The Opera Queen

Sometimes new works will wash over the listener like a gentle wave. Others will strike intensely, like a thunderbolt. The latter is an apt description of my reaction to hearing Moses, a late nineteenth century work by pianist-conductor-composer Anton Rubinstein. Written in eight scenes and based on episodes from the book of Exodus, the vocal work follows the story of Moses from his childhood through to being given the Ten Commandments and handing authority to Joshua. It’s a long listen (over three hours), but is a deeply evocative aural journey, with an abundance of rich vocal writing weaved throughout a plush neo-Romantic score.

Moses is so familiar, and yet not; epic and yet intimate, religiously specific and yet broadly encompassing, it sounds so much like the things I love and yet nothing at all like any of them. There are clear references backwards (to works by Balakirev and Mussorgsky), forwards (Zemlinsky and Henze), and most firmly within Rubinstein’s own time (specifically Wagner, and more specifically, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin). Being lots of things at once and requiring a very large number of musicians, the work was never actually presented during Rubinstein’s lifetime, or for a long period of time after. 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 conductor Michail Jurowski.

First, the obvious: yes, Michael Jurowski is the father of Vladimir and Dmitri, both celebrated conductors. Yes, his father was a conductor and composer, and his grandfather, David Block, was a conductor too. Yes, both he and his sons have conducted the work of his father. And yes, Moses was an immense labour of love; the maestro dedicated years to preparing and restoring the score for performance, which took place two ago (October 15th, 2017) at Warsaw’s National Philharmonic Hall. The world premiere, recorded and released last year on Warner Classics, featured the immense talents of the Polish Sinfonia Juventus, Warsaw Philharmonic and Artos Children’s choirs, as well as a talented group of soloists including Stanislaw Kuflyuk, Torsten Kerl and Chen Reiss. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung called the album “an immense declaration of faith and culture” and indeed, it is that, but it is also a deeply expressive work with a clear narrative sense, thanks to the precise work of its dedicated maestro. Jurowski imbues the work with palpable momentum while allowing moments of deep beauty to shine through: there’s a beguiling interplay between a textured, spindly orchestra and Irina Papenbrock’s silky vocal delivery in “Picture 3: Have You Come, My Friend”; further along, Chen Reiss’ ethereal soprano intones luxuriantly within and around rippling strings and sonorous brass in “Picture 7: Jordan Flows Around Its Loins.” It may be a Geistliche Oper (or sacred opera, a term invented by Rubinstein himself to imply a unique blend of opera and oratorio forms), but Moses has its share of magical moments that transcend the boundaries of faith, and, dare I say, offer a space where one might meditate on the integration of spatial, sensual, and spiritual.

That integration is something Michail Jurowski excels at, through his numerous recordings and live performances. Having studied conducting in his native Moscow under Leo Ginsburg, Jurowski went on to assist the legendary Gennady Rozhdestvensky at the National Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra of Moscow, and conducted regularly at Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Academic Music Theatre as well as Komische Oper Berlin. Before departing the Soviet Union in 1989 (he’d accepted a permanent post with the Dresden Semperoper), Jurowski had frequently conducted performances at the Bolshoi Theatre. Since then, he’s held numerous positions, including Chief Conductor of Leipzig Opera, Principal Conductor of Deutsche Oper Berlin, General Music Director and Chief Conductor of the Northwest German Philharmonic Orchestra, and Chief Conductor of WDR Rundfunkorchester in Köln; he’s also made numerous guest appearances (Leipzig Gewandhaus, Oslo Philharmonic, Bergen Philharmonic, London Philharmonic Orchestra, to name a few) and has conducted a myriad of operas and ballets in many prestigious houses, including Teatro alla Scala, Bayerische Staatsoper, Oper Zürich, and the Bolshoi.

