Sound in and of itself is neither good or bad; it simply is. But more than ever, sound, and the way it is delivered and experienced, is tied up in commerce. The various sources of revenue and concomitant connections to money within the classical world often provides silent framing of a vast and under-discussed reality. Recently The Metropolitan Opera announced they would be performing 10% fewer works next season, drawing on their endowment, and focusing on new works for next season. This year’s new works – Kevin Puts’ The Hours and Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones – drew near-capacity audiences, while old chestnuts (like the Italian version of Verdi’s epic Don Carlos) barely filled the immense auditorium by half. Similar challenges with audiences in post-pandemic life resound internationally, and organizations need to rethink their over-reliance on both starry names and ossified presentational styles. The challenges are less related to “rubbing people’s noses” in current issues (as a famous tenor recently mused) than to organizations attenuating to ever-unfolding realities (including pandemic) within a media ecosystem ever more reliant on the machinery of hype and ad tech which polarizes audience experience (/ inexperience) and expectation, often screwing in unconsciously-held cliches around opera in the process in a breathless bid to please sponsors and conservative board members. Whither sound? Does it matter when there are no camels in Aida?
Exposure, education, and cultural curiosity have everything to do with receptivity of sounds, and in building the critical thinking structures needed for reception of their live realization. More than once this year I have written about (and linked to) the precipitous drops in educational standards, particularly across North America. If Europeans groan at hearing the word “privilege” and roll eyes at the mention of culture wars, it is worth remembering the basic cost of things across the ocean. (Various American contacts of mine living in Europe are aghast at the sheer cost of groceries in visits home for the holidays, as one immediate example.) This seems an issue worth shouting about, repeatedly, even if people want to stick fingers in ears and continue rolling eyes. The Met is not The Royal Opera Covent Garden is not Bayerische Staatsoper is not Oper Zurich is not Opera de Paris is not the COC is not ENO (alas…). Different strokes; different horses. As I discussed with Mark Williams (the new CEO of the Toronto Symphony) this autumn, one city cannot simply be grafted onto another. One culture cannot be grafted onto another. One educational system cannot be grafted onto another; one set of ideas and living experiences cannot be grafted onto another. We cannot wish x was like more y; x may be devolving back to m but it is its own m, in its own place, and this is worth remembering. Blithely accepting what various levels of government cut or mete out or hype without a peep of protest, pause, or media scrutiny does not make for a healthy arts ecosystem, or for healthy artists.
Thus do the educational systems in various locales – along with social safety nets, levels of (non-corporate) funding, culture, history, infrastructure – contribute to respective classical atmospheres and moreover to the perceptions of sounds, and their direct experience within specific environments. In classical within a North American idiom, some of those sounds are treated as a decimal in the equation of style, performance, and digital bragging rights. Marketing departments often dictate programming choices; risky sounds are placed straight in the bin unless those departments are very sure they can create an online buzz that directly translates to ticket sales – the unicorn goal of classical marketing rarely achieved with any reliable consistency. Of course sound is, at its core, represented by dots on a page, but sound is much more than dots, symbols many people can’t read, let alone hear in their heads. It matters how/where/when/within what circumstance one experiences them, or does not experience them, where and how one learns them, from whom, in what atmosphere. Absence is as importance as presence, something musicians of all genres know. Contributor Tori Wanzama experienced Bizet’s Carmen for the first time this past autumn – in a highly individualized way and certainly different to those who grew up hearing the music throughout childhood. Context is everything, and it ought not – especially now in a war that so affects cultural arenas – to be ignored in favour of romantic notions which do not contextualize (let alone acknowledge) the role of privilege in the listening/live/learning-about experience.
Sounds are, or can be, loaded; they often carry the heavy ammunition of intertwined histories – personal, professional, political, and beyond. Recently I came upon a unique performance of a German-language version of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin led by Michail Jurowski, who passed away in March of this year. Recorded at Semperoper Dresden in 1991, this Onegin demonstrates clearly, how sound is not only sound but can be much more. Yes, this is recognizably Tchaikovsky; no, it is not the recognizable Onegin, at least not for those who are solely familiar with the opera in its original language. The famous “Letter Scene”, for instance, features Czech soprano Zora Jehličková performing Tatyana’s passionate declaration in an excited if highly knowing manner – she sounds worldly, as if she is about to set Valhalla on fire. The reading of the score has transformed to reflect the vagaries of the language in which it is being sung. Use all the Teutonic-music cliches you wish (see above) – they apply to Jurowski’s reading, but they don’t quite capture the singularity of this particular sound at this particular juncture. How could they? Think about what was happening in Germany at the time, and you hear it in this reading; the swift tempi, the jaunty phrasing, the acid tone of the strings against the excitable blares of the horns, the way in which the orchestra swells around certain syllables – and how much it all contrasts with various Russian recordings. These divides in sonorities aren’t solely down to the differences between maestros (though that’s a factor) – but time, place, language, people – context.
Sound embodies so many things, if only we would listen. Semperoper is not The Met is not La Scala is not Mariinsky is not Kyiv Opera is not… we are not you; you are not me; one but not the same, and sounds are bigger than both of us, together or apart –the biggest question, the smallest decimal; the hard sell, the soft touch; sound draws in the most tiny details and simultaneously reveals a far broader picture. It is difficult to define because its experience differs so greatly between people and changes through time, privilege, history, locale, and family. This website has tried to reflect such concerns since its founding in 2017, and the past twelve months in particular have brought a reassessment of its purpose. I always resisted definitions for what this website is, or could be, though I was always quite sure of what it was not. I always wanted my work to be more than hyperbolic PR – to be a meaningful (and yes, critical) engagement with an art form I love in all its facets. I aimed to share authentic, unedited (mostly) conversations with people whose work genuinely inspires curiosity, and in so doing provide a forum for the sorts of exchanges mainstream media has neither the bucks nor the bandwidth for. I aimed to float somewhere between the heady and the populist, the intellectual and the everyday, and to firmly keep my own voice intact, as someone who floats in that netherworld herself, and probably always will. This is, at least, what I had hoped. Have I achieved these aims? Have I contributed anything of worth to conversations around classical music? Should I worry about legacy brand media, and which writers and artists love, hate, or share my work?
2022 has been a year of learning to live with and accept open questions that may never have answers, and to stop worrying about the ones that really don’t matter. This website will exist in the short term; there will be occasional feature interviews – as ever, with people and things not being given the attention or quality of time and detail, let alone the uniqueness of perspective, in mainstream media coverage. But just as practical priorities (paid writing opportunities; teaching) call, so does the living of life, remade from what it was in March 2020. Returning is different, which is just as it should be; it is not returning at all, but remaking. Just as locales cannot be grafted onto one another, neither can experiences, ideas, or notions of normal. I want to have meaningful real-life conversations that won’t be shared online, and I want to experience sounds, live, with people I call friends, and note how those sounds are different now that everything else – that magical context – is too. There are voices, and sights, and (thank goodness) sounds, and all they carry – quietly, loudly, beautifully; the readiness, to quote Hamlet, is all.
Photos: mine. Please do not reproduce without express written permission.
One of the most moving episodes in the life of composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) occurred in 1960 upon his first visit to the health resort of Gohrisch, a mountainside town located forty kilometres south-east of Dresden, where he had gone to write the music for Lev Armshtam’s film “Five Days, Five Nights”. The String Quartet No. 8 was famously composed instead, the sole piece he wrote outside the Soviet Union, done over three days in mid-July in the green, scenic spot near the River Elbe. Tortured by questions of identity, integrity, history, creativity and the tenuous links therein, having been heavily coerced into joining the Communist Party just prior, Shostakovich dedicated the work to victims of fascism and war, offering a mourning of the past, a dirge for the present, a worried sigh at the future. The composer returned to Gohrisch in summer 1972 following the premiere of his Symphony No. 15, where he visited with conductor Kurt Sanderling. Little could he have known that the site would host a celebrated festival bearing his name, featuring a range of his own works as well as those by his colleagues and contemporaries.
