn’t usually happen with good composers.

That synergy is interesting given your recent projects use texts by authors who are long dead and/or did not write specifically for singers. 

It is known that Kafka, although he did not have an aversion to music, did not want some of his texts set to music..

… and yet!

… yes, Max Brod didn’t quite comply there! He didn’t burn the papers Kafka had written after his death. Glanert and Widmann have both said that at a certain point, they have to let their work go. Both are very experienced, so it means at one point they realize it’s no longer controlled by them, and they accept performers might have a slightly different viewpoint or approach, and I think there is a wisdom in this. They’re both great at letting things go. Glanert was present during rehearsals with the Czech Phil and took notes, and when there were moments of difficulty, instruments groups were too soft or loud or whatever, he, without running to the stage and making a fuss, would take notes, and Semyon would come and they’d communicate about it. The process was super-fluid in terms of it being a true work-in-progress situation. We didn’t have many rehearsals of that, either.

The subsequent performances of it this year may have more rehearsals, then?

I have a huge advantage now because I know the piece, but for orchestras, it’s different. Mind you, those other orchestras – the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Leipzig Gewandhaus – are super-orchestras, even with their different approaches. And I have to say also: the Czech Phil is stunning, just… top.

To what extent do you think these songs, and Kafka’s texts, have acquired a new relevance?

It’s funny, that work, as well as the songs I’m doing with Helmut and the theme of my doctoral research, it’s all on work done roughly 100 years ago – yet these poems, at this very moment, in my opinion, have an incredible modernity and relevance. You read some of them, and … well, so I read The Guardian in the mornings, and you see these terrible things about the war in Ukraine, and you see these works, and they resonate as a part of our time, right now.

How does this work and the Widmann speak to that time? And how much do you think listening as a result of that time changed?

Both Widmann and Glanert have a lot of experience in the operatic field and a high level of awareness. They won’t waste opportunities in sound; if they want a big turmoil they know how to create it, and likewise they can create the absence of sound and the power of pauses and stillness. They totally understand – it’s quite unsettling in the Glanert, you think, holy! You could hear a needle drop. It only happens if the ear is preconditioned in the writing, and both of them can do this very well.

For me, and so many who experienced an unprecedented level of isolation and loneliness, and a lack of outside distraction if you will, there was a total feeling of insecurity of what is going to happen. Nobody knew. I find in a lot in these poems, especially in the Kafka texts, there is a sense of basically trying to come out of that situation by saying, “Okay, let’s state we are lonely, and the only way we can kind of overcome this is by stating it first of all and being aware of it, and then sticking together.” This first Kafka text, if you read it, it’s so strong, it states: we are lonely yet we are interconnected by a network of invisible threads, and it’s bad enough if they loosen, but it’s terrible if one of them falls. That, to a certain degree, is what we all experienced in early 2020.

But somehow there is a hope through humanity, and that sounds grand, but these songs don’t leave you feeling dark, they leave you with a sense of… hope is not enough… but that there’s a chance for humanity. And it’s an important balance to what I read in the newspaper.

That seems more rooted in reality. 

Yes and I do like that these composers don’t go into the religious sphere or some form of theism, or into any kind of metaphysical sphere at all – everything stays deeply human, earthy and rooted, and thus very approachable. The subtext of them is: you don’t have to be a believer to come out of this darkness.

That’s exactly where they reminded me of Bach, which is perhaps odd…

It’s not odd!

Bach is associated with deep religiosity, but in St. Matthew Passion, for instance, the writing is blood-and-guts human, and it’s the embrace of that messiness which opens the door to the divine. The line between Bach and these modern works is not that long, is it?

It really isn’t It’s funny, I was standing in the Liszt Academy in Budapest recently – which is a total dream building, by the way – I was in a corridor and remembered being there one-and-a-half years ago, being tested with the orchestra, and at 5 in the afternoon the performance was cancelled; the entire bass section had covid. It was like a sudden rain-shower but you don’t know what to do; we are not programmed as artists to know what to do. When I get up on a performance day I am geared to that one thing in the evening when I am meant to deliver. It’s a lot of energy… this very earthy, a very sharply human experience…

How has that time influenced you in terms of singing both contemporary music like Widmann and Baroque?

In terms of the Widmann, it’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever learned, and if you don’t hear that I take it as a compliment. The scoring is very detailed! He is a total musician; he wants to define it as well as possible, but then you have to have it in your system. The actual level of preparation was intense; there is so much information coming your way, you can’t ignore it, and say, “Oh I feel it this way” – that isn’t possible. You have to prepare it to that level of detail and then know it subconsciously. It was an incredible amount of preparation, apart from pitching and rhythm, and the extended vocal techniques; he would write things in the direction like, ‘Dangerously Through Your Teeth’ or ‘Psychedelically Sung’ for certain passages, but it always makes sense. And, this may sound banal, but it could be Widmann or Monteverdi or Bach or Glanert, but look at it and I’ll think, “This is just top-class writing!”

Do you think preparing for something like the Widmann works would have been different in 2019?

I would say no …

So the pandemic didn’t change your approach that much… ?

It changed how people got together, via Zoom or not at all. The loneliness of preparation, overall, was strong for everything. Just after musicians here were allowed to come together again I did the Beethoven/Leonore with René Jacobs, it was just a piano rehearsal with the cast, and everybody started crying. It was such a release of… like, you can practice and vocalize, but it’s a profession which has to be done in community, and with a third ingredient in this: the public. The feeling of being together was unbelievable. For this experience we were grateful to have that return, to know we weren’t alone.

So yes, I stayed faithful to preparing well and being detailed, but, like the first time I sang the St. Matthew Passion, you come out of the pandemic experience a different person, obviously. It changes your whole perception of music and life. You can prepare the piece but the effect it leaves when you present it live… you cannot prepare for that.

Top Photo: Marco Borggreve

Alexander Shelley: ” There’s Difficulty And Challenge Right Now But Also Opportunity”

Alexander Shelley, conductor, maestro, British, culture, music, NACO

Photo: Rémi Thériault

Alexander Shelley marked his birthday this year in the one spot he probably wants to be more than any other: in front of an orchestra. The Music Director of Canada’s National Arts Centre (NAC) Orchestra and Principal Associate Conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra is back rehearsing live, with musicians at Ottawa’s Southam Hall, in preparation for the first in a series of live-streamed concerts starting October 17th. Shelley traveled to Ottawa from his native UK in September, having endured the lockdown, like so many in the music world, worrying, wondering, and willing the return of the live music experience in whatever way possible. He is, like his music world colleagues, cautiously optimistic but also clearly anxious to make (and mark) a Canadian return, in Ottawa and then in Quebec, before conducting duties in Luxembourg later this month. November sees more concerts in Ottawa, as well as a date in Germany with baritone Thomas Hampson and bass baritone Luca Pisaroni in a concert with the Würth Philharmoniker and featuring the music of Mozart, Verdi, Rossini, Richard Rodgers, and Irving Berlin.

This hopscotch of music and travel, while normal for many conductors and certainly noteworthy in the pandemic era, is also something of a strong symbol of Shelley’s wide-ranging, some might argue even daring, musical pursuits. He has led no less than 32 world premieres, a list which is ever-growing, and he is just as comfortable performing jazz and pop sounds as he is musical works firmly within the established classical canon. If anything, Shelley’s aim may well be to widen and expand that canon, and his NAC Orchestra programming for this autumn seems like a good underlining of that intent. The group’s first concert will feature works by Canadian and American composers, including Lyric for Strings by George Walker, the first Black American composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for music; the orchestra’s second concert features works by contemporary composers including Marjan Mzetich, Hannah Kendall, and Jessie Montgomery together with Violet Archer’s 1968 work Sinfonietta and Henri Tomasi’s 1956 work Concerto for trombone (the soloist is Hillary Simms, co-founder of The Canadian Trombone Quartet, the country’s first professional all-female trombone quartet). The creative curiosity which marks so much of Shelley’s artistic output did not come about in a vacuum.  Hailing from a decidedly creative lineage (his father is pianist and conductor Howard Shelley; he was taught piano by his mum and cello by his grandmother), Shelley’s resume is one that is a living embodiment of The Daily Telegraph‘s assertion of him as “a natural communicator both on and off the podium.” In 2005 Shelley thought up the idea for the 440Hz project in Germany, a concert series aimed to attract younger audiences to classical music; the series included various famous figures from the worlds of German stage and screen, including electronic music duo Blank & Jones, pop acapella group Wise Guys, and soprano Marlis Petersen. That same year he took the top prize at the 2005 Leeds Conducting Competition, which formally launched him onto the international stage and led to his leading a number of orchestras including the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Deutsche Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, and the Hong Kong Philharmonic. In 2009 Shelley was named Chief Conductor of the Nürnberger Symphoniker, a position he held until 2017, undertaking numerous tours and recorded live performances during his tenure. His operatic conducting includes leading works by Lehár and Gounod at Royal Danish Opera, Mozart works at Opera North and Opéra national de Montpellier, Puccini at Opera Lyra (Ottawa), and the 1967 Harry Somers opera Louis Riel at both the National Arts Centre and the Canadian Opera Company. In 2014 Shelley worked with violinist Daniel Hope as part of the album Escape To Paradise: The Hollywood Album (Deutsche Grammophon), together with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and the Quintet of the Deutsches Kammerorchester Berlin; the album is an eclectic mix of sounds celebrating composers known for their film scores, including Miklos Rozsa, Erich Korngold, Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Ennio Morricone, and also featured performances by pop star Sting and German crooner Max Raabe.

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Darlings Of The Muses was released in May 2020 by Canadian classical label Analekta.

Named Music Director of the National Arts Centre Orchestra (NACO) in Ottawa in 2015, Shelley’s highly creative programming has integrated the worlds of dance, history, and contemporary music in a fun and lively if equally educational mix. The orchestra’s 2019 tour to parts of Europe, Scandinavia, and the UK featured the work of numerous Canadian composers and artists, and also encompassed localized community events and learning initiatives along the way. In November 2018 the orchestra performed Britten’s War Requiem together with members of the Bundesjugendorchester (the Germany National Youth Orchestra, with whom he has toured) to mark the end of the First World War. Shelley’s award-winning discography with the NAC Orchestra and Canadian independent classical label Analekta features many works by living Canadian composers (including Jocelyn Morlock, John Estacio, Kevin Lau, and Ana Sokolović) alongside works by Dvořák, Ravel, and Rimsky-Korsakov. Shelley and the NAC Orchestra’s latest album is Clara-Robert-Johannes: Darlings Of The Muses (Analekta), released earlier this year. It is the first of four planned albums which aim to explore the creative and intimate connections between Clara Schumann, Robert Schumann, and Johannes Brahms. Along with Schumann’s and Brahms’s First Symphonies is Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor, performed by pianist Gabriela Montero. Gramophone‘s Farach-Colton noted at its release that “there’s an improvisatory quality to Montero’s playing that highlights the music’s florid inventiveness“, which is noteworthy, as it’s a quality that flows through the whole of the album. Montero performs four related (and very beautiful indeed) improvisations based on and inspired by the work of Clara Schumann herself, and it’s these improvisations which cleverly if sensitively bridge the work of Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms, all three  towering figures about whom Shelley himself can speak at length and in great detail, about the smallest details in scoring to broader contemporaneous social concepts, all whilst betraying a clear delight in his subjects and their creative output.

This joyous communicativeness is something that makes Shelley such an engaging maestro and music educator; all the old-school ideas about conductors being cold and heady are swept aside in his friendly, engaging banter. Since the start of his tenure at the NAC he has hosted Shelley Notes, a regular series of engaging concert introductions which contextualize various works performed by the Orchestra. Over the course of the lockdown earlier this year he continued his hosting duties, albeit in altered form, with Musically Speaking, a chat series featuring a variety of figures in and around the classical world; his first guest was violinist James Ehnes, the incoming Artist In Residence with the NAC Orchestra. The conductor and I spoke last month about bringing live music back to a live setting and why that matters, particularly within a North American context, as well as about the wide range of programming the NACO is offering this autumn, and why he feels Gabriela Montero is precisely the right person to appear on the orchestra’s recent Schumann/Brahms album.