Earlier this year Jurowski made his long-awaited North American debut, leading the Cleveland Orchestra in a program of works featuring Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich; the concert was met with extreme success, and, as you’ll read, meant a great deal to the maestro. Recently he completed a series of concerts in Sweden, where he opened the season of the Norrköpings Symfoniorkester; the well-received concert featured works by Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and the world premiere of Elena Firsova’s new double concerto for violin and cello, which featured violinist Vadim Gluzman and cellist Johannes Moser as soloists. Norrköpings and Jurowski have enjoyed a long and fruitful collaboration, with numerous live performances and recordings in their shared history including, quite notably, a 2015 release through cpo featuring the work of his father. Jurowski has also made numerous recordings of the work of Shostakovich, particularly special in light of the close association his family shared with the composer. His 2017 album of live recordings (Berlin Classics) with the Staatskapelle Dresden from the International Shostakovich Festival in Gohrisch won the German Record Critics’ Prize, with the conductor also being awarded the third International Shostakovich Prize by the Shostakovich Gohrisch Foundation that same year. Along with Shostakovich, music of Prokofiev, Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Meyerbeer, Rangström, and Khachaturian (another family friend) constitutes a good part of his discography.

A cornerstone of my own musical explorations is his 1995 cpo recording of Symphony No. 2 and Symphony No. 7 by Georgian composer Giya Kancheli. Jurowski alternates moments of tenderness and dread in a seriously engaging sonic tapestry underlining textures between strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion. One moment, shimmering, glittering and gleaming in resplendence, that beauty giving way to awesome, awfully gripping moments of piercing violence. Few conductors, I think, understand Kancheli’s music better than this;  Jurowski engineers the sound against blinking, winking silences in a way that makes one rethink ideas around space, movement, and resonance. Such expertise highlights, once more, that holy, wholly beguiling trinity of spatial-sensual-spiritual in understanding music, an approach 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 he is with music, and he’s happy to share more than a few intriguing tales. We recently spoke about a host of various topics: his American debut, meeting Stravinsky, and how the experiences of Dmitri Shostakovich underline the importance of nuance in relation to artistic integrity.

You had your American debut recently; how did it go?

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

Too long.

Well you see, better late than never!

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

In general, no, It is different between a prepared audience and one absolutely fresh, but it can be this way in Vienna, in Berlin, and it is not a question. I met a really very good, prepared, and cultured public. The Cleveland Orchestra has a very long and very big tradition. I 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 it was within the first five minutes we understood each other.

The program was fresh to the orchestra — not the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, but the Eleventh Symphony of Shostakovich, which is today rather seldom presented onstage. It is a symphony which had influence from Hungarian 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. I had the possibility for these concerts to speak with the public, and it was about forty minutes. We spoke about my personal experience with Shostakovich, some biographical moments. It was in parallel with Vadim Guzman, who brought his violin, on which was premiered the Glazunov violin concerto. It was an incredible but historical instrument.

I was very happy. I had not only the possibility to make music together with this orchestra but also to have contact with the public. I had the feeling I was in paradise.

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

Music, first of all, is notes. 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 connects with the event of the letter of architect Walter Gropius to his wife, and he understood his wife was not with him; it was a shock, and from this shock began the composing of Symphony, the climax of the first movement. It’s a question we know: what was this input (the source of inspiration)? For Shostakovich, for example, one of his most famous pieces is his Seventh Symphony. 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.

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

Your comparison with cinema… maybe this observation is right. I try to blend with theatre. I am also a theatre (opera) conductor. I look behind and 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 Oistrakh 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 Dziga Vertov or Sergei Eisenstein, very big directors of the 1930s — of course society was absolutely closed, but I can tell you that such directors as Bykov, Romm, Gerasimov, and other Soviet directors – they were all top-quality in terms of artists of world cinema. For me, it was a very important moment (to be around them) and to ask myself, “What is moving conflict? How do I find inputs as to what brought this music?” Music is an abstract art; it is only notes. I just try to understand what happens with these notes, but it means I compose, in a sense: the changing of effects, the language of music, this moving between con moto and sostenuto, the idea of musical structure. Musical form can be only realized during live performance; music is when we play and in this case, form, structure. It’s what happens, I hope, when I bring the right form to the public during various pieces.

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

That seems rather strenuous!