The International Shostakovich Days Gohrisch, founded in 2010 with the help of the Staatskapelle Dresden, has been a fount of musical exploration in the decades since its titular composer paid his visits. This year’s edition, which opened on Thursday (30 June), features the music of Shostakovich, of course, as well as that of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), Sofia Gubaidulina (b. 1931), Yuri Povolotsky (b. 1962), and Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov (b. 1937), who is this year’s recipient of the International Shostakovich Prize. It’s fair to say that there are several spectres hanging over this year’s edition of the festival, but they are encapsulated in the figure of one person who is no longer present, but whose history, with both Shostakovich and Gohrisch, remains vital. Conductor Michail Jurowski, who passed away in March of this year, helped in the formation of the Festival and indeed led the Sächsische Staatskapelle in the concert barn (or the concert marquee) in Gohrisch from 2010 to 2013, and was awarded the third International Shostakovich Prize by the Shostakovich Gohrisch Foundation in 2012. An award-winning album of live festival recordings, released in 2017 (Berlin Classics), features the music of Arvo Pärt (1935), Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-1996), and Shostakovich, including the 1948 song cycle, From Jewish Folk Poetry, op. 79, which was composed following Shostakovich’s denunciation of the Zhdanov Decree; it had to wait until 1955 to receive its premiere performance. Jurowski championed such repressed works, making it something of his life’s mission to uncover and present the pieces which an insidious combination of politics, history, nationalistic fervour, and ideological intransigence forced longtime silence, ignorance, misperception upon. Born in Moscow in 1945 but with Ukrainian roots, the conductor was a champion of bringing rarely heard (and even more rarely recorded) works to the fore, as much out of a sense of civic duty as artistic curiosity, something that stayed with him and was inherited by his children, pianist/vocal coach Maria; conductors Vladimir, and Dmitri. It is a family rich in artistic lineage as much as intellectual probing, as concerned with present exploration as much embracing the past, and looking to the future not with a worried sigh, but a defiant, direct stare.
This year’s festival is dedicated to the memory of Michail Jurowski, whose memory will be most poignantly marked on Sunday (3 July), when youngest son Dmitri Jurowski leads the Saxon State Orchestra Dresden in a programme of works by Silvestrov and Shostakovich, including the world premieres of Michail Jurowski’s arrangement of the latter composer’s The Human Comedy op.37 (1934) for concert orchestra, and Dmitri Jurowski’s arrangement of Six Poems by Marina Tsvetaeva opera.143a (1973) with soprano Evelina Dobračeva and chamber orchestra. The transposition of voice feels somehow very right for an artist like Dmitri Jurowski, a cellist with an innate feeling for vocal expression, both human and instrumental. Over the past two decades, he has led over one hundred different opera productions for a range of celebrated houses, including Bayerische Staatsoper, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Opéra de Paris, Teatro Real Madrid, Gran Teatre del Liceu, Teatro La Fenice, Grand Théâtre Geneva, Lyric Opera Chicago, Israeli Opera Tel Aviv, and the Moscow Bolshoi Theatre. From 2011 to 2016 he was was General Music Director of the Flemish Opera Antwerp / Ghent. Jurowski’s history with opera does not obscure his deep sensitivity to (and with) orchestral scores – he has worked with the BBC Philharmonic Manchester, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the Bruckner Orchestra Linz, Tonkünstler Orchestra in Vienna, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra Stockholm, the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra, the Dresden Philharmonic, the Hong Kong Philharmonic and Shanghai Philharmonic, to name a few. One of my own favourite recordings features the works of Hungarian composer Ernst von Dohnányi (1877–1960) with Jurowski leading the Sinfonieorchester Wuppertal (Cybele, 2018). With iron-hand-in-velvet-glove confidence, the conductor coaxes a luscious lyricism from the string section in Symphonic Minutes for orchestra op.36 (1933), a lyricism that is carried through into conversational woodwind exchange so lovingly conveyed in the piece’s second movement Rapsodia: Andante, and manifest in an energetic final Rondo: Presto, which is resplendent with busy strings and Jurowski’s repeated emphasis on cross-sectional conversation, allowing the drama which arises naturally from and within it to direct, turn a corner, then another; balance is thoughtfully maintained, but not at the expense of spirit; seriousness is equally present, but not without an equal dose of play.
Theatre, like music, would seem to be a part of the Jurowski family’s creative legacy, which, given the actual as well as artistic ties, only makes sense, given their long connection with many celebrated theatre artists, as well as Dmitri Shostakovich himself. The Human Comedy, composed for a 1934 stage adaptation of Balzac’s immense 19th century work by Russian writer Pavel Sukhotin (1884-1935), the mix of lightness and uncertainty of Balzac’s Paris, its surface charm hiding an anxious underbelly. The Six Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva possess their own form of drama, its power imparted via the fulsomeness of the poet’s vowels and consonants and the ways Shostakovich writes in, through, and around them. In listening to recordings, one is constantly confronted with the question of inner and outer ‘voices’, both vocal and instrumental, by experiences as much spoken as not; the third poem in the cycle (“Hamlet’s Dialogue With His Conscience”) with its ponderings on guilt, responsibility, notions of love and romance, and micro/macro ideas of place, speaks directly to the fourth (“The Poet And The Tsar”) and fifth (“No, The Drum Beat”) with its meditations on private-public faces and paradigms of power within various spheres of influence. The composer’s ever-present internal debates are reflected in this cycle, as much through the words of Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) as through its chewy score, which was recorded by contralto Ortrun Wenkel under the baton of Bernard Haitink and the Concertgebouworkest, released by Decca in 1993. Placing the Six Poems cycle on the same bill as The Human Comedy, written four decades earlier, feels ballsy and somehow, important, particularly in light of ongoing debates related to the various uses and teachings of music, the role of canon, the expectations of audiences, whether music ought to have an “identity” (and if so, what it should be), as well as perceptions of Music As Entertainment (“Unterhaltsmusik”) and (or, more tiresomely, versus) Music As Serious Art (“ernste Musik”). Can Balzac and Tsvetaeva (and Silvestrov, and Shostakovich) share a creative universe? Well, why shouldn’t they? Moreover, how could they not?
The concert barn at the International Shostakovich Days Gohrisch, 2016. Photo: Oliver Killig
The lives and feelings these artists explored in their respective works, the words and sounds they choose for describing those lives and sharing inner thoughts, ask for the very quality Shostakovich himself seemed quite interested in (consciously or not), the thing which is in short supply as much in life as in art, especially at the moment: empathy. I am not a believer in music magically melting barriers; specific contexts (socio-economic, racial, religious) must be taken into account whenever one experiences new sounds – contexts as much as atmospheres, inner and outer, controllable and not. These things exist. Sounds don’t magically ping them away. The ways in which one experiences the work of Silvestrov and Shostakovich (and/or writers and poets) are as relevant as one possessing a background in either’s work, or both, or none. These things are as much related to context as the environment in which one experiences such works, environments filled with all manner of human comedy, tragedy, mediocrity, diversion, novelty, affliction, agenda, and (one hopes) opportunities for contemplation. Ugly circumstances, harsh realities, human life in all its variance, must be recognized. Lived realities, and the inevitable lines they (mostly unconsciously) create do not magically melt; they simply are. It’s up to you to acknowledge them. Thus is art’s role as a vehicle of empathy vital; If we are unwilling to do the actual, real work of feeling another’s experience (much less acknowledging it as real), particularly those who have not had the privilege we have enjoyed (and perhaps do not even recognize), if we do not conscientiously direct imagination toward those foreign experiences which are beyond our direct experience and knowledge (and thus may be unpleasant, unfamiliar, dull, wearying), then what use is theatre, art, music, culture? Leo Tolstoy grappled with this very question in What Is Art? (1897):
The activity of art is based on the fact that a man, receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man’s expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it. To take the simplest example; one man laughs, and another who hears becomes merry; or a man weeps, and another who hears feels sorrow. A man is excited or irritated, and another man seeing him comes to a similar state of mind. By his movements or by the sounds of his voice, a man expresses courage and determination or sadness and calmness, and this state of mind passes on to others. A man suffers, expressing his sufferings by groans and spasms, and this suffering transmits itself to other people; a man expresses his feeling of admiration, devotion, fear, respect, or love to certain objects, persons, or phenomena, and others are infected by the same feelings of admiration, devotion, fear, respect, or love to the same objects, persons, and phenomena. (trans. Aylmer Maude, 1899)
Painter Mark Rothko would later say that “The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.” While such strength and visibility of reaction is personal, and may or may not be warranted (in the age of social media reaction can be more performative than authentic), that doesn’t cancel its validity within a real, lived framework. Empathy is needed in times of strife – in times of war, in times of pandemic, in times of division, separation, hostility, horror, anger, intransigence; it is work, indeed. Empathy is the energetic opposite of whataboutism that so heavily (alas) dominates contemporary discourse, and it is the hardest thing to keep alive, let alone cultivate, when algorithms inspire (and profit from) strong reaction, not slow thought. Consider slow thought, the festival in Gohrisch seems to whisper; slow thought is, very possibly, the very thing that best cultivates empathy. Somehow I can hear Silvestrov, Shostakovich, Balzac, Tsvetaeva, and Michail Jurowski whispering such a suggestion a bit more loudly right now.