Alexander Shelley, conductor, maestro, British, culture, music, NACO, live, performance, orchestra

Photo: Dwayne Johnson

How have you noticed differences, traveling between the UK and Canada, in attitudes toward bringing classical music performance back to the stage?

Last season I did concerts on six continents, which was quite an extraordinary experience, and I got to see how different people think and relate to culture; in each country people have a sense that the way they do it is the norm, and I find the same is true during this pandemic. Reading news from Germany and speaking to friends there, and in Austria, Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia, and North America, is that the way different countries are responding and thinking is very different, but everyone is doing the best thing and the most appropriate thing they feel is necessary. In mainland Europe, concertizing came back quite a few months ago. The only dates that remain in my diary apart from NAC Orchestra ones are in Luxembourg and Germany; the ones in Hong Kong and Australia and London are all gone for the fall, and no one can be sure whether they can get audiences in the hall. They’ve found a way in Germany – they have the (infection) numbers more under control – but other countries in the EU are all approaching it differently. Everybody works differently in responding to the numbers they’re seeing in different cities and towns. But in some places, yes, the performing arts are dying because there’s no performances – there’s no revenues, no turnover for audiences coming in. The Royal Philharmonic is seeping money, and the players don’t have any security or support. The things we take for granted, the great institutions we take for granted like The Royal Phil and other orchestras, may really not survive. There’s a fine line between lobbying for them and their continuance – and related to that, offering audiences that all-important catharsis and a conversation about what it means to live through art – and at the same time respecting the public health guidelines. I’m glad I don’t have to run a country and make these very, very hard choices, where you’re stuck between a wall and a hard place.

But that “hard place” seems to be very slowly softening in places; how much do you think your upcoming dates with the NAC Orchestra might be perceived as a broader symbol for the return of live classical culture in North America?

I think I feel like we have a responsibility as a national organization to be trying to serve our audiences. People need music – it is essential. People need the arts. They’re not some added extra once you have everything else sorted out. Humans have expressed the need for culture through millenia; they speak to needs that transcends language by definition, they reach those place words and even concrete thought can’t reach. It’s sometimes a pure sense of being, as all of us who are involved in the arts are well aware. So on the one hand we feel we have a responsibility to reach audiences and serve them, and at the same time, we are in a position to be able to carry on creating content. During the lockdown our musicians were at home but able to quickly pivot to putting stuff out there, and we had a team who worked with the website and social media. We had the #CanadaPerforms movement which was not just classical but featured all genres, and we had artists across the country with a platform there to perform. It was very important something was coming out, that people could hear and see music being performed live. We need to carry that forward now, and we have ambitious plans for the coming months, because we feel the National Arts Centre needs to be serving the nation in any way we can.

So primarily it’ll be streaming, at least initially, though when I say “primarily” our assumption is the largest number of people we’ll reach is through our streaming, but we will be getting the orchestra back together, we will be back rehearsing soon – we’ve made an important pivot with our work here digitally, but yes, the live experience is vital. I spoke to the Friends of NACO when I arrived back in Ottawa, on Zoom of course, and I pointed something out to them which I think every performing artists is very aware of, which is that our performance is different when there are people there, even if it’s 10 people: you perform differently, the experience is different, the sound is different, the actual product is transformed by the presence of people there, live. It is a communal experience in the deepest sense. And just as with any communal experience, the presence of people who partake in it and care about it changes the actual experience. I said flat-out that it’s not just about having people working back in the hall, which is of course nice and good in an economic sense, but it’s fundamentally important to us to not be performing to an empty space but to take music we perform to a direct and live audience and engage in live feedback from those listeners. And that is of course, one of several things that, even if we’re not aware of it, we miss in the digital realm, that immediate feedback, you can sense it even as a listener if you’re watching a concert on a TV screen or computer or cellphone, whatever, but you know you are not offering that actual feedback as part of a performance, so of course you miss it. And all people can do now is plan, but of course changing circumstances mean we may not, but our plan is to start with 50 guests in the hall and, as quickly as possible, ramp that up, so that over the coming months more and more patrons can join us in the hall, and then, fingers crossed, in the new year, we would hope to start getting back to full numbers, but let’s take it one step at a time.

How does that return to live performance blend with your work as the Music Director?

Ever since I’ve worked with this orchestra, I fell in love not only with the ensemble but this model of a national arts institution; it’s vital to keep asking one’s self not only how we can serve our community in Ottawa but to ask what role a such an organization can play in a national sort of way. You can’t have delusions of grandeur – there are so many other wonderful organizations already in Canada who also engage nationally and internationally – but I do think we can ask if there are gaps we can fill. Within the model of funding – the NAC Orchestra’s funding comes directly from the federal government – we ask, how does one respond to such a responsibility and privilege? In many ways I think of it like public broadcasters; you have, at the core of your responsibility, to do those things which are a harder sell commercially – that’s a privilege as well.

Your latest album is very ambitious – how was it conceived? Did you say, “Right, four albums, everything, all of this, off we go” or was it, “Let’s try this and see where it goes” ?

I think there are a few starting points that coalesced. There are lots of stories in music about composers, and you notice people who’ve watched Amadeus feel they have a connection to Mozart, they feel they know more about his music and life – but those of us in the industry are very aware of these stories, and how some stories are more myths than they are accurate. One particularly fascinating triumvirate for me has always been the relationship between Robert Schumann, his wife Clara, and Johannes Brahms. I think many who explored their music and their lives become fascinated by it. Without a doubt, Robert Schumann and Brahms are more household names now, and one could explore the reasoning for that over the centuries; I’m sure there’s an aspect of gender politics in there, but putting that aside for a second and looking at how they were viewed and thought of in their own lifetimes, Clara was, for the majority of the time in which all of them co-existed, the most famous of the three. She was renowned across Europe as one of the great pianists and one of great improvisers; she was known for her composition as well. So she was the artistic character in that triumvirate, the one the two men looked up to and respected, the one from whom they drew inspiration, and I think that’s a lovely story to remind oneself of. It means when you engage with Schumann or Brahms symphonies you are able to connect through to the woman who inspired them, and who also gave them very important feedback and guided them in many ways on their respective journeys. Now if you bear in mind she also had how many children, and ran the household, this was an extraordinary person, the spirit and the energy and talent it took to do all those things, together with the fact her husband was a brilliant man but he was troubled…

He was ill… 

Yes, very ill, and she managed that too, and then she met this other brilliant man, Brahms, who was taken under Robert’s wings, with whom she had a deep friendship. It’s one of the mysteries of music history, whether their platonic love for one another was ever consummated; for me it’s unimportant, because their friendship was rather transcendental – how they affected one another was transcendental. After Robert passed, Clara’s musical friendship with Brahms, and the influence she had on him creatively, was fundamental to the history of music and to classical music development, so that story is at the heart of why I wanted us to create this set of albums. On the one hand, the Schumann and Brahms symphonies are core repertoire for this orchestra, it’s work that fits our instrumentation like a glove; we’re a small symphony orchestra or a large chamber orchestra if you will, so the music fits with our precise instrumentation. These two sets of symphonies mirror each other nicely as well; written twenty years apart, they are intimately connected by the two men who played off one another, particularly Brahms playing off Schumann. Both were trying to solve a problem: after Beethoven symphonies, when you had artists like Liszt and Wagner going off in one direction, which was very programmatic, how do you continue in that abstract music vein of writing symphonies? They both offered up solutions over the course of these four symphonic works. Also, between Schumann completing his four symphonies and Brahms starting and completing his one four symphonies, the entire (Wagner) Ring Cycle was written; that’s something which is so interesting for setting the scene, particularly for Brahms’s symphonies, because it helps to explain criticism at the time, that they seemed like chamber music, which is an aspect I wanted us to grab and explore in these recordings.

It’s very palpable, that chamber quality– it’s one not always apparent within other performances. The music of Brahms is often presented in this muscular, macho way… 

Two of the reviews, picked up said opening is too fast in Brahms’s First – of course this was a very deliberate choice on my part, there is a tradition of hearing the opening of that symphony as this very heavy, epic, big timpani beat…

Clara Schumann, pianist, composer, musician, German, artist

Clara Schumann (1819-1896) in 1857. Photo: Franz Hanfstaengl / Wikimedia Commons

… which is rather macho  to my ears… 

… like a behemoth! And precisely my reason for setting it in the context of Schumann symphonies and also Clara’s music, which is infused as is Robert’s, with lightness and transparency and with that sonic element of chamber music, is to create context for that intro to the first symphony by Brahms. Yes, it is epic in a sense, because it’s setting the C Minor scene, and just like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony takes us from C Minor to C Major over the course of the symphony – so it’s a big journey. I was hoping listeners would understand the point that he, Brahms, was not coming from the music that was written after him, that great late Romantic music and epic statements; he was coming from Robert Schumann and Clara Schumann, he was coming from that chamber setting, from that sense of every line being equal, and of not wanting to over-egg the Romantic aspect at potentially the cost of the Classical architecture and line.

So I wrote in the notes about it, that it’s a very deliberate choice, and I hope there will be listeners who appreciate this perhaps different perspective. We have lots of recordings where it’s that big epic sound, but there’s also a take on it where it isn’t that – and, at the center of this cycle, is Clara herself. In this first album (of the series), I wanted us to present her biggest orchestral statement, which is also her Concerto statement. It’s the biggest work she wrote for orchestra; she wrote the last movement when she was thirteen years old, and in the years following she filled it out to a three-movement Concerto which she premiered with Mendelssohn conducting and the Leipzig Gewandhaus playing. The idea she was some “lost talent” isn’t true – she was highly respected in her time. Can you imagine a fifteen year-old girl performing, with Mendelsohn, her own Concerto?! That’s the level of appreciation we’re talking about in her time.

Why did you choose Gabriela Montero to play the music of Clara Schumann?

If I think of all the pianists on earth living now, who for me most embody who Clara Schumann was, it’s Gabriela Montero: she is a consummate improviser, she’ a composer, a virtuoso, a mother, she is all the things Clara was and is, and that she was able to join us and interpret this piece, is very special. This all connects back to when things were very different to what they are now in terms of concert performance – it would be completely normal when Clara performed a concert to perform a piece of her own and then do improvisations, and play a piece by Robert, and improvise, and then Mendelsohn, and so on. The same thing applied in big orchestral concerts, so I wanted us to get a sense of that philosophy. I asked Gabriela if she would improvise for us in the spirit of Clara as she feels her, and as you know, Gabriela is one of the great improvisers of our age, so she sat onstage in Southam Hall and improvised for an hour, and we selected a few of those to connect from the Concerto into Brahms’s First Symphony. It’s a proposition which, for many listeners, will be new and different, and is in keeping with the spirit of the age.

Alexander Shelley, conductor, maestro, British, culture, music, NACO

Photo: Rémi Thériault

Your contextualizing makes it approachable but still very intelligent. Speaking of contextualizing music, will you be doing more online artist chats?

Absolutely. We’ve put together what I believe is programming that speaks to the time we’re living through. I think we all watched not only COVID happening but concurrent to that, all the cultural conversations around identity and voice, and it would’ve felt very strange to us, to have come back and just done a Mozart or Beethoven concert without thinking about what responsibilities we have as a national organization. I wanted to program differently, and try to engage with audiences nationally and internationally, so each 90-minute concert will feature two next-generation Canadian artists; they’ve had hurdles put in their way and over the next season or two, it will certainly be more difficult to travel and be seen, and they need to be given opportunities to perform on a big stage and to grow, to be heard. I’ll be speaking with them, or a member of the orchestra may do, so there will be a platform to get to know them. We’re going to feature Canadian and American composers, living and not, with an emphasis on brilliant contemporary music, and still have so-called traditional names, like Mozart and Prokofiev and Chopin, but the focus will be on composers who are perhaps new names to some, but who are brilliant and deserve this platform. It’s been concerning all of us, can big cultural institutions respond to these conversations? And I don’t see why we can’t, or shouldn’t, especially right now. There’s difficulty and challenge right now but also opportunity – even those people who didn’t realize how much they needed live music now realize how important it is in life.

Cornelius Meister: On Curiosity, Collaboration, And What His Father Taught Him

conductor Meister German baton hands music culture expression maestro

Photo: Marco Borggreve

Looking at Cornelius Meister’s calendar inspires a mix of wonder and exhaustion.