Yes, it was. For a moment I changed my understanding of this program — 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, needs 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 — that night I understood if I go by plot, so to say, by events, every time, and prepare myself for some climaxes or some moments which in life happened unfortunately, then for me it must be personally not only a pleasure to make big music, but interesting. And from this moment, the door for this action and understanding of what happens in music, was opened.

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 Stravinsky 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 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. I told him, “Of course, Sacre du Printemps!”

“Why?” he asked.

“It’s such a beautiful piece, but 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 Stravinsky said, “Truth is only music; don’t believe the words.”

Stravinsky gave us very different pieces, 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. 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.

How does that quality of ‘the real’ translate in leading pieces by your father? Or 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 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 “ten kilometres” behind others, so to say. His work was not forbidden, of course, he had a very big success with the public, but he had no help from organizations that developed success. His ballet Scarlet Sails, after the romantic novel of Alexander Grin, it was on for fourteen years, on the stage of the Bolshoi – it was on during the war. At the time there was a 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 it 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. Shostakovich wrote a highly positive critique to this ballet in the central press.

The music of my father was high romantic. I cannot say he was like some other composers. His was tonal music, and with a very positive feeling, but step by step, his own view of life became worse and worse; belief 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, and very personal, and 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 students, he had a big success with Scarlet Sails; and my concert also, with the Fourth Symphony, and again with students of the Moscow Conservatory. The time for him is coming, but it’s not for only my father’s name.

After the war, in the Soviet Union especially and in Moscow, there was an absolutely fantastic group of composers, really high-rate composers, not only Shostakovich, who I think was a genius, but also Khachaturian, Karayev,  Weinberg, and others whose music now also is getting attention. Now I’m making a CD of Weinberg’s music with Staatskapelle Dresden; other pieces are already ready — the Clarinet Concerto, for instance. I hope by the end of this year it 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 cliches 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 Schnittke, Gubaidulina, Denisov 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 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 lived with a view that looked only behind, of course not, but I 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. He is now at the age — well, a little older — as 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 as you did.

In this form, yes.

What role do you think authenticity plays? You mentioned cliches and the development of the soul. It seems like within the cultural world today authenticity is getting harder and harder to find.

I suppose that it depends from what point of view you take things. In the famous and very good Little Tragedies story of Pushkin, 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 wisdom and… we must give the last moments of our time for beauty, or for persons, and so on. Every event has 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” – to live or not to live, because after Stalin’s death, it was a bit of fresh air. I remember this time, I was eight or nine years old. I remember it very well. And it was from one side to the other side; the role of music in creating a social community was incredibly important, higher than now. At that time, the leader of the Soviet composers Tikhon Khrennikov, was a composer – not a high composer, but good, and his idea was not to help somebody who might be better than him. That was clear. 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 better than they were.

Some would observe that’s the negative side of human nature.

Yes, 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 and Shostakovich, and later Khachaturian, who was from Armenia, which helped. 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 considered suicide.

It was at the time when his wife had died (in 1954), and Shostakovich had come to his moment and he could not compose or do absolutely anything. He had two children that needed at that time to come to the light road, so to say – his son Maxim, and his daughter Galina – but Shostakovich was absolutely destroyed as a person. His friend, cinema producer Lev Arnshtam, who made the film Five days, Five nights, 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.) When Shostakovich got to Dresden he was given the possibility to live in Gohrisch (roughly 47 kilometres southwest of Dresden). Nothing had been destroyed there during the war, unlike 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 day, he could not compose, until one day he made the conscious choice to stop composing the film music and instead composed 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.” Naivety…!

Is knowing when to compromise the secret to authenticity, do you think?

It’s the secret of surviving the regime. It 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 to do this, not only in his big symphonic works but in his quartets. So to give some reply here… when we speak about cliche, well, it originates from an order: “Who is not with us is against us. We must know that the crocodile that ate your enemy is not your friend yet!”

A cliche can today bring mass ideology, mass meaning, mass press, the point of view of one composer against another; this is 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 in order to work and to ensure their ideas are heard.

I don’t know. Maybe. I understand today it is practically almost all the same, what happened with humans and 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.