And so, amidst such consideration, and one hopes, a related cultivation of empathy within creative realms, is a conversation in which family, culture, creation, grief, poetry, and that sticky, marvellous word “transposition” are all carefully, slowly considered. It was a true privilege and pleasure to speak with Dmitri Jurowski, and to hear, over the course of nearly an hour, his observations and ideas on music, writing, sound, performance, and his father’s influence. I remain grateful for his time and energy.
Why did you choose the Tsvetaeva song cycle – why arrange it it for chamber orchestra?
This work of Dmitri Shostakovich was one of my father’s favourite compositions. The whole concert is dedicated to him – actually the concert, and the whole festival, which he had planned one year ago, was one he was supposed to conduct. So when everything happened of course we decided not to make any changes in the programme – the only thing we did was put in the Tsvetaeva cycle. That was not foreseen; originally it was a Shostakovich violin concerto with the bigger orchestra, but since the pandemic is still going on, the orchestra actually asked to have a work in the programme which is for chamber, not a big group. That was the first thing they asked, and the (the song cycle) was one of his favourite pieces. During his funeral his recording of it was played many times during the day – so we decided to do this. Also there was one little change (to the work itself). It was written for mezzo soprano, but we wanted to do this together with (soprano) Evelina Dobračeva; I know her, we studied together, she was working more with my father than with me, and during all these years they made many projects together. He was like a teacher for her, and it was very important to have her on board for this project, so the only thing we had to do was change the tonalities for the cycle, because for a soprano it’s really too low. That was the only thing we did. The programme’s second half, The Human Comedy, will be a very special thing; it’s a world premiere. The work has been performed in the past of course, but it’ll be the first time the whole music, music for theatre, is done, the way it was played in Moscow in the theatre of Vakhtangov in 1934. That was the only year it was performed in the theatre, so that’s why we had to go and find it all; it was a real adventure to find that material. I spent a lot of time in different archives in Moscow, in the Vakhtangov Theatre, searching for it – I have good friend who is an actor who helped me, and it was a real thrill to find all the notes of the director from that time, his writing on when exactly which part of music was supposed to be played. Luckily they were very bureaucratic in the 1930s, so I could find everything I needed, but it’s still interesting. I’m really thrilled – again, yes, it will be the first time it’s performed.
The Human Comedy has been dismissed in the past as something Shostakovich simply did for the money, but having it in a chamber arrangement also means it forces a reconsideration…
You’re right, it’s becomes very transparent because of that. As to my opinion on its inception, the same thing you can say about Mozart: a lot of music and composers wrote for money. It was normal, they did it for a living, but even what Shostakovich did for the money was great. I think he had a lot of humour, sometimes very black humour, cynical humour, so even with the music he was writing for entertainment, it still becomes, somehow, very biting. And it’s interesting that the problems in the society they were facing in the 1920s and 1930s, I have the feeling many of these things we are facing again. Shostakovich was saying the music, there is actually a great quote of his, that music is the only thing which should survive any wars and any illnesses. I have the feeling now in the beginning of the 21st century we are back in the same situation somehow. We have to somehow prove that art, that music, has the power and the possibility to survive and bring, a little bit, people back together, that’s actually the only thing you can do in this really difficult situation.
Conductor Michail Jurowski leads the Staatskapelle Dresden and cellist Isang Enders at the inaugural International Shostakovich Days Gohrisch in 2010. Photo: Matthias Creutziger
The context in which it is presented is important, your father’s history with the festival being very much part of that context. I’m curious what you think attracted him to this work. I recall him telling me years ago that conducting in America was like a dream for him – something that really wouldn’t be expressed now – and I can only theorize that such an experience, and the related feelings of curiosity and wonder, play into Balzac’s explorations about the variance of human experience, and Shostakovich’s also.
Yes, I’m thinking a lot in the last few months about his relationship to Shostakovich as well. It’s a strange thing, my father had such a close relationship to (the composer) in a human sense, as well as professionally. It was such that I always had the feeling I knew Shostakovich myself, even though it’s not possible. We spoke a lot about Shostakovich from my childhood and now since my father is no longer here I think about this energy he was creating, because you are right, I feel strongly his presence is still here. Even though I’m not able to ask him in real life for advice, I feel it, and it has been like that before when I was in touch with the music of Shostakovich – I was doing a lot of his music throughout my life and always feel an energetic support from him myself, although I didn’t know him. My father would speak about a genetic memory, and I think it’s valuable; he himself had strong genetic memory because of his father and grandfather. The period of The Human Comedy, or when we speak about Balzac and the 19th century, or the first thirty years of 20th century when this piece was written for theatre, those are all periods my father couldn’t know himself, but still a very strong connection existed. And I have the feeling it’s not an accident that history sometimes makes these repetitions – that is also a little bit related to this Human Comedy, to this exchange of tragedy and comedy, this continuance; it never stops.
So the idea of Shostakovich, as with other artists, is that there is no end of the story – there might be the end of somebody’s life, but the whole story will continue with other characters, like a play. So when you feel part of the huge theatrical play, that’s also what people like Shakespeare imagined, then you… have to also create a distance to everything, which is not bad, especially in our days, because it is very difficult to continue and to go on when you are facing really very strong negative things, like war, like illness –so you need a distance to all that.
But you also need immediacy, a sense of relationship to what you watch, what you listen to, the people you spend time with, the food you eat, whatever you consume in whatever forms, and I feel Shostakovich really understood that – your father understood that also. That sense of connection is powerfully manifest in chamber arrangements. How, to your mind, does changing the tonality for voice, and within a chamber configuration, affect understandings of Tsvetaeva’s poetry, and Shostakovich’s music?
The word “transposition” is a great word; it has so much inside of it! I am always curious why we call it, in musical language, a transposition from one tonality or modulation to another one – of course it will be another piece, so I am very curious how this particular piece will sound. Every tonality has a colour; every tonality has a character, so when you change tonalities you change a lot of things – that’s clear. But we have to take into account that every piece of music we hear, from Baroque times or from Classical times, that all the tonalities – all the G Minors and whatnot – from that period are not the same as now because of the tuning, so when you start to play this music in the way it was done at the time it was written, then you understand it’s really another feeling. But it doesn’t mean you have to do that – you can play it also in the modern tonalities, with modern instruments. The times are changing and the acoustics are changing. What I can say about the Tsvetaeva work is, I have a feeling for now anyway, that the music itself remains dark, the cycles of Shostakovich remain dark, even if we put everything one tone higher, but the transference of the text now means it might be even stronger because of that. When you take the very high voices with the very high notes you can barely understand them.
For example, I’m talking now a little bit lower, because there is also microphone so I don’t have to raise my voice so much, but if I’m talking to somebody, the minute I speak a little bit higher, the attention, the whole energy, changes – it’s like a string pulled tighter, the whole connection is stronger, right at this moment. It’s not better or worse, it’s just a different kind of energy, so I’m really curious how (the song cycle) will be, but it’s my feeling that the darkness becomes more transparent there. Also the number of musicians onstage is really not big, you can do it with a bigger group, but for me, I’m not a pianist, I’m a cellist – I was doing a lot of chamber music and a lot of soloistic music, especially, so it’s a different feeling. My best memories were the cycles of Shostakovich with the Blok poetry which is written for piano trio and voice, and there were movements where you had just cello and voice together, and this type of intimacy where you have this one voice and one instrument, for me is something I always try to aim for even when I have a big symphony to perform. I’m always searching for these intimate moments when you can really produce this kind of tension. It’s like when you have a crowd of people and everyone is talking and then suddenly everyone is silent and you have two people looking at each and talking to each other – that’s powerful. This silence is extremely strong. And for somebody like Tsvetaeva, her work really asks for silence, even if she’s screaming or crying, it’s not for mainstream television, let’s say.