The German conductor, who is Music Director of the Staatsoper und Staatsorchester Stuttgart, is currently in New York City, leading performances of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro at the Metropolitan Opera until February 22nd. From there, he jets off to Tokyo to lead the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra (of which he is Principal Guest Conductor) before playing with various orchestras in France, Germany, and Austria. A return to Stuttgart comes the end of April; Meister will conduct a series of concerts and also conduct a revival of Tristan und Isolde, where he’ll be leading soprano Catherine Naglestad in her role debut as the doomed Irish princess. May brings a production of Strauss’s Arabella in Vienna, and the summer features a busy mix of concerts and opera back in Stuttgart. All this activity doesn’t even touch Meister’s extensive discography, many of them done when he was Chief Conductor and Artistic Director with the Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien (ORF) between 2010 and 2018.

Meister, whose father was a professor at Musikhochschule Hannover and whose mother is a piano teacher, started out in 2003 as Second Kappellmeister with Staatsoper Hannover (his hometown), before becoming Music Director of the Theatre and Philharmonic Orchestra of Heidelberg, where he stayed for seven years, until 2012. His recordings (of Brahms, Haydn, Dvořák, Mozart, Wagner, Bartók, Zemlinsky, and particularly Bruckner) and live work (a comprehensive A to Z listing on his website includes, among the very many, Beethoven, Lehár, Gershwin, Mahler, Boulez, Nono, Stravinsky, Webern, and Zender) reflect an insatiable musical appetite, one that seems to grow with each new orchestra and experience, whether orchestral or operatic. Meister’s tenure at Oper Stuttgart began in 2018, having already conducted at numerous prestigious houses, including Oper Zürich, Teatro Alla Scala Milan, Semperoper Dresden, and Wiener Staatsoper, and festivals including those at Glyndebourne, Salzburg, and in Bucharest, at the biennial Enescu Festival.

All this activity isn’t exactly unusual for a successful artist within the classical sphere, but the breadth and range of Meister’s musical curiosity is as enlightening as it is exhilarating. I became much better acquainted with the symphonies of Bohuslav Martinů thanks to a truly brilliant 2017 recording (Capriccio Records) of the Czech composer’s complete symphonies. Recorded with the ORF between 2011 and 2017, the mammoth album (spread across three CDs) is a gorgeous lesson for both newbies and Martinů connoisseurs alike, revealing Meister’s focus on maintaining keen balances between individual voices within the rich orchestral tapestries, while emphasizing their unique tonal and structural paths and underpinnings. At its release, music writer Michael Cookson noted that “Meister palpably generates considerable tension in his readings and the playing, full of rhythmic energy, is never less than steadfast, whilst shaping phrases that give consideration to every nuance.”

His 2014 album of the music of Wagner (Capriccio Records), again with the ORF and featuring soprano Anne Schwanewilms, performing the beloved Wesendonck Lieder and and Elisabeth’s Aria from Tannhäuser, is a sumptuous mix of big and small; Wagner’s sweepingly broad overture to Tannhäuser is here given loving pockets of quietude, with rippling strings that glint softly, shimmering against woodwinds and brass, Meister’s watchful tempi and textural swells throughout the album underline the music’s connection to a broader scope of musical history, both backward-looking (Beethoven) and anticipatory (again, Martinů, which would make sense given the album’s timing). Meister and I recently spoke amidst performances of Nozze at The Met; I asked the busy father of three how he kept up such a hectic pace, before moving into musical, and, as you’ll read, dramatic (and even balletic) matters.

figaro opera performance Mozart Met opera Metropolitan NYC Meister production stage kiss couple

Adam Plachetka as Figaro and Hanna-Elisabeth Müller as Susanna in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Nozze.” Photo: Marty Sohl/The Metropolitan Opera

You have a lot of diversified engagements – how do you keep your energy and inspiration?

I have a family, and I must say, I love music and opera of course but it is not everything in my life. And without my family, I think I couldn’t do everything.

Many artists say that family provides the balance amidst the chaos.

Yes. I’m very happy to be born not ten or twenty years earlier, because nowadays it is so much easier to call each other from another continent or city, and to take fast trains and such. We didn’t have these things even fifty years ago; now it’s much easier to keep in touch.

The houses that you perform in (Stuttgart, Zürich, Vienna, New York) are all so different; how do you create intimacy within each space?

When I’m conducting, let’s say an opera by Mozart, it matters a lot which room I’m performing it in regarding the acoustics. In Germany there are a lot of ensembles, so between thirty and forty singers who work regularly; that means sometimes we prepare role debuts together, one year ahead or even more. Last season in Stuttgart, we did Ariadne Auf Naxos and we had a wonderful mezzo soprano who is now in our ensemble, and she prepared it more than one year in advance – this is only possible in houses with an ensemble. 

On the other hand, here at The Met I have the privilege to work with many singers who have done their roles in various productions at several great opera houses, so this makes it easier in another aspect, I would say – their acoustic awareness could start on the highest level, and the beauty for me, as a conductor, is then to bring all these different experiences together to create a production ensemble.

conductor Cornelius Meister German music culture expression maestro

Photo: Marco Borggreve

You said in a 2019 interview that conducting is about making music together – how does that relate to the inherent power dynamics of being a conductor? How do you balance the power aspect with the collaborative aspect?

On the one hand, of course it is true that a conductor can decide a lot, but on the other hand, I’m the only person in the room who doesn’t play any tune or make the music by himself, so I can’t do anything without having everybody on the same side. I would say my job is to encourage everybody to be brilliant, and confident, and bring together all the different possibilities and traditions and experiences everybody has. And in houses like the Metropolitan Opera, where everybody in the orchestra has played these operas a lot, with many different conductors, it’s not a question of, “How we do it?”, it’s more a question of how we all can do it in the same style, and how we can bring it all together. This is a task I like very much. I also like to be flexible when I conduct the same opera in Vienna and New York – the result is, of course, very different; it’s still my Mozart, for example, but there is not just one Mozart which is my Mozart.

Would you say that flexibility is the key to authority in your position?

In a way, yes, but I would also say that it is really necessary to have some strong ideas of what I want – having something I really like and really want with music, and being flexible to bring everybody to that result. 

That must be especially true when you move between so many different orchestras as you are about to do, post-Nozze. Where does flexibility fit within your experiences between different ensembles, especially ones you have such a short amount of time with?

I always try to use the tradition an orchestra has – so the Viennese tradition, or maybe the Dresden Staatskapelle tradition, for example – those traditions are really old, and I adore them, and I always make a point to ask members of the orchestra how are they used to playing this or that. When I’m in Vienna I spend hours and hours in the library to research information which is hand-written into the orchestra parts, hand-written from the time when Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler conducted there. I wouldn’t think that us younger conductors should always start at point zero; we should use that tradition, we can learn from it. In Stuttgart we are using the original harmonium used at the Ariadne world premiere – the first version of the opera was performed in Stuttgart in 1912, just two months after the opening of the opera house, with this very harmonium. 

Oper Zürich Monika Rittershaus Meister Serebrennikov production stage culture opera classical Switzerland

Oper Zürich’s 2018 production of Così fan tutte. Photo © Monika Rittershaus

Where does that sense of tradition fit when you are working on a new production? You had an special situation in Zürich in 2018 with a new production of Così fan tutte, and you also led a new work, The Snow Queen, in Munich in 2019. 

in Zürich the situation was that we didn’t have the director face-to-face – we were in close contact. So every morning we got a new video message from Kirill Serebrennikov; there was contact and he had brilliant assistants in Zürich, but for me as a conductor, the face-to face exchange is really important when preparing a new opera production. When I’m conducting opera, I’m not only a musician; I try to be a theatre person also, and I need a sense of every aspect of the drama. The first and most important question, always, is not, “how can we play the music?” but “how can we create that emotion, that dramatic situation?’ In order to create that situation you have several possibilities; there are scenic possibilities and musical possibilities, but these are, for me, totally secondary. The first question has to relate to the drama. And if I don’t have a partner to whom I can say something and to which he can react – not only by email or whatever – then it isn’t so easy! In the end (for Così fan tutte) of course I was very happy we did it, and it was very important, I think, to do that in Zürich.

In Munich the situation was completely different because there the piece (directed by Andreas Kriegenburg) had already been performed in Copenhagen some months before, so it was already set, on a certain level. Rachel Wilson, who is from Texas and is in the ensemble in Stuttgart now, sang the main mezzo role (Kay) in The Snow Queen, and she was really well-prepared coming in, so it was quite easy. 

The Snow Queen Bayerische Staatsoper Abrahamsen Wilfried Hösl antlers mythology opera classical stage performance presentation live music

The Snow Queen at Bayerische Staatsoper in 2019. Photo © Wilfried Hösl

When you perform symphonic works by the likes of Martinů and Bruckner, and then go back to the opera house and do Wagner and Mozart, what things do you take with you between the two worlds?

I always appreciate it when orchestras who play symphonic music are also experienced in accompanying singers. In my opinion, a violin group who is used to listening to a singer in the opera is also very flexible and fast in listening to a solo oboe, for example, in a symphony. On the other hand, I appreciate it a lot when orchestras which are playing normally a lot of opera are also used to, in some situations, sitting on the stage and creating something unique for one or two or three performances. From one world I try to take the best and then bring it to the other world, and of course, some composers, like Mahler and Schumann and Brahms, wrote very opera-type things, and it’s good to have those works be performed also, because for me there is not such a big difference between theatrical music and other music.

When we have the Third Symphony of Bruckner, for example, with its quotations of Wagner in its first edition, this is a good example for that close relationship between those worlds, but I know there are many conductors who are conducting either operas or symphonic music. Others do mostly oratorios and choir music. I respect that, because I think (the music) needs different techniques, conducting techniques, and people to conduct different styles, but I always try to learn as much as I can from all these works. I have also conducted oratorios and ballets during my Kapellmeister time years ago, and sometimes I would conduct silent movies too.

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Photo: Marco Borggreve

What did you learn conducting ballet?

A ballet dancer needs certain tempos as a singer would need. I, as a musician, hopefully can sense if a singer needs a certain tempo. When is started to conduct ballets, it was much more difficult for me to feel that sense of which was the right tempo for him or her, and sometimes we had different ballet dancers on stage who needed different tempi. After some experiences it was easier for me to see and to feel how movement onstage is related to music tempi, and this helps now, a lot, when I’m conducting operas – not only to listen, but also to watch which is the right tempo for an action or movement onstage.

This relates to what I said earlier, that for me, music is a part of a larger theatrical performance. I had an experience eleven years ago when I conducted The Abduction From The Seraglio at the San Francisco Opera, my first opera experience in the United States (in 2009). I had conducted it before in Germany. I took approximately the same tempo which I had taken before, but with this production in San Francisco, it didn’t work. I had to take a different musical tempo and then it worked within a scenic sense, not only for the action but for the atmosphere onstage. I changed my musical approach, quite happily.

You took lessons with your father – how much do you think this quality of openness relate to that time?

He and I spent so many hours playing piano together, four hands style. We would go through and play all the Beethoven works, and all the Bruckner symphonies. He was never a conductor, but he was really interested in everything, not only piano music, but also he had a great knowledge about history and culture in general. So through this approach I learned to always be open to the world, and to be interested in different sounds, and in people from different nations and people with different ideas of the world. This was my education, and I am really glad for that.

That curiosity is apparent from the wide repertoire list at your website, which includes the work of Claude Vivier. 

For me there has never been a difference between old and contemporary music, because this is the music I’m interested in, and there’s music I may be, at the moment, not so much interested in, but it doesn’t matter which year it’s from. When I was with the ORF it was totally normal to play all different types of music. When we started to rehearse a piece which none of us had performed before, we didn’t ask if this is a good piece or not, because we always started, and after some days, then maybe we started to think something, not as a absolute judgement, but  maybe we allowed ourselves to say, “Okay, I like this or that” but never on the first day. We would never be so self-confident to judge music on the first look of it. 

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Tristan und Isolde, Oper Stuttgart. The production, from the team of Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito, was first presented in 2014. Photo © A.T. Schaefer

Do you think that approach could apply to audiences hearing things for the first time?