Some translations capture that relationship between silence and music better than others; the repetitions in her writing are staccato in some ways – so deliberate, so rhythmic, so musical.
They really are…
I wonder if people miss that musicality because of the drama, but she’s asking as much for a subconscious understanding through that musicality as a conscious one through the words themselves, and I think Shostakovich captures both in this song cycle…
Yes that’s true!
.. now I wanted to ask you, these chamber sounds, vocal sounds, ensemble sounds – the ways you perceive sound, and write, conduct, and transpose, are they informed by the cello?
Yes, you’re right; they are. I have to say, my biggest learning, one of my best schooling in working with singers was by playing cello, because it is the instrument which has the biggest connection to the human voice. It includes the whole range of all possible sounds, from bass to soprano, in one instrument. I remember I had an ensemble, a chamber group, we performed with a baritone, me as a cellist, and a pianist, we were doing many arrangements, not only opera arias but we were also playing, lots of duets for example, of Schumann and Schubert, where one voice was played by cello and one was singing, and there was always a moment where you consciously lost this – like “where is the voice and where is the cello?” This is also what Shostakovich really did great, his understanding of sounds, of the voice as an instrument, was really central. So when vocalists deal with Shostakovich, they have to really think like an instrument, especially for performing his music, it’s a great need. Of course it helps when you have, generally, great poetry. In Italian opera you sometimes have a kind of text which is, I don’t want to say it’s useless, but of course you have it sometimes where the words are really not important but the vocal line is, and that’s something else – but when you deal with Russian or German or also sometimes Italian, but another type of style, like something from Petrarch or Dante, something where the text is leading, it’s obvious how the music has to be.
That’s why it’s so great with Shostakovich: the music has to be leading and carrying at the same time. And especially when you see the amazing last movement of the cycle, when it’s about Akhmatova, so Tsvetaeva is writing about Akhmatova, through Shostakovich’s musical line, it’s just… you have so many incredible people in one little musical bar… it’s immense. For a conductor, a musician, a listener, it doesn’t matter – you have to show it to others, you don’t have to show yourself, you don’t have to pretend your art is higher or mightier than anything those people were creating. It’s not about you. That’s why it’s so important to be a little bit aside, and to be a little bit under this, let’s say, sound, still controlling everything, still producing your language, and with your capacities, but! This is too fragile, all this music and chamber music generally is very fragile, and in combination with poetry of Tsvetaeva and music of Shostakovich, you can’t just throw it somewhere; you have to touch it as if it’s crystal. That’s the best possibility, for everyone … to hear, to listen, to inhale it. That’s why I am always looking forward, so much, to all these sorts of concerts, but energetically they take… it’s a much bigger challenge than a huge symphony or opera. It’s sometimes much more difficult to produce something like that.
Your use of the word “fragility” brings Silvestrov’s work to mind. He is on the programme with Shostakovich on Sunday. How do you see the connection?
The interesting thing is I performed Silvestrov in my time as a cellist many years ago. His work is always very much related to beauty, and it’s very honest music; he was never trying to pretend that he was the big modernist of the 20th century. Somebody like Arvo Pärt is also not a modernist but is very much about the spirit of music. I know Pärt very well, we spoke a lot about music, and you can feel how important the spiritual energy has always been for him in his life, and not only in his music – but with Silvestrov, it’s different; it’s so simple with him. Of course now the situation has changed. He’s not the only existing Ukrainian composer but he’s the big one being performed. He’s the oldest, for sure – luckily it’s still alive, and he will be present on Sunday. For musicians performing his music now, you can imagine it’s even more a responsibility now than it was twenty years ago, and still, I am absolutely sure it is so important for him as a composer, and for us as interpreters, to play music, to make music, to show the artistic side of Silvestrov. Shostakovich was much more political than Silvestrov, of course, they were much different times in which Shostakovich lived. But he was somebody who was a fighter; he was always fighting crises. Somehow, luckily for him, he didn’t need to invent anything; it was already present in reality. Shostakovich generally works very well in combination with other composers of the Soviet Union of the 20th century, but with a little bit different way of energy.
It’s interesting that Silvestrov is being honoured at the festival this year, and that his work is on this programme with the Shostakovich chamber arrangements.
Especially the Tsvetaeva work, which comes directly after the Silvestrov piece. His work is chamber music, and it’s about feeling, about atmosphere. With Shostakovich there is a script, always, there is a clear storyline, even if it’s not… even if you play Shostakovich’s chamber music without words, still, yes, he is the narrator of the story. Silvestrov, it was always my feeling, he’s a witness of atmosphere, and he’s sharing that atmosphere. So that’s why I think there is a good link between them.
He’s an observer of atmosphere and putting it out there has its own kind of interpretation of script…
Yes.
… it’s one that is being written as it’s being played, and it changes all the time. That’s what I hear in Silvestrov, not a narrative but a sort of Beckett play where there’s a very pervasive mood that is inherent to overall understanding. I wonder if that’s another connection with the work of Shostakovich, that development of feeling with inner and outer worlds.
That’s about performing, though. Performing must include a script – whatever you are doing, it must have a certain sense. Sometimes you have a kind of clear help from the composer who is writing everything already, so you have just to comment; in other cases you have to create a script for yourself, and with the music of Silvestrov it’s not difficult. Especially in the 21st century – and the 20th they had it as well – you have movies, when you know how a movie can work, and you know what the perfect music is for it. That’s essentially what Shostakovich said about Silvestrov – they knew each other of course. Silvestrov is 84 years old now, he knew Shostakovich, who was always very polite to his colleagues, and had a lot of respect for people like Schnittke and Kancheli. I remember hearing from the widow of Shostakovich, from Irina, I spoke to her two weeks ago about this concert, and she said, “Yes, he always respected Silvestrov, he said (Silvestrov’s) music is amazing especially when somebody knows how to paint.” So somehow it’s an interesting way to describe his music.
So if Shostakovich is Kandinsky, Silvestrov is Mark Rothko?
Good point, yes.
Experiencing all these “paintings” in a live setting on Sunday, one which is so historically loaded, and especially with you doing it, feels profound, though it must be a little daunting for you?
What do you mean?
Parental figures who give their children deep connections to art can cast large shadows, as my own mother did; after she passed and I had to go do things in public with some kind of connection to her, it was like walking into a room naked; I learned that one has to draw a line between what one gives the public and saves for one’s self.
Well, you know Catherine, when I chose this profession and started to conduct, having my father and my brother, these important and successful conductors already, I knew I would be kind of naked my entire life. So that’s nothing new to me. I’ve done this job for seventeen years now. The only thing which is kind of changing for myself, not for other people, is that I feel my… responsibility, first of all, for this profession since he passed away, is now bigger than it was before. Because now I have not only to be just to be on a certain professional level, we all have to achieve this for all our lives, but I have also to respect and show respect to his memory, you know? And respect to memory, responsibility for somebody who is not there anymore, physically at least, for me it’s now an experience to say that somehow it’s even bigger, but it gives you more energy.
I remember the day he passed away, on the 19th of March, this day I was in my theatre in Novosibirsk and the next day I had Traviata to conduct, not the easiest opera to do, especially… but the thing is… whatever piece I would conduct, whatever I would take, my father had such a huge repertoire and had done so many things in his life, so there is always a kind of link to him. And I have to be honest, I didn’t have so much energy to go onstage of course at that time, but I did it, because I knew he would really appreciate it at this precise moment. And I mean I always have, it’s one of the main reasons I do this profession, is that I have very special feelings for singers – that’s the most fragile and most sensitive thing because you have an instrument here, inside. I always trying to treat the singers with a necessary sensitivity, but now I have the feeling it’s even more, because I know they have to produce out their emotions they have inside, you know? So this experience is something, and it’s the thing that will stay with me forever. I know of course there is always a period of grief you have to go through and some of your parents or the people close to you die, and somehow it’s over, you’re over this hill, and you still have the memories but there’s a distance…
… I can tell you the grief comes back, but in a different form.
Yes, I have the feeling when we talk about him, it will never be completely distant to me. We are doing the same profession and my life and profession are the same thing. There will be, always, a strong connection, and probably through the years, it will become even stronger.
Top: Dmitri Jurowski leads a rehearsal with the Staatskapelle at the Semper Opera. Photo: Matthias Creutziger
I learned of conductor Michail Jurowski’s passing yesterday morning, March 19th, 2022. What a blessing, to have met him and later spent time in conversation. Initially connecting at a concert (where else) we subsequently made arrangements for a proper interview, with him in Berlin, and me (then) in Bucharest. Kind, patient, generous, and full of stories, he was very keen to share his thoughts and experiences on everything from meeting Stravinsky to pondering the ways in which compromise and authenticity affect the work of being a conductor and artist. He was someone who took time with his responses, broke out big grins now and again, asked me to repeat things (“the sound on my computer is so bad!”). In other words, Jurowski was warm, human, and unpretentious.
I confess to feeling like a fraud at a few points, battling through the anxiety I could feel rising in waves now and again: who was I, after all, this eager-beaver Canadian without a music degree, asking such an accomplished person such questions? How long I had incubated that question, one of a perceived lack which had, up to news of the maestro’s passing, burnished into an acid shame that had become a near-unconscious part of every day being. I don’t fit in because I can’t! It was a shrieking demon of self-doubt.
In learning of Jurowski’s passing I was reminded of a moment when that demon was, if not silenced, content to sit in a corner, only making the occasional ruckus. Some days are better than others in facing down such a creature. Sometimes it shrieks, tells me I ought best quit writing about music. Imposter syndrome for writers is real; equally real is the rejection one feels from lacking what all the other members of the club seem to so easily possess. I am learning to negotiate such details and related feelings, to see a much broader picture with far less self-doubt there are things happening in the world. I am slowly learning to kick the demon’s tail out of the way as best I can, with a reminder (in my mother’s voice) that I’ve always been an outsider anyway; why should now be any different?
Maestro didn’t care about my perceived deficiencies, or if he did, he didn’t let on. Get the lead out, as my mother would say. The last thirty hours or so has been spent, in large part, ruminating on that 2019 conversation with the conductor, listening to his wide variety of recordings (from ones of his own father to those by Khancheli, Shostakovich, Schulhoff, and Lehar too), and then looking at a litany of news items, one more horrible than the next. That he should pass now, of all times, seems especially tragic. Moscow-born and with Ukrainian-Jewish roots, Jurowski belonging to a generation that looked to the West as a source of hope and even inspiration. It seems hard to believe, and yet. Jurowski didn’t buy the reductive Them vs. Us narrative made so popular (so widely if unconsciously carried) promulgated through Putin-era politics. His focus was European and Slavic repertoire, but he was well aware of administration stesses and funding realities and what they all meant, having held official positions in various organizations (Leipzig, Berlin, Dresden). He was highly aware of postwar perceptions of Russian-ness versus its lived reality, and painfully aware of what it was to be an outsider. He knew about audiences; as he told me in our chat, the one in Cleveland was among the most receptive he’d experienced. He didn’t carry heavily sentimentalized notions of his home country, or if he did, he didn’t let on about them publicly. (Through such a lens the final image of Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia begins to make an awful sense, but more on that in a future post.) “My family has been through a lot,” he said, speaking about his father toward the end of our chat. I remember he shook his head, letting out a little sigh.
Whatever memories he did carry were firmly in the past, and not meant to be guides of the present, creatively or otherwise. It is painful to think he only enjoyed his American debut in 2019, at the age of 73, a few months before we spoke. Jurowski cared about a great many things, but what he didn’t care about where I happened to be from, what that might imply, or what that could mean in European classical music circles. (The recent cries from the continent, along the lines of, “Mon Dieu, don’t import your North American culture wars here!” seem especially absurd.) Maestro didn’t seem to care about my perceived lack, as someone born in North America: of the “right” background; of the “right” degrees; of the “right” books / movies / theatre / albums having been consumed in childhood / youth; of the “right” linguistic skills; of the “right” cultural knowledge. All of these things seem to hold a certain weight to some in the current cultural milieu, ironically, in an era that is (the marketing tells us) meant to be more inclusive. He was curious, and in today’s climate, a symbol of what Russian culture can, should be, and maybe still is: curious, yes, but also open, inclusive, generous.
Jurowski asked me again in that conversation, just as he’d done when we met: how did I know his work? Through his wondrous recording of Moses (by way of soprano Chen Reiss, who appears on the recording), released in 2018. How did I know about Kancheli? Well, Youtube makes sometimes-magical suggestions. And Pärt? Via the 1999 Meltdown Festival programmed by Nick Cave; I was living in London at the time and intrigued by Cave’s mix of rock, punk, blues, and classical. Isn’t that kind of mix the way music should be experienced? Maestro was flattered at my enthusiasm, my admitting to exploring things I didn’t grow up with, what I want to call my Canadian moxie. He was happy to exchange ideas, happy to listen to what I heard in those albums and others, keen to know the paths I’d taken thereafter. What’s more, he offered suggestions of things to listen to and watch. I left that conversation feeling not stupid but encouraged. What a refreshing, welcome feeling.
That sense didn’t occur because of some magical bridge that had been constructed over the course of our 70-minute exchange. Music is not, to my mind, a universal language; it does not always build bridges. To believe it does, or can, is to ignore the many varied landscapes and circumstances and realities of human experience – varied perceptions, inequalities, streams of thought, beliefs (and related intransigence); sadness, loss, engagements and learned behaviours. None of these things magically vanish via romantic artsy lenses, or should vanish, particularly now (universalism is a nice theory for and by the privileged) – but the thing music asks us to do, in its best form, matters: to use your imagination, and sometimes, do that in the active exercise of empathy, to make the leap across a chasm, sans bridge. Bridges are for the lazy. Get your feet dirty, and all the better in someone else’s reality. Some (composers, conductors, singers, ensembles) are more skilled at highlighting this than others. As listeners, we are often asked to imagine: other people, other worlds, the composer composing, the musicians playing, the maestro on the podium, the faces and hands of engineers and producers and audiences. Of course, one imagines one’s self sometimes too, as one or another – that’s the social media reality of navel-gazing, but more than that, it’s also a reflection of the human need to dream.
The music I love best is the sort that gently requests a look outside, away from self –and simultaneously within it, honestly enough to throw that shell away in order to glimpse another world, another time, another life, without attempting to understand. Some things don’t make sense, because they can’t. This has been something I think the last two years has constantly reminded us of; loss doesn’t ask to be understood. We cannot understand, we cannot control it; we can only mitigate its effects, minimize the transmission of grief, think, consider, act – stare at the chasm, wonder if we have the right boots to wade in. Sometimes the right sounds, at the right time, blow the fuse on the ouroboros of suffering. It isn’t the music doing that, it’s what what we’re bringing to it. Perhaps we’ll light some tiny spark, somewhere. Perhaps the chasm will fill in, however slightly and temporarily.
We also have the choice not to move at all. A quietly-yawning compassion deficit, prevalent throughout modern life and made noticeable amidst pandemic, is now writ horribly, painfully large through war. I’ve been writing about this lately and how it relates to the classical industry (including as part of an essay series; Part 1 is already up), contemplating its implications and origins a great deal – reading, watching, trying to understand various worlds, minds, lives, and ways of thinking and being, all of them largely powered on this horrendous deficit of compassion (Andrey Kurkov, Hannah Arendt, and Ingeborg Bachmann provide a few clues, along with the films of Yuri Bykov and Andrey Zvyagintsev). I have been avoiding and simultaneously diving straight into news, furiously hoovering, barely eating, avoiding mirrors, slowly completing student marking, booking a trip, cancelling a trip, pecking at writing and tossing around giving it up altogether; eyeballing graduate school, smirking at cat photos, and looking out the window at the pond across the street. The signs of life are there, though the colors are still muted; the geese have yet to return, but the robins are already out, bobbing along the edges of low bushes. I want to flick parked cars and noisy voices away like dirty crumbs. Perhaps a little bit of faith is required, hard and expensive it may be; perhaps a bit of patience needs be extended. Loss is a huge a hole to navigate, and it comes with consistently rough edges. There is no such thing as the “right” kind of grieving; there is only grief, and it takes as long as it must. In the meantime, one remembers, and keeps remembering.