I’m not in the position, or I would not like to be in the position, to give advice to audiences, because I respect there are many, many different reasons why a person likes to go to a concert or opera. I respect that the reason could be just to have a wonderful evening, enjoy a glass of champagne at intermission and to relax, not to think too much. This is a good reason. There’s another good reason for people who maybe prepare their opera visits a week before, and they read many books about it, and then they really want to have a strong production, strong Regie, so that they can think about it for the next week, and maybe they wouldn’t understand everything and they like not to understand everything but want to come back three times to get it. Once again, I wouldn’t think I should give advice on how an audience should deal with a performance visit, but I respect that there are different reasons, good reasons.

So just come with an open mind….?

Being open-minded, always, is not a bad idea! What I really ask everybody is not to open the mouth before having thought something out – this is the general advice, for music and for life.

Vasily Petrenko: Paying Attention To Details

Vasily Petrenko conductor culture classical music Russian Met opera debut

Photo: CF Wesenberg

The last time Vasily Petrenko and I spoke was in a windowless room full of whirling fans. There’s still a feeling of summer in September in Bucharest, and this year’s heat was particularly intense; I was worried conditions in the Sala Palatului conference room would prove a bit too warm for a conversation about the music of Enescu, Bartók, and Torvund.

The busy conductor, a native of Saint Petersburg, was in town for two concerts as part of the hectic Enescu Festival with his Oslo Philharmonic, of which he is Chief Conductor. (My report on the festival featuring said interview is publishing in the upcoming winter edition of Opera Canada magazine.) Despite the heat, Petrenko was his lovely, chatty self, full of insights, observations, and charming stories. His concerts, with soloists Leif Ove Andsnes and Johannes Moser, respectively, were met with outpourings of loud cheers and happy shrieks, to which he jovially responded with a broad smile, playfully encouraging gestures (one hand, then another, on ears with matching eyebrow waggles and forward-leans), and energetically performed encores.

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At the Enescu Festival, September 2019. Photo: Andrei Gindac

That joviality was revealed again in a more recent conversation, this time over the telephone, with a bit of tags-and-snags at the start. “It’s a big building!” Petrenko exclaimed about the Metropolitan Opera, where he’s making his company debut leading a revival of Tchaikovsky’s Pique Dame (also known as The Queen of Spades), featuring Yusif Ayvazov as the tormented Hermann and Lise Davidsen (also making her Met debut) as Lisa, in a 1995 production by Elijah Moshinsky. Based on the Pushkin novel, the work is set in Saint Petersburg and is a haunting love-gone-awry tale with strong elements of the supernatural, the sadistic, and the spiritual. The production opens tonight (November 29th) and will be broadcast live on Met Opera Radio on SiriusXM as well as streamed at the Met Opera’s website.

Petrenko is making his Metropolitan Opera debut amidst a raft of conducting duties. As well as being Chief Conductor with the Oslo Philharmonic, he is also Chief Conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and European Union Youth Orchestras, and Principal Guest Conductor, State Academic Symphony Orchestra of Russia (“Evgeny Svetlanov”). As of 2021, he becomes Music Director of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and has big plans for presenting the work of Mahler. His latest albums including a beautiful, sensitive recording of Beethoven’s First and Second Piano Concertos with pianist Boris Giltburg and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic (Naxos), and another (again with the RLPO) featuring the music of Kabalevsky, Khachaturian, Shchedrin, Mussorgsky, and Rachmaninoff (Onyx).

These are part of a vast discography comprised of  Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Strauss, Liszt, Szymanowski, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, Scriabin, and more; when I interviewed Petrenko this past spring following the announcement of his Royal Philharmonic appointment, I swooned over the awesome beauty of his Elgar interpretation, writing the recordings “brim a lively, warm energy, a keen forward momentum, effervescent textures and poetic nuance, underlining the joy, drama and humanity so central to Elgar’s canon.” That humanity is so palpable experiencing Petrenko live. It’s hard to overstate the warmth he brings to even the most brutal of scores, an innate beauty which allows the listener to experience deeper, more vivid shades and textures. Much of that comes down to a detailed approach, something Petrenko emphasized in this, our latest conversation, with him happily chatting for thirty minutes between rehearsal sessions at the Met.

Petrenko’s current experience in the Big Apple has not been without surprises. The Queen of Spades, meant to have been his New York debut, was temporarily placed to the side when Petrenko stepped in at the very last moment earlier this month to replace Mariss Jansons on the podium on what turned out to be the final stop on the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (BRSO) tour. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practise, timing, and as it turns out, knowing Shostakovich Symphony No. 10 very, very well. Critics were effusive in their praise of the concert, with Musical America hailing Petrenko’s “palpable sense of musical storytelling” and noting his “hard-driven approach… added a welcome edge of hysteria to the suspiciously sugary main theme. A willingness throughout his reading to explore ambiguities often hiding in plain sight gave the rush to the finish a quality that was both exhilarating and appropriately double-faced.” The praise, however, doesn’t feed in to pressure, because as Petrenko explains, that feeling comes from a different and far more personal place. I’ll let him explain.

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Mariss Jansons. Photo: Martin Walz (via Berliner Philharmoniker)

Update: Maestro Mariss Jansons passed away on November 30th, 2019, one day after this feature was posted. On his Facebook page, Petrenko wrote about his experience with the famed Latvian conductor:

I have always felt like I am walking a little in some of the footsteps of Mariss Jansons: most tangibly in the personal and artistic footprints he left with his long and illustrious tenure at the Oslo-Filharmonien, where it is such an honour to be his successor, but he has been a defining and deeply beloved presence from my earliest days, attending his rehearsals and masterclasses in St Petersburg, and through his legacy of concerts, recordings, lessons and advice, that have always been a touchstone for me. Thank you, dear Maestro, for all you’ve given to us, for your smile, generosity and warmth, and for simply bringing all of your heart into our musical world. It was a joy to be able to make music last week with your wonderful colleagues in the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, although those circumstances are now framed with such sadness. You will always be alive in our memories, in our souls and in our performances.

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Larissa Diadkova as the Countess in The Queen of Spades. Photo: Ken Howard / Met Opera

How are rehearsals for The Queen Of Spades going?

We just finished one rehearsal and ready for another in forty-five minutes. It’s a lot of work as always and especially for the last ten days for so before the first night, so we’re all working hard at the moment.

And you were at Carnegie Hall too!

(Laughs) I was there yesterday just to listen… 

How did it happen that you stepped in for Mariss Jansons? You studied under him at one point, yes?

I grew up attending his rehearsals and concerts with the Leningrad Philharmonic, and later in the Conservatory I had Master Classes with him. I wouldn’t say we’re friends – there’s a big age gap between us and he’s from a different generation – but we spoke with each other several times and in some ways I’m following his path in Oslo, with the Philharmonic there.

What happened here is that after rehearsals here at the Met one day I came home, and had a phone call about midnight actually, asking if I could be available for the next day’s concert at Carnegie Hall. I said it would be my greatest honour to save the concert and to help with Mariss if he will not be able to conduct for the next day. They didn’t change the program, and luckily I know all the pieces very well – I had performed them many, many times – so it was a case of, let’s see what tomorrow brings and in the morning we’ll have a decision. So the next day I went to the Pique Dame rehearsals at the Met in the morning, and during that time I was brought the scores for the BRSO concert, and after that there was a forty-five-minute rehearsal with the (BRSO) in the evening, and then the concert. They are a great band, an incredible orchestra with a lot of incredible soloists – one of the top bands in the world – and, to their credit, they are also very flexible. I haven’t heard how Mariss interprets Shostakovich 10 with them so I guess I was doing it slightly different than he had done it on tour, but for orchestra to be able to follow with different interpretation almost without any rehearsal…  huge kudos to them. The chemistry happened very quickly between me and the orchestra. I think part of it is because there was no other option! It was a great pleasure to be stage and it was a good concert, and it was a good party after the concert! They’d had the last concert on their autumn tour and were departing back home.

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At Carnegie Hall, November 2019. Photo: Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra

So you got a direct taste of New York audiences through this.

It was a very warm audience, with a lot of cheering and applause. I visited Geffen Hall for a concert with the New York Philharmonic, in which Esa Pekka (Salonen) was conducting the other week, and I’ve seen things here in the Met too, and you always sense a lot of excitement with audiences and a lot of openness and cheering, which is always very nice for the artists.

How much of that creates pressure creatively?

I think talking about pressure… to me honestly, the pressure is always only about myself, it’s only about doing better than the last performance. It’s a sort of perfectionist pressure which I always have in my veins, and which I always feel in that sense.

So how does that translate into a house like the Met? 

It’s one of the largest opera houses in the world, and we are trying to do our best, listening to several performances of operas over the past few weeks. I’m also figuring out how to do things in the pit while balancing onstage action to allow the soloists and music to sound natural in such a big place.

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A scene from Act II of The Queen of Spades. Photo: Ken Howard / Met Opera

You have an interesting personal history with this opera.

I was in it as a boy in the 1980s, as a member of the famous production at the Kirov Opera, because I studied at this special boys school, and several students from there were usually in this production as a choir, so I was one of the boys singing. There are a lot of memories. Later I did a production at the Maly, one of my first revivals was actually was at the Maly Opera Theatre, now the Mikhailovsky in Saint Petersburg, when I was working there; then I did a revival in Hamburg, so (Pique Dame) has been with me throughout my life. I think it’s one of the greatest operas ever written. It has so much meaning and passion, so much philosophical subtext. If you read the Pushkin novel, that’s one of the most incredibly written, equilibristic pieces of literature; it’s compact, it has all these E.T.A Hoffman-meets-Mephistopheles elements in it, and the history and the language, as well as the symbolic things, are absolutely incredible. Very few pieces of Russian literature within the short novel genre surpass this one by Pushkin.

How do you express all that in a production that is so well-known?

There’s always a place for some mystery and symbolism – the Countess breaking through the floor in the scene with Hermann, that’s a moment! Is it his vision? Is it real? When she appears at the end with the gambling scene, is it his vision? What happened with Lisa? There’s plenty of questions you have to answer for yourself. What is the main intention of Hermann? Is it cards alone or related to self-establishment? He’s a German person who lives in Russia in a very different society and deliberately decided to live there, even though it’s not the most happy life in the beginning, and where it leads him… there’s plenty of angles in this opera, and working with soloists and talking about all of this, with sections, and trying to find the right colors in the orchestration and the right balance in the orchestra itself, it’s one of the processes we’re in now.

Vasily Petrenko conductor culture classical music Russian Met opera debut

Photo: CF Wesenberg

How has your understanding changed, especially in light of your symphonic work?

Quite often people ask me what’s different between orchestral and opera conducting, and I think a while ago I found a good image, which is quite true: when you conduct an orchestra it’s driving a car; when you conduct opera, it’s driving a truck or big van. On one hand, driving a car is more manoeuvrable, also you all enjoy company of yourself and you’re not caring so much about certain aspects – you can do what you want, and quickly. When you drive a truck you should be aware of all the movements – the time and response of this big vehicle are paramount – but on the other hand, you can bring many more goods to the people. 

But you have to be more careful about delivering them.

It’s different, because opera has many more people involved, rather than in symphonic concerts. However, the principles are the same. Even in very loud moments, you have to be aware of the transparency of what the composer has written, and you must pay very big attention to all the details the composer put in the score, either in a symphony or opera, and then there is also that something which is beyond the notes: what is most important? What is this music written for? What are the emotions? The philosophic concepts? What is the impact on the audience? It’s not just quavers and semiquavers and quarter notes, it’s moving beyond that. We’re going this direction in both opera and symphony. And of course, when you work in opera, you aim to be careful of the balance between orchestra and soloists and choir. This production has such an incredible cast, each one is outstanding. I’m very lucky to have all of them onstage, and a great chorus too – they’re doing a very good job. I think we have one live broadcast too!

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Lise Davidsen as Lisa and Yusif Eyvazov as Hermann in The Queen of Spades. Photo: Ken Howard / Met Opera

So perhaps just a bit of pressure for that live broadcast… ?