And so I remember Michail Jurowski – his kindness, his generosity, his curiosity, and the ways in which his work touched so many. Seeing the various tributes of late, I am struck at their shared chords, the ones sounding out those qualities which are so precious, the ones which have become so scarce. He was Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish, a musician, a husband, a father, a grandfather, a friend, a confidant, an inspiration, a mentor, an artist; he only made it to America once, but oh, lucky Cleveland. He affected so many, so much, and I hope his spirit lives on not only through his family but through those who worked with him, spoke with him, and those who listen to his work with renewed curiosity and enthusiasm. His mind, and his spirit, knew the notes as if burned into the heart; as he told me in 2019, he “composes” them in a sense, himself, every time he opens a score. He never used such knowledge as a weapon, but instead, as an umbrella. I imagine myself standing under its shade now, hearing the sounds of Kancheli, Rubinstein, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky, and those of his father too, and I imagine things blooming, slowly, however briefly, waiting out the storm.
Thank you, maestro. I wish we could have spoken one more time.
Update 22 June 2020: The Canadian Opera Company has cancelled its 2020 autumn season. The conversation with COC General Director Alexander Neef, below, took place in May 2020, prior to the official announcement.
Cancellation, closure, calibration: these are the elements at work within an arts industry trying desperately to stay afloat in the middle of a pandemic. What to cancel? What to postpone? What to calibrate – or recalibrate – as the situation warrants? Which companies will be around in year, and which will close? Some organizations are busily preparing for presentations of old favorites within the context of a new normal dictated by the coronavirus, acting, consciously or not, as beacons of an industry facing an immense and undeniable transformation.
The annual Salzburg Festival, for instance, will be going forwards in a modified form as of August 1st. On the slate is Elektra (with Aušrine Stundyte in the lead and Franz Welser-Möst on the podium, in a production by Krzysztof Warlikowski) and a revival of Così fan tutte, as well as four theatre works (including the world premiere of Zdeněk Adamec by Peter Handke) and numerous concerts, including a Beethoven cycle by pianist Igor Levit. In Germany, Deutsche Oper Berlin (DOB) has also made adjustments. The company recently announced a 90-minute chamber presentation of Das Rheingold in its very own car park, running for five performances starting this Friday (12 June), and featuring twenty-two musicians and twelve singers. The production, by Jonathan Dove (who also did orchestration) and director Graham Vick for the Birmingham Opera Company, is not the first presentation by DOB in such an environment; in 2014 the company presented Iannis Xenakis’ Oresteia in the very same parking deck. Wagner’s first opera in his epic Ring Cycle had been originally planned as a fully staged work from director Stefan Herheim, a premiere which has since been postponed. The upcoming version, adhering to the guidelines set out by the Senate of Berlin, has a €5 entry fee and a pay-what-you-can structure, with audience member contact information being recorded and a 1.5 metre distance enforced; moreover, masks will be required when entering and exiting, toilets will be accessible, and (rather crucially) small bottles of “beverages” will be made available to visitors.
Such an ambitious undertaking underlines the very thin lines that currently exist between possibilities and probabilities. Those who can are doing their best, in the most creative and safe methods presently allowable; others are bending and flexing in ways heretofore unimaginable six months ago. The Metropolitan Opera cancelled its autumn season and will be reopening (ostensibly) on December 31st, although it continues to offer a revolving slate of productions online. Looking over their latest release, it’s hard to not think of the artists who were set to make their debuts at the house this autumn, either in a role or with the company itself: soprano Christine Goerke was set to sing her first fully-staged Isolde in a revival of Marius Treliński’s production of Tristan und Isolde; 74-year-old conductor Michail Jurowski was to have made his Met Opera debut leading Prokofiev’s The Fiery Angel. On the other side of the ocean, the Royal Opera House, itself in dire straits, is getting set to launch a new series, Live From Covent Garden, on Saturday (June 13), which will complement its extant online offerings of opera and ballet. Curated by Sir Antonio Pappano, Music Director of The Royal Opera, Oliver Mears, Director of Opera, and Kevin O’Hare, Director of The Royal Ballet, the event (set to be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on June 15th) will feature performances by baritone Gerald Finley, tenor Toby Spence, soprano Louise Alder, and the premiere of a new ballet choreographed by Royal Ballet Resident Choreographer Wayne McGregor. The following two presentations of the program, on the 20th and 27th of June respectively, will be available on a pay-per-view basis. Like every company, a prominent “Donate Now” button is displayed on the ROH homepage, one whose request will no doubt grow in urgency as the autumn season inches ever closer.
Rosario La Spina as Radames (background) and Sondra Radvanovsky (foreground) as Aida in the Canadian Opera Company’s production of Aida, 2010. Photo: Michael Cooper
For Canadian Opera Company (COC) audiences, the fall season is just as fraught with uncertainty. In late March the company made the difficult if necessary decision to cancel the remainder of its 2019-2020 season, which was to include revivals of The Flying Dutchman and a wildly divisive staging of Aida by Tim Albery. Bereft of the gilded visuals so frequently attached to presentations of the famed Verdi work, the production had been anticipated for the reactions it might have provoked a full decade after its premiere. Would Toronto audiences have grown to accept Albery’s arresting vision? Would it have been so upsetting in 2020? Will it even be staged again, now that COVID seems, for some, to have put a damper on even perceivably risque productions and programming? The opportunity to discover the elasticity of the COC audience was, alas, lost this spring but another chance, possibly, awaits in the fall. The company is set to present Wagner’s Parsifal – the first presentation of the opera in the COC’s history. A co-production with Opéra de Lyon, The Metropolitan Opera, and the COC, the highly abstract (and at times, very bloody) François Girard-helmed work was presented in February 2013 at The Met, to widespread acclaim. Owing to the monumental nature of the production, the company launched a fundraising campaign with various levels of support named after elements of the opera. Tenors Christopher Ventris and Viktor Antipenko share the title role in the COC production, with Johan Reuter as Amfortas, Tanja Ariane Baumgartner as Kundry, and Robert Pomakov as Klingsor; COC Music Director Johannes Debus conducts. Opening night is scheduled for September 25th.
A scene from The Metropolitan Opera’s production of Parsifal, 2013. Photo: Ken Howard
According to Canadian Opera Company General Director Alexander Neef, those plans are still intact. Neef, who is also Artistic Director of the Santa Fe Festival, had been set to leave the COC at the end of the 2020-2021 season and become General Director of the Opéra national de Paris. The company is facing €40 million in losses this year alone, from both the pandemic as well as numerous strikes which occurred before the lockdown. The Opéra’s current Director, Stéphane Lissner, announced in an interview with Le Monde on June 11th, 2020 that he’s ending his mandate at the end of 2020, emphasizing the extreme nature of the situation brought on by the coronavirus pandemic: “nous ne sommes pas dans une situation de passation normale.” (“we are not in a normal handover situation.”) Neef confirmed in a COC release the following day that he “certainly did not anticipate Lissner’s early departure and that also confirmed not leaving Canada just yet. Neef says he “has not yet had any formal discussions – either with the Paris Opera or members of our Board of Directors – about accelerating the start of my engagement in Paris. Moreover, the ongoing global health crisis makes it difficult to envision how any significant changes to the intended timeline could be accommodated.”