I don’t feel pressure about that, really. Again, I’m more thinking about how musically it will all go together, and how I can deliver, how things can gel together – all the soloists, all the orchestra, and all the technicians. There’s a number of scenic effects, some moments when you have to wait or slow down the pace just to achieve the synchronicity between staging and music. It’s a classy production, I’d say. Saint Petersburg is one of the classiest cities in the world for its architecture, especially the Winter Palace – there’s no comparison to it around the world, it’s a unique creation of Peter The Great – so it’s the same feeling in a classy production. There are plenty of details but none of them is not necessary, all of them are very logical and in exactly the right places. 

Do you match that or build on it?

Both. In some places you have to match that, especially in a place where there’s big moving pieces onstage, you have to pace the music so it synchronizes with closings or openings of certain things at some points, on top of all the classical details. I’m adding articulations, for example in the Pastoral, which is written in the way going back into, not Baroque music, but earlier than Mozart; at the same time it’s music-making by Lisa and Pauline, who are playing these Mozart-type arias at home, so for that, there has to be, from the orchestra, this way of playing “a la Mozart” in some ways in terms of style. On the other hand, you still need the feeling they’re trying hard but not professional musicians, as they are not in the libretto; they are, in the tradition of aristocracy, learning music for entertainment, so on top of this classical scene, it’s figuring out how to enrich and give to the audience this understanding of a whole type of music-making within the scene.

How much is your approach influenced by your recordings?

Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 1 is one of the most close to Mendelssohn and his territory – Pique Dame has this, a little bit lighter approach into the orchestration in general. During the recording cycle of the (Tchaikovsky symphonies) 4, 5, and 6 a few years ago I said to the orchestra, “Please, let’s not think of him only as this emotional, hysterical type – think about him as a man who spent actually at least three to four months outside of Russia, mainly in Italy, but also Austria, Germany, France – he opened Carnegie Hall!” He was a man traveling a lot and absorbing a lot of principles of other composers. And also there’s a lot of a German way of orchestrating in the symphonies and in Pique Dame. He used all the principles of orchestration of the time, he attended Wagner operas, he was a man who knew so much about the world tradition and that’s what makes him so unique; he had a pure Russian soul and a German way of orchestration, and that’s what I’m trying for in the symphonies, and in some places in Pique Dame

Too often Tchaikovsky’s music is presented in just one way. 

I think you can always find something new, even in the most played and performed score. I’m always trying to find the details, and get from the orchestra and singers something written in the score but probably obscured during tradition, because it is there you get to be very authentic. The devil is in the details, as they say. 

Especially in this opera!

So true!

Will this lead to more opera for you then? 

I hope to do more opera in the future than I was doing recently; I hadn’t done it simply because I was so busy with so many orchestras, but I hope for more productions in more houses.

And in-concert presentations also?

In-concert yes, we are planning a few things for 2020-2021… there are a few things, even some less-frequently performed operas but still great operas which are cooking at the moment. Stay tuned! 

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Jurowski, conductor, Michail Jurowski, maestro, Russian, Ukrainian, history, portrait

Conductor Michail Jurowski: “Music Is An Abstract Art”

First, the obvious: yes, Michail Jurowski is the father of conductors Vladimir and Dmitri, and vocal coach and pianist Maria. He comes from a long line of musical talent: his own father, Vladimir Jurowski (1915-1948) was a conductor and composer, and his grandfather, David Blok (1888-1948), was a conductor, film composer, and the first head of the State Orchestra of the USSR Ministry of Cinematography. Both Jurowski and his sons have conducted the work of his father (whom his first-born son was named after), including the sumptuous ballet suite Scarlet Sails (1942), based on the 1923 Alexander Grin novel of the same name.

There are many memories one may hold dear with relation to a particular recording; some of my fondest are tied to Michail Jurowski’s 2017 recording of Moses, by pianist-conductor-composer Anton Rubinstein (1829-1894). Constructed around eight scenes and based on episodes from the biblical book of Exodus, Rubinstein composed the piece between 1884 and 1891, using a libretto by Salomon Hermann Mosenthal. The vocal work (or “geistliche Oper” – sacred opera – a term Rubinstein coined himself) follows the biblical story of the prophet Moses from his childhood through to being given the Ten Commandments and handing authority to Joshua. It is long (over three hours), but it is fascinating, a deeply evocative aural journey, with an abundance of rich vocal writing weaved throughout a plush neo-Romantic score. Sonically familiar, and yet not, and filled with paradox: epic and yet intimate; religiously specific and yet totally secular, its writing is immediate and yet over-arching, broad, a strangely symbolic expression of the human relation to the divine, one that is graspable and yet distant, personal and yet universal. There are clear musical references backwards (to works by Balakirev and Mussorgsky), forwards (Zemlinsky and Henze), and mostly near-contemporaneous, with the sounds of Wagner, and more specifically, the writing of Tannhäuser (1845) and Lohengrin (1850) given clear nods.

With such a rich integration of sounds, a dense score, and its need for a very large orchestra, the work was never presented during Rubinstein’s lifetime, or for a long period thereafter. A planned presentation in Prague in 1892 fell through when the theatre (then Neues Deutsches Theater; later Státní Opera) went bankrupt; public taste had shifted too, and Rubinstein’s passing in 1894 left the work in relative obscurity – until the efforts of Russian conductor Michail Jurowski, who spent years undertaking careful research and restoration of the score. Moses was given its world premiere in Warsaw in October 2017, with the Polish Sinfonia Juventus, the Warsaw Philharmonic, and Artos Children’s choirs. Featuring a stellar cast (including tenor Torsten Kerl, sopranos Chen Reiss and Evelina Dobraceva, and baritone Stanislaw Kuflyuk  in the title role), the recording (released via Warner Classics) is as much a distillation of late-19th century musical thought as a call for broader contemplation; here the creative is personal, and the personal is certainly creative. Jurowski’s refined management of these immense orchestral forces feels intimate, as if he’s talking to the divine himself, whether through voices or violins; such an approach underlines the epic yet intimate writing, and acts as a powerful symbol bridging sound and spirit.

Such creative integration is what Michail Jurowski (b. 1945) excels at, a gift discovered early on, and shown through numerous recordings and live performances. Having studied conducting in his native Moscow under conductor Leo Ginsburg and musicologist Alexey Kandinsky, Jurowski went on to assist the legendary maestro Gennady Rozhdestvensky at the National Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra of Moscow, and conducted regularly at Stanislavsky Theatre and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Academic Music Theatre, and began conducting at the Komische Oper Berlin (then in East Berlin) in 1978. In 1989 he accepted a permanent post with the Dresden Semperoper, departing the Soviet Union shortly thereafter to live permanently in Germany. Since then, he has held numerous positions, including Chief Conductor of Leipzig Opera, Principal Conductor of Deutsche Oper Berlin, General Music Director and Chief Conductor of the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie, and Chief Conductor of WDR Funkhausorchester Köln. Between 1998 and 2006 Jurowski was Principal Guest Conductor of the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin. He has also made numerous guest appearances with orchestras around the world, including the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Dresden Staatskapelle, the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, the Oslo Philharmonic, the Bergen Philharmonic, MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra, Königlichen Kapelle Copenhagen, the Buenos Aires Philharmonic, Orquestra Sinfónica do Porta Casa da Música, the São Paulo Symphony, Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and has led a myriad of opera productions and ballets in many prestigious houses, including Teatro alla Scala, Bayerische Staatsoper, the Bolshoi, Opernhaus Zürich, and Malmö Opera. He has also led televised concerts and radio recordings in Oslo, Norrköping, Berlin, Stuttgart, Cologne, Dresden, and Hannover, and won the German Record Critics’ Prize in both 1992 and 1996; five years later, maestro received a Grammy nomination for his recording of orchestral works by Rimsky-Korsakov done with the RSB. In 2018 he was a recipient of the Accademia Internazionale “Le Muse” award, presented in Florence, recognizing his significant contributions to culture.

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Photo: T. Müller

Jurowski made his long-awaited North American debut in May 2019, leading the historic Cleveland Orchestra in a programme featuring the music of Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich; the concert was met with great success, and, as you’ll read, meant a great deal personally to the maestro. More recently Jurowski completed a series of concerts in Sweden, opening the season of the Norrköpings Symfoniorkester, with whom he has enjoyed a long and happy working relationship; the well-received concert featured works by Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and the world premiere of a new double concerto for violin and cello by Russian composer Elena Firsova, a performance which featured violinist Vadim Gluzman and cellist Johannes Moser as its soloists.

Norrköpings and Jurowski have numerous live performances and impressive recordings in their shared history including a 2015 release (via cpo) of Vladimir Jurowski’s Symphony No. 5 and Symphonic Pictures: Russian Painters. The conductor has also made numerous recordings of the work of Shostakovich, stellar as much for their intense musicality as for their emotional immediacy.  A 2017 album of live recordings (Berlin Classics) with the Staatskapelle Dresden from the International Shostakovich Festival in Gohrisch won the German Record Critics’ Prize, with the conductor also being formally awarded the Third International Shostakovich Prize by the Shostakovich Gohrisch Foundation that same year. Along with the famed Russian composer, the music of Prokofiev, Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Meyerbeer, Rangström, and Khachaturian (another family friend) constitutes a good part of his discography.

Jurowski Kancheli classical recording Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin

via cpo

A cornerstone of my own musical exploration is a 1995 recording (released via cpo) of Symphony No. 2 and Symphony No. 7 by Georgian composer Giya Kancheli, with Jurowski leading the Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin. The alternating moments of tenderness and dread are handled with deft elegance; Jurowski brushes the sonic tapestry of textures between strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion, with skill and precision. One moment, shimmering, glittering, and gleaming, the next, piercing, gripping violence. Few conductors, I think, understand Kancheli’s music better; Jurowski carefully modulates the blinking, winking silences in a way that makes one rethink orchestration and resonance within such a rich sonic universe; if the composer shows you an ocean, Jurowski asks you to dip in a toe, then a leg, and then… any charges you can’t swim suddenly don’t seem very real. Jurowski has this gift, for making you understand connection, and your role in making them, in real time. Such expertise highlights, once more, the beguiling trinity of spatial-sensual-spiritual in understanding and appreciating music, an integration I strongly suspect transferred more than a bit onto his offspring.

Among his many engagements this season, Jurowski is scheduled to lead Boris Godunov at Bayerische Staatsoper (a revival of a Calixto Bieito production from 2013) with a stellar cast featuring Dmitri Ulyanov, Ekaterina Vorontsova, and Brindley Sherratt; he’s also returning to La Scala for a revival of Swan Lake. This Thursday he’ll be on the podium for a concert with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic featuring the music of Beethoven and Penderecki. Just as you’d expect, Jurowski is as much of a great storyteller with words as with music. Ever kind, ever patient, with a big laugh and warm, open facial expressions, he was hugely generous with time and energy, his words (about meeting Stravinsky and Shostakovich, about doing the same programme several days in a row, about the role of compromise in dealing with repressive governments) inspiring many ruminations long past the hour we spent conversing. I remain immensely grateful for such an exchange with such a special person.

Jurowski, conductor, Michail Jurowski, maestro, Russian, Ukrainian, history, portrait

Photo via IMG Artists

You had your American debut with the Cleveland Orchestra in May (2019); how did it go?

I felt it was fantastic! It was a huge success. We got standing ovations, and it was a big present for me, especially after a long time waiting.

Too long!

Well you see, better late than never!

Did you notice any differences between American audiences and European or Russian audiences?

In general, no. It is different between a prepared audience and one absolutely fresh, yes – but it can be this way in Vienna, in Berlin, location is not even the question. I met a really very good, very prepared, and highly cultured public. It was lovely!

It has to be said: the Cleveland Orchestra has a very long and very big tradition. I first heard this orchestra in the 1960s in Moscow with George Szell, and I remember these concerts very well — it was one of the most powerful feelings in my life, to experience such an orchestra and conductor. So when we met, the orchestra and me, it was within the first five minutes we immediately understood each other. The programme was fresh to the orchestra — well, not the Tchaikovsky violin concerto – but the Eleventh Symphony of Shostakovich (1957), which is today rather seldom presented onstage. It is a symphony which had its influence from Hungarian revolutionary events of 1956, but Shostakovich’s special talent and his genius, was that he referenced, in his compositions, the problems of the whole world. The vision of violence, of death, of life, everything, not in the biographical sense in one or other way, but in the intonation. This is really music from heart to heart, and I can say it was truly so in Cleveland.

I had the possibility, with these concerts, to speak with the public, for about forty minutes. We spoke about my personal experience with Shostakovich (1906-1975), and some related biographical moments. It was in parallel with violinist Vadim Guzman, who brought his violin, on which was premiered the Glazunov violin concerto. That was an incredible but historical instrument he used! So, to answer your original question, yes, I was very happy to be there. I had not only the possibility to make music together with this orchestra but also to have contact with the American public. I had the feeling I was in paradise.

How much do you think music can contribute to breaking down barriers — cultural barriers, political barriers, emotional barriers?

Music, first of all, is notes. It is just notes. And it is really seldom we can find the direct connection between historical or political events, so music, in general, is a retrospective art, or an art for the future: what I felt by some fact of life; or, what I want to wish for humanity – and so on. The Tenth Symphony of Mahler (1910), for instance, connects with the event of the letter of architect Walter Gropius to Mahler’s wife – Mahler understood his wife was not with him; it was a shock, and from this shock began the composing of the symphony, and really the climax of the first movement. It’s a question we know the answer to here: what was this input (the source of inspiration)? We know it. For Shostakovich, in another example, one of his most famous pieces is his Seventh Symphony (1942). It was composed during the terrible blockade in Leningrad during the war, but you see, the material of the first movement was in Shostakovich’s head before the war. And for Shostakovich, violence does not have a national form; violence is violence, it is more than geographical. So this is one of the reasons why, for example, the Seventh Symphony has such success today. This season I will conduct it in Italy; I’ve done it almost every year somewhere, and this year it will be in Sicily. People understand its power, no matter where it is played.

Michail Jurowski conductor Russian music classical live performance

Photo: T. Müller

In an interview earlier this year you said you originally wanted to be a film director, and I wonder how much cinematic sense you bring to what you conduct, because some of your recordings are strongly cinematic in nature.

Your comparison with cinema… yes, maybe this observation is right! I try to blend music with cinema and theatre. I am also a theatre (opera) conductor, after all. I look behind, and I remember in my childhood: I didn’t want to be a musician, because my father was a composer. I wanted to be a theatre director! Our house was open for contact with really fantastic artists of the time – among our guests was not only Shostakovich, but also (violinist) Oistrakh (1908-1974) and other great musicians. My father had very regular contact with various artists in cinema as well. In the West the names of Soviet directors are not so important, except maybe for Dziga Vertov or Sergei Eisenstein, who were very big directors of the 1930s; of course society was absolutely closed then, but I can tell you that such directors as Rolan Bykov (1929-1998), Mikhail Romm (1901-1971), Sergei Gerasimov (1906-1985), and other Soviet directors – they were regulars, and all top-quality in terms of their being recognized artists of world cinema.

So for me, it was a very important moment, to be able to be around them, and it led to asking myself such questions: “What is moving conflict?” and “How do I find the right inputs as to what music is used here?” Music is an abstract art; it is only notes. I just try to understand what happens with these notes, but it means I compose, in a sense: the changing of effects, the language of music, this moving between con moto and sostenuto, the idea of musical structure. Musical form can be only realized during live performance; music is when we play and in this case, form, structure. It’s what happens, I hope, when I bring the right form to the public during various pieces.

The other side, from my personal kitchen, is from a time when I had a big friendship with the Tonkünstler Orchestra (Austria). The traditions of this orchestra are to repeat one programme through seven or eight concerts, so with this programme, I had such work. It was, as usual, a series of concerts on a tour, including two or three in the Musikverein (Vienna). It was sometimes rather difficult to repeat like that, seven or eight times, the same composition, night after night.

That seems strenuous!

Yes, it was. For a moment I decided to change my understanding of this programme – what I must feel, what I must think, just come with this Shostakovich work that I had to conduct seven days in a row without pause. This symphony, as with almost all of them, needed very high tension, and after seven concerts I felt myself … well, the best thing was to go fishing afterwards; I was absolutely empty and terribly tired. I was fine up to the second day or after that, but before me was three or four next. To your question about cinema, it was like this: that night I understood if I go by plot, so to say, by events, every time, and prepare myself for some of the score’s climaxes, or relate them to some moments which in life happened, unfortunately, then for me it must be personally not only a pleasure to make big music, but also very interesting. And from this moment, the door for this sort of action and understanding, of what happens in music, was opened.

Composer Igor Stravinsky and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich in Moscow, September 1962. (Photo: RIA Novosti archive, image #597702 / Mikhail Ozerskiy / CC-BY-SA 3.0)

You observed in that same interview that Stravinsky would “imbue the music with a human meaning.” What did you mean?

I had the opportunity to speak with Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) in 1962. He was in Moscow, playing there, it was his visit together with Robert Craft, his first time visiting Soviet Russia. He had received special permission to visit. Stravinsky not only conducted – he was a very good conductor – but also he had some meetings with Soviet composers. My father took me to one of these meetings. Standing there, about four metres from him, he asked me what I wanted to compose. I was sixteen years old; I told him I wanted to be a conductor.

“And what do you want to conduct?”

At that time we were allowed to know Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) — I had the score with me. I told him, “Of course, Sacre du Printemps!”

“Why?” he asked.

“It’s such a beautiful piece, but it is also so difficult.”

“It’s not difficult,” he said, “everyone and his dog can conduct it.”

I remember this. He was highly intelligent when he spoke. It was incredible. I remember some of the musicologists asking him about his autobiography, things like, “In your conversations with Mr. Craft, what is true and what is not true?” And Stravinsky said, “Truth is only music; don’t believe the words.”

Stravinsky gave us very different pieces, very different ideas. He had personal experience with Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky, but his expression became different from the Russian music of Firebird, Petrushka and of course, Sacre as well. He was composing these anarchic, fantastic things, destroying all worlds, with these fantastic harmonies in his new classics. He’s a very important person of the 20th century and I would compare him with Picasso, because stylistically, he is like Picasso: he changed a lot during his life. Where is the real Picasso? We don’t know. And we don’t know where the real Stravinsky is either, but he is real, always.

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Olga Lepeshinskaya as Assol and Vladimir Preobrazhensky as Arthur Grey in a scene from Vladimir Jurowski’s ballet Scarlet Sails, staged at the State Academic Bolshoi Theater of the USSR, December 5,1943. (Photo: RIA Novosti archive, image #941010 / Anatoliy Garanin / CC-BY-SA 3.0)

How does that quality of ‘the real’ translate in leading pieces by your father? Or in watching your sons conduct his works?

If you speak about my father, I find him one of the outstanding composers of his time. He died very early – he was only 56 years old – and he was not in the music mainstream. We are Jews, the whole family, so within the Soviet Union, our stock line was always, as you might say, “ten kilometres behind others” – that is how it was. His work was not forbidden though, he had a very big success with the public, but he had no help from any of the organizations at the time to have developed that success. His ballet Scarlet Sails, after the romantic novel of Alexander Grin, was played for fourteen years on the stage of the Bolshoi – it was on during the Second World War. At the time of the war there was a deep hunger for the high romantic, and a very, so to say, Christ-like idea about the inferno in life and paradise in future. In this sense (the ballet) captured Grin’s theme, that patience of the soul has to be without any orders – then Captain Grey will come with a big ship, with red sails, and take one and one’s life away to better things. Shostakovich wrote a highly positive critique to this ballet in the central press.

scarlet sails movie poster Russian Soviet novel cinema Grin Alexandr Ptushko

Movie poster for the 1961 film Scarlet Sails (directed by Alexandr Ptushko) based on the novel. (Photo: Mosfilm)

The music of my father was high romantic. I cannot say he was like some other composers. His music was tonal music, and with a very positive feeling, but step by step, his own view of life became worse and worse; belief for him was very difficult and he was ill. There were a lot of difficulties in his life. During the war there were difficulties experienced by everybody, but after the war it was sometimes very difficult for him indeed, and some of those challenges were very personal.

I’m very happy all of us – Vladimir and Dmitri and me – opened the pages of his music. My recordings of his work were met with good press, and there were very successful concerts in Moscow this year, by Dmitri – with his symphonic poem Otello; and Vladimir’s concert with the Moscow students, he had a big success with Scarlet Sails. And my concert also, with the Fourth Symphony, which was again with students of the Moscow Conservatory. The time for my father’s music is coming, and it will not be for my father’s own name alone.

This relates to the atmosphere after the war in the Soviet Union and especially in Moscow: there was an absolutely fantastic group of composers, really very high-rate composers, not only Shostakovich, who I think was a genius, but also Khachaturian, Karayev,  Mieczysław Weinberg, and others whose music now also is getting attention. I knew those composers, of course, including Weinberg (1919-1996), and now I’m making a CD of his music with Staatskapelle Dresden (here Jurowski holds up an immense score with markings – ed.); this is now what I work on, which I enjoy. All the other pieces are already ready — the Clarinet Concerto, for instance. I hope by the end of this year the album will be ready to release.

It’s encouraging to see the work of these composers being more frequently performed and recorded.

It’s very good! I must say, I, personally think society today has a lot of clichés that really close off the connection with the high-level composers of that time – the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s. In this time, Soviet music was not only Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998), Sofia Gubaidulina (1931), Edison Denisov (1929-1996) and so on – whose work I played a lot. Granted, it was not a very big group of composers, but there were enough that any musical culture would be proud to have them. I met practically all of them. After our immigration, I had no contact, not only with these people – most of them died – but the world in the West opened up such big doors for me, and I had a free feeling from different sides.

Now I’m almost 74 years old, and I don’t think I ever lived with a view that looked only behind – but I also understand that not everything today is for the development of the soul, so I try with all my forces to compensate for that, and I’m very glad that Vladimir has done practically the same. It’s in a bit of a different form, but he has more possibilities than I did. He is now at the age for doing that – well, he is a little older than I was when we jumped to Germany. At his age right now is precisely when I really began my world career, incredibly.

It was like a whole second life for you to start over the way you did.

In this form, with family and children and career and all the various factors – yes.

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Leading the Norrköpings Symfoniorkester in October 2019 with violinist Vadim Gluzman and cellist Johannes Moser. (Photo: Calle Slättengren / Norrköpings Symfoniorkester)

What role do you think authenticity plays? You mentioned clichés and the development of the soul; it seems like within the cultural realm now authenticity is increasingly difficult to find.

I suppose that it depends from what point of view you perceive such things. In the famous and very good Pushkin work Little Tragedies, within the story of Mozart and Salieri, there is a whole tragedy from the phrase, “There is no justice on the earth, they say. But there is none in heaven, either.” I think that is true wisdom and… we must give the last moments of our time for beauty, or for real people we have now, in our lives, and so on. Every event has many different sides; it is, today, very simple for young people to say, “Shostakovich was a collaborator, he was a Communist party member” – but today it is not obligatory to be a member of some party.

At the end of the 1950s, especially for Shostakovich, he felt like Hamlet – To be or not to be! – that is, to live or not to live. It was like this in his mind because after Stalin’s death (1953) was a bit of fresh air, and I remember this time, I was eight or nine years old, I remember it very well, it was from one side to the other side in all walks of life. The role of music in creating a social community was incredibly important, much higher than now. At that time, the leader of the Soviet composers Tikhon Khrennikov (1913-2007), was a composer – not a high composer, but good, and his idea was not to ever help somebody who might be a better composer than him. In fairness, I must say that Khrennikov managed to save the Union of Composers, unlike other creative unions – ones for writers, artists, theatrical figures, where there were many victims of the Great Terror after the war in the 40s. But it happened with a lot of conductors as well, ones who didn’t want a guest conductor who were most likely better than they were.