Back in May, Lissner spoke to the unfeasible economics around presenting opera at the Garnier and Bastille theatres within prescribed social distancing mandates. France, like most other locales, requires audience members to be two meters (6.5 feet) apart. “Le protocole [proposé pour reprendre les spectacles] est impraticable : impraticable pour le public, pour les artistes et pour les salariés. Suppression des entractes, c’est impossible, faire entrer 2700 personnes en respectant les distances, c’est impossible, la distance dans l’orchestre, dans les chœurs, c’est impossible,” he noted in early May (“The protocol [proposed to take over the shows] is impractical: impractical for the public, for the artists and for the employees. Eliminating intermissions is impossible, bringing in 2700 people while respecting distances is impossible, the distance in the orchestra, in the choirs, is impossible.”). Will there even be a 2020-2021 season for Opéra national de Paris? The report in Le Monde indicates, if not an outright cancellation, then a greatly altered one, with an emphasis on revivals, including La traviata (led by James Gaffigan, in a production by Simone Stone), the ballet La Bayadère, and the ever-popular Carmen, with Domingo Hindoyan on the podium, in an acclaimed staging by Calixto Bieito. The Bastille is not set to reopen until November 24th, and the Garnier in late December. A planned new Ring Cycle staging is off the books. “Fin 2020, il est probable que l’Opéra de Paris n’aura plus de fonds de roulement” (By the end of 2020, it is likely that the Paris Opera will no longer have working capital”), Lissner told Le Monde. “C’est pourquoi, à partir de janvier 2021, j’ai choisi de m’effacer afin qu’il n’y ait plus qu’un seul patron à bord.” (“That’s why, from January 2021, I chose to step aside so that there would only be one boss on board.”)
The interior of the Palais Garnier. Photo: mine. Please do not reproduce without permission.
That “seul patron” is shouldering a lot of responsibility right now. Notwithstanding this unfolding and weighty situation, plus the cancellation of the COC’s spring season and the uncertainty of its 2020-2021 season, Neef was also very recently heavily involved in negotiations to obtain recorded COC performances for online broadcast during the quarantine – hardly a simple task, as music writer Lydia Perovic ably outlined in her smart investigation into the paucity of online Canadian opera content for Opera Canada magazine in 2018. Yet in our conversation last month, before the Paris news, Neef was his characteristically cool, unflappable self. The COC head honcho and I have spoken many times over the years, most recently last summer following the announcement of his Paris appointment. The German-born Neef has always been direct if highly diplomatic, eloquent but possessing an undeniable edge of steel. With an encyclopaedic knowledge of history (not surprising, given he graduated from Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen with a Master of Arts in Latin Philology and Modern History) and a solid if wholly unsurprising knack for thoughtful casting (honed during his time as casting director at the Paris Opera from 2004 to 2008), Neef is as much passionate as level-headed; that passion shows itself in strong, well-observed opinions and observations, and then translates itself into elegantly understated wisdom. Having started at the Salzburg Festival with famed opera administrator Gerard Mortier, Neef went on to work at the Ruhrtriennale, New York City Opera, and later, Opéra nationale de Paris, before arriving in Toronto in 2008. In the decade-plus of his directorship with the COC, Neef has brought a number of celebrated international opera figures to the Four Seasons Centre stage: singers (Ferruccio Furlanetto, Anita Rachvellishvilli, Patricia Racette, Stefan Vinke, Luca Pisaroni, conductors (Carlo Rizzi, Speranza Scapucci, Paolo Carignani, Harry Bicket, Patrick Lange), directors (Peter Sellars, Dmitri Tcherniakov, Claus Guth, Robert Wilson, Spanish theatre collective Els Comediants). He has consistently championed the work of tenor Russell Thomas, who has appeared on multiple occasions on the stage of the Four Seasons Centre (The Tales of Hoffman in 2012, Carmen in 2016 Norma in 2016, Otello in 2019, and was to have performed in Aida this spring), along with that of soprano Sondra Radvanovsky (two operas in Donizetti’s Tudor trilogy as well as Norma), bass baritone Gerald Finley (Falstaff, 2014, Otello, 2019) and soprano Christine Goerke, whose Brunnhilde in the company’s year-by-year presentations unfolding Wagner’s Ring Cycle won her acclaim and, like Radvanovsky, Finley, and Thomas, bolstered a fierce following.
In mid-May, Neef took part in an online chat hosted by the Toronto-based International Resource Centre for the Performing Arts (IRCPA) in which he was asked about how he perceived the coronavirus pandemic was affecting the opera community, singers in particular; I was keen to hear more from Neef and was grateful when, not a week later, he and I had a lengthy discussion – about pandemic, Parsifal, Paris, and, to start, the question of risk and its place in the industry moving forwards.
In light of the damage the pandemic is doing in the arts world, some believe that opera programming and presentation will become more conservative, that any perceived risk in either is off the table for the foreseeable future. What’s your take – can opera afford to break eggs in a pandemic/post-pandemic environment?
To stick with your analogy: I think there is no art if you don’t break the eggs. And I think since we don’t have any live art in our lives right now, breaking eggs becomes even more important in the future. I got this really interesting manifesto in my mailbox this morning – and it’s easier to say this when you run a little company rather than when you have X number of employees you want to keep feeding – but, it says, “time to commission new works from young composers; time to ally with other theatre, cinema, dance, performing arts centres; time to follow the example of cinema, the storytelling medium that came after opera and was predicted by great opera composers” and so on. When you’re a small, flexible structure, then yes, those boats are easy to turn around; you can be much more reactive. The bigger your apparatus becomes, the harder it is to change because there are a lot of people who need to make that change with you, but in general, I’ve never believed and still don’t believe it, that going back to more traditional approaches, to what we consider “safe” repertoire, will do anything for the future sector – the only thing it will do is make people get more tired of you. Or, to say it another way, how many times will you need to see the same production of La bohème, even though it might be with different people? At some point you may say, “I’ve seen this five times over the last ten years; give me one reason why I should go again?” I think what we’ve been trying to do is to space things out enough, or to hold off with programming, so there’s still for us a reason to do (a certain opera), other than the reason that it’s popular repertoire…
Or it’s nostalgia…
… or it’s nostalgia, yes. Also, our audience is not eternal. Like everybody who deals with an audience, we are always interested in refreshing – we want a relationship with our public where we don’t always confirm what they think opera is.
That’s a big hurdle, especially for companies who play into clichés. How do you counter it?
It is a hurdle, but I continue to believe, and this crisis hasn’t changed my opinion so far, that what’s really important is people know what kind of company they’re coming to; you need to have a spine. And again, I always say, and have said: indifference is our biggest enemy. If people think, “Oh, this is the same old thing” or they leave a show and can’t remember, ten minutes later, what it was all about… well, obviously we want people to like what we do, but I prefer they hate (a production) with a passion than be indifferent to it. Unfortunately we didn’t get to do that revival of Aida that people were itching to see, for very different reasons!
I distinctly recall someone saying to me at the opening in 2010 that “it’s actually just fine if you close your eyes.”
Think what you want about that production but ten years later people still talk about it. That’s what I mean when I say indifference is our biggest enemy. Obviously there was a lot of rejection at the time but also a lot of people came to it and said, “Wow, I had no clue opera could be so current, and about me, and not just stuffy and purely representational.”
There were also younger people I know who went and later said, “That was my first opera experience and I wanted grandeur and camels!”
… and other people walked away from it thinking, “Where has this art form been all my life?!” So it’s hard to say what’s interesting to one and not to the other. People think about young audiences that, very often, those are the ones who want the avant-garde, but I think it’s not necessarily true; sometimes they’re way more conservative than someone who’s been subscribing for twenty-five years. It’s a complicated thing! But just because you are older does not mean your taste in art is more conservative – that’s not how it works.
Jonas Kaufmann as Parsifal in the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Parsifal, 2013. Photo: Ken Howard
There’s been so much effort on the part of classical organizations to try and get this mythical young audience, but I feel as if the pandemic has forced them to realize the importance of a far wider cultivation.
In the end you can’t afford to ignore any part of your audience. Right now there’s an issue with at-risk populations; a young audience is not seen as so much at-risk (for COVID), but I think that shouldn’t mean we totally abandon our older audiences. The whole discussion for me is kind of moot anyway, because you cannot separate the discussion of keeping an audience safe from keeping the performers and staff safe, and while that might not be exactly the precisely same measures, if you can’t combine both, then it’s going to be very hard to have a show. Right now the pit is a very dangerous work environment. We’re in a lucky position in Canada and the COC – we won’t be going back into rehearsals before two-and-a-half months from now, so we will have better information in two weeks, four weeks, six weeks, that will allow us to make better decisions. The big hiatus we have now, I’m rather grateful for that.
Some in the Toronto opera world are wondering what will happen to Parsifal – it’s been a long road to having it staged at the Four Seasons Centre.
What I say is: I simply don’t want to make that decision right now. And I don’t feel I have to. Right now we’re living in an equation with too many variables and those variables make it hard to solve that equation. There’s already some measures falling in place in terms of public health advisories, and some of the variables are starting to be eliminated. Today I read something stating that essentially the virus is mostly circulating in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) and the rest of Ontario is under control – which is not great news for the GTA, but it’s true in all urban centres – Montréal, Paris, all those places – it’s true that it hangs on (in those locales) for longer because there’s more movement of people, but it also means it can get contained. We need to have a better idea of the public health measures.
Obviously we won’t be able to perform Parsifal if we have to have limited numbers in the audience, it’s an economic nightmare and it wouldn’t be worth it. We couldn’t even accommodate all of our subscribers (in that scenario), but we have to be prepared, and we are taking the time to be prepared, and when we have to make a decision, we will gather all the elements to make the best decision for our staff and performers, and the house, and everyone.
The interior of Palais Garnier. Photo: mine. Please do not reproduce without permission.
It’s a strange new equation to accept, that we are now in a world where there’s a question mark over both Parsifal and Paris’s opera season.
It is a strange new equation, and with strange new variables – and I think one needs to take this a week at a time. There are supposed to be additional announcements of openings in Europe…
… under strict conditions. Returning to the theatre-going experience people are familiar with will take much longer.
Yes, and it’s a two-way street, or more than a two-way street. A part of it is medical progress as well – I think even more effective and widely-available testing will do a lot to reassure the public about the situation. That is big! Everybody knows the vaccine will take a little while but also we’re working on all kinds of things in terms of an effective antiviral, because the truth is, if we didn’t have a flu vaccine we would be having a terrible situation every winter. But because we have a flu vaccine there’s no discussions of masks or additional hygiene measures during flu season… so we need to find a way through additional safety measures, through progress in medicine, all of that, to kind of normalize this situation in a way that is… I mean, there’s always a risk: you leave your house and you can catch something on the subway, right? That happens to a lot of people. I am not a scientist and indeed COVID is very contagious – if you get sick you can get very sick, but we need to take time to really learn more about it and then calibrate all the available information and input it back into a form where people can gain a certain amount of comfort in leaving their homes, in order to assess different levels of risk.
View from the orchestra pit of R. Fraser Elliott Hall at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. Photo: Lucia Graca
How do you see the current recalibrating in the opera world influencing not only companies but artists?
Again, for everything that’s on the performer’s side, regular testing is going to be the key so that you can be certain the people working together in confined spaces, people touching each other in rehearsals and so on, they can have a reasonable level of confidence that everybody is up to date on their health. Now it’s the case that you wake up in the morning and you feel a little bit off and take your temperature; three months ago you would have thought, “Oh I’ll see how I feel in the afternoon” but today you get the thermometer out and look at the reading and say, “It’s not normal.” People will be more sensitive to their own symptoms and more responsible, I think. I was reading something interesting, about how work culture will change, especially in North America, where coming to work sick was like a badge of honor, not letting the company down, now it’s, “You’re not feeling well, we don’t want to see you” and that’s not necessarily a bad thing! That’s the performer’s side.
On the audience side, if people feel safe again if wearing a gloves and a mask when they go somewhere and feel okay to sit next to someone they don’t know, if we can reach that level of confidence, I think nobody will care about people wearing a mask in the foreseeable future in a theatre, even if it’s not a requirement. It will be part of the new normal, and frankly, it’s normal already in certain parts of the world. It’s funny that in Canada, which was so haunted by SARS, mask-wearing didn’t become a norm, so maybe now it will. If that’s the worst thing that can happen to us, that people put on a mask before walking into the Four Seasons Centre, we can do that. There’s so much cultural change about masks that’s already happened – people felt, “Oh you can’t speak with a mask” – well, people do it all the time. I was at the supermarket the other day and ran into someone I know, and we didn’t take our masks off, we just spoke with our masks on at a safe distance. Places are going to normalize these kinds of protocols, and it’ll make it all less scary, I believe. And of course, if you are part of a risk group, you would think twice about where you go and what you do; we might be able to accommodate you somewhere in the theatre. We’re more than happy to do that with patrons; it’s our business to accommodate their needs. Frankly, every theatre would be willing to do that to get their patrons back. But then again it’s not something we haven’t done already in making all reasonable accommodations for people with needs.
Tenor Russell Thomas in rehearsal for the Canadian Opera Company’s production of Otello, 2019. Photo: Canadian Opera Company
And casting?
That’s actually one of the bigger problems we’re discussing. Zoom doesn’t give you a lot of information about the size of the voice but it does give you information about the personality you’re dealing with, about pitch, about rhythm. We were talking about this in relation to the ensemble, for example; they were Zoom coaching before they went off contract for the summer. Everybody hated the idea initially, and then came away saying it was better than not doing anything at all, so that is obviously also a part of that new normal, as you say. There’s also the situation of stage auditions and having a pianist and nobody in the hall except for two or three casting people; that seems less complicated than a full stage performance in this environment, if you can get them safely in through the stage door and onstage. All these things are being worked out.
It probably will… but… I look at it more as an added tool to what we’re already doing than anything else. We have more and more tools at our disposable, yes, but there’s a lot of the old stuff that still works and we can’t abandon it, that’s been true for our marketing and communications as much as for casting – we still send postcards to people (for marketing) because there’s people who really like postcards, maybe not as many as twenty years ago, but it’s still a valuable part of our audience, so why would we abandon that practise?
So the same holds true for singers then? I see a lot of imitation online.
As I said in the IRCPA talk, people who do casting are really not very interested in generic products…
… you mean in terms of singers pushing an homogenous image?
Yes – going back to your breaking-the-eggs metaphor at the beginning of our conversation, if you don’t have that appetite for risk-taking there’s not going to be a lot of art in what you do.
Strange to think that being yourself is perceived as a risk.
We all know it’s the hardest to be yourself – but as an artist you have the opportunity to not be yourself, and to figure that out, and to live it out, in a way a lot of people cannot, but I think it’s very important to have that self-assessment skill and to figure out, clearly, “What can I do better than other people?” If you have better high Fs than anybody, then all I want to know is, can you sing Queen Of The Night? That’s the thing, and there’s nothing bad about it, and you must acknowledge that as you get older, your high Fs won’t be as great, and you’d better figure out what you can do then.
Or have figured it out already…
Yes. It comes back to having a lot of courage. Sometimes I feel the courage, especially for a young artist, will always come before the self-assurance, but it’s kind of a bit of – I really like this egg thing you started with! – it’s a chicken-and-egg situation: if you don’t put in the courage it might just never happen, but you will not know if there’s a reward before you’ve done it, and I think doing it for the first time, and seeing if it works, will give you more courage for the second time, and so on.
The benefit of digital is it’s creating a vital form of community a lot of people miss right now – are the recent COC opera broadcasts a sign of things to come?
Right now it’s a concession to the times we’re in; we wouldn’t want to necessarily put archival recordings out as a standard, but what’s important for me is – and some don’t see it this way but that’s fine – that it’s about creating a presence for all those artists who can’t work right now. Putting this kind of work out – work that was done in a good environment, where (artists) are performing good roles with a good company, with a high level of quality – reminds the world that is what artists do. And having such material released also reminds the world that this is just a video, and if you want the real thing, you will have to come back to the theatre and get a real-life experience.
So you see video as a complement, not a replacement?
Absolutely.
The exterior of Palais Garnier. Photo: mine. Please do not reproduce without permission.
I asked you this in our conversation last year, but of course so much has changed, and I want to ask again: what are you taking with you now from Toronto to Paris?
I’m not leaving just yet!
Something you’d noted before is your desire at Opéra national de Paris to highlight various historical aspects within a contemporary context.
That hasn’t changed, of course – putting historical opera within the larger context of what happens today, for 21st century artists and for a 21st century audience – that won’t change, but we’ll have to see as we emerge from this crisis, what has actually changed, and when we can go back. That (plan for return) will determine a lot. The longer this goes, the more we will have to think about smaller things we can do for limited groups of people. The goal is to go back to fully staged opera as quickly as possible, but if we can’t do that, we better get inventive. Ultimately I believe in the resilience of the art form.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 TonkünstlerOrchestra (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.
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 balletScarlet 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.
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.
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.
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 producerLev 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.