Michail Jurowski conductor Russian music classical live performance

Photo: T. Müller

Some would say that’s just another negative side of human nature…

… yes it is part of that, human nature. From the other side though, the position of composers was not only from the point of view of cultural but international presence, because internationally there were only two names – Prokofiev (1891-1953) and Shostakovich, and then later Khachaturian (1903-1978), who was from Armenia, which helped. But near to Shostakovich were some friends, who were also, as I understand now, secret agents of the KGB. They gave him advice, and it was around this time when Shostakovich very seriously considered suicide. And it was at this same time when the wife of Shostakovich had died (1954), and Shostakovich had come to his moment and he could not compose or do absolutely anything. He had two children that needed at that time to come to the light road, so to say – his son Maxim, and his daughter Galina – but Shostakovich was absolutely destroyed as a person. His friend, cinema producer Lev Arnshtam (1905-1979), who made the film Five days, Five nights (1961) invited the composer abroad in what was then the DDR. (Shostakovich was composing music for the film, a joint project between the Soviet Union and East Germany, about the WW2 bombing of Dresden – ed.) When Shostakovich got to Dresden he was given the possibility to live in Gohrisch (roughly 47 kilometres southwest of Dresden – ed.). Nothing had been destroyed there during the war, unlike the city of Dresden, which had been totally destroyed. Gohrisch was not a village, not town, but something between; it was filled with fantastic air, good views looking to the river, mountains – but Shostakovich cried every single day he was there. He could not compose, until one day he made the conscious choice to stop composing the film music and instead compose the Eighth String Quartet, one of the most important compositions of the 20th century. He wrote it in three days.

Then he received the advice  to be member of the communist party, and decide all his problems in one day. He was not really a member of the party as a big ideologue – absolutely not – but most people near him understood why he made this step, and from it, he was able to compose what he wanted. He said, “The more decent people in this party, the more likely it will be better.” Oh, the naivete…!

So is knowing when to compromise the secret to inner authenticity, or merely outer peace?

It’s the secret of surviving the regime. Shostakovich’s choice was an opportunity to save himself. In Stalin’s time, he was in danger, and after Stalin died, he could’ve been a hero of fairy tales, but, I must say, political power was afraid of him, because he could write some tune for the anniversary of the Republic, or the Seventh Symphony inspired by the Psalms, or use poems of Yevtushenko in the Thirteenth Symphony with double sense – Shostakovich knew very well how to do this, not only in his big symphonic works but in his smaller quartets.

So to give some reply here… when we speak about cliché, well, it originates from a strong order: “Who is not with us is against us” and “you must know that the crocodile who ate your enemy is not your friend yet.” A cliché can today bring mass ideology, mass meaning, mass press, the point of view of one composer against another; this is all very sad, because we have really very different points and conditions of life, and if we don’t understand this, we can’t give our true selves, guilty or not guilty.

It feels like there are a lot of artists now who still have to make those compromises.

I don’t know…maybe. I understand today it is practically almost all the same thing as before. What happened with humans and those artists… there are some groups of covert artists who are, so to say, “in front”, and these artists must be, possibly, in good shape with their souls. But… I don’t know if it’s good or not-good; we are not angels. And we also don’t live in paradise.

Top photo: IMG Artists

Szymanowski At The TSO: Shimmering & Sighing

Tetzlaff TSO

Christian Tetzlaff performs with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, April 2019. (Photo: Jag Gundu)

There was an air of impatience in the air at Roy Thomson Hall Friday evening, as if concertgoers couldn’t quite settle in when the lights went down. I was reminded of the people who sit at Stonehenge every summer solstice, vibrating with anxiety at the first hints of yellow-orange beams making a path among the stones. Music is perhaps similar to light in some respects, but its path should perhaps not be so predictable. The impatience was owing largely to one thing: the monolithic presence of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 (the so-called “Eroica”) in the program’s second half. The Toronto Symphony were on the second of a three-night series of music from the 19th and 20th centuries. Debussy’s symphony poem Prélude à l’aprèsmidi d’un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun) opened the program, and was followed by Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No.1 (Op. 35). Both are in no way unusual repertoire choices — but the disquietude was palpable. People wanted their Ludwig, and they were prepared to fidget, sigh loudly, and shift around frequently until they got it. What hooked them (and this was delightful to note) were the twin forces of soloist Christian Tetzlaff’s sheer passion for the concerto, and conductor Hasan’s finely finessed coloration.

Furthermore, what made the evening so interesting on a personal level was that the date of the concert coincided with what would have been my mother’s birthday; I couldn’t help but think, sitting in the hall, that she certainly would have been among the impatient Beethoven majority. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course, but since deepening both the width and breadth of my own musical scope over the past few years, I find the so-called hits just aren’t enough, and I’m not alone in that sentiment. Recently there was more than a little griping online with the focus of the works of Beethoven in various new season announcements; it feels like not that long ago that I would have been horrified by this reaction, but now, I tend to sit in hearty if hesitant agreement. This isn’t of course to imply Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 (or any of his other work) isn’t a great and important piece of art — but when’s the last time you’ve heard Creatures of Prometheus or Cantata on the Death of Emperor Joseph II or King Stephen Overture? (The London Philharmonic is doing the latter two next April and did the first last autumn, natch.) Financial realities largely dictate the programming for orchestras and organizations not involved in a broader, government-connected funding model, and even then, there are numerous stakeholders (investors, CEOs, sponsors) who fully expect to see BIS (Bums In Seats) as part of their ROI. That means programming the hits, with some not-so-knowns at the start for good measure.

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Conductor Kerem Hasan leads the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, April 2019. (Photo: Jag Gundu)

Yet the Debussy piece performed by the TSO last evening (as well as tonight) is not in the slightest bit unknown, though it is firmly modern in content and style. Premiered in 1894 and based on the work of symbolist poet Stephane Mallarmé from 1876, it’s arguably one of the best-known works within French classical music. An evocative musing from a mythical satyr, the work reflects, as noted in the program, “Mallarmé’s hazy, dream-like ideas with effortless tonal magic.” British conductor Kerem Hasan, newly appointed Chief Conductor of the Tiroler Symphonieorchester Innsbruck and a frequent guest of numerous European orchestras (he’s led the Concertgebouw, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, and the ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien as part of the Salzburg Festival), makes his Canadian debut with these concerts, filling in for an indisposed Louis Langrée. Hasan underlined the contrasting temperatures and textures within each winding passage: hot-cool; soft-hard; smooth-rough. One could positively see the works of Franz Von Stuck come to life here. Hasan’s opera background (he’s led performances with the Welsh National Opera, the Meininger Staatstheater, and the Tiroler Landestheater) was especially apparent in drawing out sectional relationships, at once lyrical and theatrical. With simple, fluid gestures, the young maestro conjured long, languorous phrases, only to dip, dive, and reshape them anew — round, then triangular; square, then octogonal, then back again, the interplay between strings and woodwinds smiling, serious, sensuous, all at once.

This sensuality transmuted into a considerably more intense and mystical form with Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No. 1. The piece’s first bars, like fine black eyelashes fluttering to wakefulness, give little indication of the piece’s extraordinary and vigorously passionate progression. Written between 1916 and 1917, the Ukrainian composer once described the work as “a rather lonely song, joyous and free, of a nightingale singing spontaneously in the fragrant Polish May night.”  Written with his friend, the celebrated violinist Pawel Kochanski (also the dedicatee of the piece), Szymanowski sought “a new style, a new mode of expression for the violin, something in this respect completely epoch-making.” Indeed, the work not only heralds a new (and very gripping) sonic experience, even now — it slinks, shimmers, shrieks, and sighs, undulating through its varied five sections (or ‘spans’) innately linked through the violin’s nightingale song.

It would have been easy to sit in astonishment at the virtuosity required of the violinist here — indeed, many patrons around me, previously sighing for Beethoven, were captivated (rightly) by Tetzlaff’s mastery. From my perspective, technique was precisely what led to transcendence; it wasn’t there purely for its own sake. Tetzlaff made this journey clear with a clear economy of elegant expressivity. I’d not seen the violinist since his performance of Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto (Op. 36) with the Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin in 2017, and while there are clear lines between the works, Tetzlaff’s attention to granular detail and appreciation of sweeping grandeur allowed for a range of sonorous textures to shine in an ever-changing kaleidoscope of lustrous atmospheres. Von Stuck’s satyrs were now dancing with Klimt’s water nymphs and Redon’s Buddhas in a grand garden of green-blue delight. This was music-making which was, by turns, fluid, jagged, poetic, pointillist, starkly sexy and richly impassioned.

faun und nixe von stuck

Franz Von Stucke, “Faun und Nixe” (Satyr and Mermaid), 1918; Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

Tetzlaff’s performance was marked by meticulous attention to detail and a gorgeous variance in colour. Hasan’s quietly authoritative leadership granted the orchestra a responsiveness that opened the door to a seamless sonic partnership which, more than once, conjured the ghosts of Strauss, Schreker, Zemlinsky, Ravel, and indeed, Debussy. The program note also mentions the work of Scriabin in its reference to the “non-Western sounds that colored the impressionistic music” for the latter two composers, naming Scriabin as well, and I couldn’t help but feel by the close that the swirling, sensuous atmosphere of the evening would’ve been better served by featuring one of his works in place of good old Ludwig. I confess I left early, happily swimming in Szymanowski’s electric, glittering lines, not daring to put on any music once in the car and headed home. Sometimes, souls need to swim; Tetzlaff, Hasan, and the TSO offered a good reminder that plunging into the sea by moonlight is a good thing; one need not wait for the sunrise to gain one’s bearings, but to simply trust the currents. One never knows what might one see, let alone who or what might just take us by the hand and lead us into ever-deeper waters.

Kirill Petrenko Exceeds Expectations With The Berlin Philharmonic

petrenko Berlin Philharmonic

Kirill Petrenko conducts the 2018-2019 season opening concert of the Berlin Philharmonic. Photo: (c) Monika Rittershaus

It’s hard to leave one’s mental baggage aside when approaching things we feel strongly about. One brings a grab bag full of expectations, consciously or not, which frequently weigh down perceptions and any new experiences. When it comes to beloved works of art, one either approaches with an expectation of ecstasy or a suitcase of cynicism; rarely are there any in-betweens these days, let alone room for nuance, contemplation, or surprise.

As Kirill Petrenko so amply demonstrated in the season opener with the Berlin Philharmonic this past Friday night, it’s precisely these things — nuance, contemplation, surprise — that make the experience of live music so enriching. The current Generalmusikdirektor of the Bayerische Staatsoper and chief conductor designate of the Berlin Philharmonic (he formally starts next fall) is renowned for his gifts in fusing the elegant and the inexplicable, the artful and the soulful, the epic and the intimate. I used the word “orgasmic” on social media in a rather futile (in retrospect) attempt to capture the heart-pounding excitement of the 2018-2019 season opening performance, but really, that word in all its modern, explosive connotations, does not remotely capture its magic. What made this performance so very special was that Petrenko took essentially well-known repertoire and didn’t churn it out for easy effect, but plumbed several layers of sonic depth out of a deep and very clear love of the scores, the music, and the art form; he took the audience to new shores with a gentle confidence, using his passion as a passage through which we eagerly followed.  

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Kirill Petrenko conducts the 2018-2019 season opening concert of the Berlin Philharmonic. Photo: (c) Monika Rittershaus

Opening with Strauss’s 1888 tone poem Don Juan, which paints episodes from the exploits of the legendary figure (based on work by poet Nikolaus Lenau), Petrenko carefully highlighted shimmering strings and bold brass section, counterbalanced by delightfully pensive winds. Albrecht Mayer’s poetically plaintive oboe work, his looping sonic interplay with Stefan Dohr’s lyrical horn and the rounded tones of Wenzel Fuchs’ clarinet were all kept in tight balance by Petrenko’s watchful baton. To use an apt phrase penned by Guardian critic Martin Kettle (writing about Petrenko leading the Bavarian State Orchestra in Mahler’s Sixth this this past June), the sound “was never permitted to meander into reverie” — which might bump up against a few expectations sonically, but earned a greater emotional payoff by the piece’s end, one less steeped in sentimentality and closer to quiet grace.

That grace continued in a lovely, thoughtful performance of Strauss’s Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration), a tone poem completed in 1889. Petrenko kept a strident tempo, providing a sonically fascinating sense of momentum; this wasn’t a race to death so much as an inevitable countdown stripped bare, once again, of sentimentality, but with a rich and textured spirit. Concertmaster Daishin Kashimoto displayed a lovely virtuosic tone in his solos, as did flautist Emmanuel Pahud in the piece’s first section, with Petrenko never resting too long in pensive solemnity; he cleverly accentuated a palpable partnership of basses, percussion, and brass to underscore the passing of one phase of mortality to the next. The result was not a clanging, cliche-ridden sound implying transcendence at the close, but rather, a question, a contemplation, a deep joy.

Petrenkp Berlin Philharmonic

Photo: (c) Stephan Rabold

This joy was brought to the fore in the concert’s second half, which featured Beethoven’s famous Seventh Symphony. Ladden as it is with so many sonic expectations (everyone seems to have a favorite bit and thinks they know the best version), Petrenko threw the roadmaps away and blazed his own trail — not with a storm of fortissimos or percussive overuse, but with smart phrasing and energetic interplay between sections. It made for a meaty, mighty listen that allowed one to experience the work anew. Momentum in the first movement (Poco Sostenuto) was created via lilting tempos and carefully modulated exchanges between strings and woodwinds; this led, with stunning elegance, to a gorgeous rendering of the movement’s theme, first performed by Pahud, and then echoed with boisterous intention by the orchestra. The work’s ties to military history were made unmissable (Beethoven conducted the 1813 premiere himself as part of a charity concert for soldiers wounded in the Battle of Hanau), with Petrenko leading the charge with brisk tempos and evocative sounds that called to mind the clomp of horse hoofs and the dizzying speed of a charge. A watchful percussion section, working in tandem with basses, produced a lusciously fulsome sound that  avoided loud-Ludwig/big-boom-Beethoven cliches. Such an elegant approach went entirely against whatever sonic expectations one might bring — Petrenko seemed determined to embrace the score’s inherent lyricism while offering a fascinating, tapestry-like array of colors and textures.

The famous second movement (Allegretto) saw more than a few swaying heads in the formally-attired opening night crowd; as with the Strauss, the movement was firmly not played for sentimental effect, and was taken at a refreshingly (if not overfast) brisk pace. Petrenko cultivated efficient momentum through strings, swelling horns and percussion, yet never once wallowed in a too-rich sound, keeping very tight modulation on pacing, volume, and texture. He displayed a great balance of drama, lyricism, intellectualism, and contemplation, attending to each with care while never abandoning the other in the slightest. And so we heard the call response moments between brass and strings in a lively sort of pas-de-deux that brought to mind similar structures in the program’s first half, and indeed, in the musical lines from a production of Parsifal Petrenko conducted earlier this year in Munich.

Petrenko Berlin Philharmonic

Kirill Petrenko conducts the 2018-2019 season opening concert of the Berlin Philharmonic. Photo: (c) Monika Rittershaus

The Berlin Philharmonic’s season opener on Friday evening was indeed full of opera, though not one word was sung. The intensity of the performance was counterbalanced by a thoughtfulness that never veered into didactic intellectualizing but rather, used joy as a guiding principle. Each section within the orchestra became a kind of new and different voice, nay, each individual musician had their voice carried, shaped, blended, formed and reformed again, within distinct voices forming a perfect whole. No over-intellectualized approach fraught with ideological or historical baggage, but a concert filled with light, warmth, and life. Any and all expectations were thrown out the window, and it was magical. The Berlin Philharmonic are currently on tour with this program, along with soloist Yuja Wang. Catch them if you can.

Review: Schubert & Strauss From A Ballsy Berlin Phil

Berlin Phil

Baritone Gerald Finley and the Berlin Phliharmonic led by conductor Daniel Harding, March 1, 2018. (Photo: (c) Stephan Rabold)

Musical works which take the concept of nature as a theme are deceptive. There’s a perception they’re somehow full of soft and lovely, full of peace and tranquil sounds. Ludwig van Beethoven reminded listeners, however, of the terrible force of nature in his Sixth Symphony (nicknamed”the Pastoral”), with its dramatic, stormy scenes  in the Fourth Movement holding particularly memorable power. Titled “Gewitter, Sturm” (Thunder, Storm) it serves as a useful counterbalance.

Something very similar exists with Strauss’s Eine Alepnsinfonie (An Alpine Symphony), op. 64; its musical splendor allows for an abundance of sonic intensity  in which the orchestra can reveal a darker side of the nature it simultaneously worships. This doesn’t necessarily always translate into minor key transitions but it does, through the inventive (and expensive) integration of percussion, brass, and woodwinds, paint vivid pictures in the minds of its listeners. So while Strauss’ work is not at all musically incongruent, the work, fifty minutes in total and requiring an immense number of musicians (125 at least), is a study in contrasts, and in knowing how to use such intensity on a very large scale.

Gerald Finley Berlin Phil

Baritone Gerald Finley takes bows following his performance with the Berlin Philharmonic, led by guest conductor Daniel Harding.(Photo: (c) Stephan Rabold)

The Berlin Philharmonic, under the direction of guest conductor Daniel Harding, explored these ideas in a the program featuring the songs of Franz Schubert for its first half. Baritone Gerald Finley, coming off a busy schedule of firsts (I interviewed him for Opera Canada magazine), was in vocally splendid form, delivering Schubert’s  works (in arrangements by Reger, Berlioz, and Brahms) with gorgeous delicacy and steely force. His “Erlkönig” (based on a very creepy Goethe poem about a child assailed by the supernatural “Erl King”) was particularly striking for the character-rich modulations Finley exercised, demonstrating unforced flexibility and a deep sensitivity to the material, from his beautiful and thoughtful rendering of “Memnon” to his exquisite performance of “Du bist die Ruh’, D.776, in an orchestration by Anton Webern, as an encore. Finley never lingered too long in a phrase or indulged in vocal flights of fancy, but kept a nice balance between crisp, character-driven diction, a ringing top end, a secure, oaken mid-range, and incredibly smart phrasing; the integration of these traits, combined with a clear love of the material, made for a very splendid and deeply satisfying musical experience. As the program notes of Berlioz’ orchestration (for “Erlkönig”), “(e)very instrument seems to be deployed according to its colouristic and dramatic potential.” No kidding; it’s a phrase that could well be applied to the entirety of the program.

Colour and drama were certainly a big part of the evening’s second half, which featured Eine Alepnsinfonie (An Alpine Symphony), op. 64. Partly inspired by a youthful Alpine adventure Strauss enjoyed, along with his later love of the work of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the work is less of a typical “symphony” in that it forgoes the traditional structure of movements, and instead features twenty-two sections which trace the experiences of a climber, from daybreak to dusk, scaling an Alpine summit. It received a mixed reception at its premiere here in Berlin 1915 (with Strauss himself conducting the Dresden Hofkapelle), with some sneering that it was “cinema music” — but it’s precisely these grandly cinematic qualities which, when brought out properly, with the right amount of love, care, commitment and respect, create such powerful sonic experiences. In all the times I’ve seen the orchestra live, I’ve rarely heard them sound better than last evening, when each element (and Harding squarely treated them as such, related to climate, nature, atmosphere) worked to create a journey as much for spirit as for imagination.

Harding Berlin Phil

Conductor Daniel Harding leads the Berlin Philharmonic in “An Alpine Symphony” by Richard Strauss, March 1, 2018. (Photo; (c) Stephan Rabold)

Right from the pensive opening (“Nacht” or Night), through the glinting “Am Wasserfall” (At the Waterfall) to the careful “Stille vor dem Sturm” (Calm Before the Storm), and then, of course, onto “Gewitter und Sturm, Abstieg” (Thunder and Tempest, Descent) and back to “Nacht” to close, the orchestra didn’t just lead listeners along the primrose path, but dropped them into the middle of a high, rough, rocky ledge, forming walls of enveloping sounds that underlined the dualistic nature of the work, the relationship (nay, need) for darkness and light between and around one another. Horn players Stefan Dohr and Sarah Willis led their sections with aplomb, shaping their phrases and long musical lines ever so intuitively around woodwinds, harps, and strings, while Harding ensured the busy percussion section wasn’t merely an accessory but a living, breathing organism, colored in shape and expression, the “heartbeat” of the piece.  This was far less a pretty excursion into the mountains than a fearsome journey into a ferocious darkness, one that in no way wiped out the capacity for the experience of beauty or majesty, or, in fact, community; more than once various orchestra members could be seen smiling instinctively at one another as phrases approached and receded. There is joy in the darkness, of course; it just sometimes takes bravery (and a few connected spirits) to stand and face it.

And face it, they did; this was the Berlin Philharmonic at its magisterial, ballsy best. I’ve spent many nights in many different symphony halls, listening carefully to many different orchestras, but very, very rare is the moment I will lean my head back, mouth open, and simply… sigh. It happened more than once lastnight. And it was simply beautiful.

Review: Contemplating Mahler And Rott In Berlin

Philharmonie Berlin

The Philharmonie Berlin. (Photo: mine. Please do not reproduce without permission.)

It’s taken me 72 hours to get to the Philharmonie in Berlin. That’s longer than many other visits I’ve made here, and while this was one of the shortest concerts I’ve attended in the storied music venue, it was one of the most quietly magical.

Performed by the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester (Radio Symphony Orchestra) Berlin under the baton of guest conductor Sebastian Weigle (who is General Director of Oper Frankfurt), the Sunday afternoon concert was a graceful integration of contrasts, joining the vast passions of the material (and the composers’ intertwined lives) with a whispering elegance underlined by smoothly assured playing. Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of the Wayfarer) and Symphony No.1 in E Major by Hans Rott were performed with sparkling clarity and a passion that whispered rather than declaimed. The effect? Beautiful. No fancy bombast, this, nor any falling into comfortable mediocrity; it was pure musicianship.

RSB Weigle

Conductor Sebastian Weigle and the RSB at the Philharmonie Berlin, February 25, 2018. (Photo: mine. Please do not reproduce without permission.)

Baritone Björn Bürger, a member of the Oper Frankfurt ensemble, filled in for an ailing Michael Volle for the program’s first half, infusing Mahler’s four famous works with a lovely youthful ardor and earnest endearment. The songs, romantic and yearning in nature, were written in the late 1800s and were inspired by Mahler’s doomed affair with soprano Johanna Richter; they are shot through with the sort of panting passion you might expect from a young composer. These qualities were nicely reflected via both Bürger’s glinting high baritone (tonally anxious in spots, no doubt due to nerves), and Weigle’s deeply intuitive, poetically astute conducting. Never leaning too far into a phrase or banging out motifs, Weigle and the RSB very clearly trusted their audience to appreciate the subtlety of a thoughtful approach, and delivered a loving performance that underlined the waterfall-like passion of the material with gossamer-like strings and a sinuous bass section.

That waterfall-like quality came into focus in the program’s second half, which featured Austrian composer Hans Rott’s First Symphony, replete with plenty of string runs and interplay between woodwinds and brass sections. A contemporary of both Mahler and Bruckner, Rott struggled with debilitating mental illness and died (of tuberculosis) roughly six weeks shy of 26. His work was largely dismissed in his lifetime — including, notably, by Brahms, who said the Austrian should give up music entirely. Mahler, however, recognized his talent, and wrote after his passing (in 1884) that “(Rott) is so near to my inmost self that he and I seem to me like two fruits from the same tree which the same soil has produced and the same air nourished. He could have meant infinitely much to me and perhaps the two of us would have well-nigh exhausted the content of new time which was breaking out for music.”

roses RSB

Roses left by conductor Sebastian Weigle on the podium after leading the RSB in Mahler and Rott. (Photo: mine. Please do not reproduce without permission.)

Traces of Mahler’s influence, as well as a clear anticipation of his output, can clearly be heard in Rott’s First Symphony, a work which only enjoyed its first full recording in 1989. The third movement, in particular, largely anticipates the sort of instrumental interplay Mahler would regularly deploy later in his career. The RSB performed this movement, a scherzo, with sparkling buoyancy, even as Weigle maintained strident sonic discipline; no large, sentimental displays here, but rather, thoughtful, clear, sensitive playing that showed the intricacies of Rott’s score while highlighting its expressiveness. The horn section was impressive with round, fulsome sounds, qualities not always associated with brass instruments, and yet so skillfully deployed here; perhaps Weigle’s fifteen years spent as a horn player with the Berlin Staatskapelle was making itself known. At the close, the conductor left the traditional bouquet given to artists on the score, gesturing as he did so, a nod to Rott and his cultural legacy.

It was a lovely, quietly elegant welcome back to the Philharmonie, and certainly a heart-and-ear-opener that underlined the energy of youth while underlining the importance of a mature approach. The material asked for it, and Weigle and the RSB delivered, beautifully.

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