The New York Times-20080127-Podium Star- Ever Expanding His Horizons
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Podium Star, Ever Expanding His Horizons
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AS fast as news travels in a world of blogs, downloads and streaming audio, musicians' reputations can still vary a lot from one place to another. In London and his native Moscow the 35-year-old conductor Vladimir Jurowski ranks as a star.
On the podium he certainly looks like one. Over 6 foot 2 and whippet thin, with long black hair framing pale features as sensual and aloof as those of Rudolf Nureyev, he conveys his intentions with balletic fluency, applying accents that are minimal and precise.
There is also the resume. Since 2001 Mr. Jurowski has served as music director of the Glyndebourne Opera Festival; since 2005, as principal guest conductor of the Russian National Orchestra; since 2006, as a principal artist of the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment in London; and since September, as principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, succeeding Kurt Masur.
In New York Mr. Jurowski is known mostly from his work at the Metropolitan Opera, where his credits since 1999 include revivals of Verdi's Rigoletto and Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin and Queen of Spades, and new productions of Janacek's Jenufa and Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel. (The final performance of the current Hansel, on Thursday, will be conducted by J. David Jackson.) Mr. Jurowski's reviews have ranged from good to excellent, but for various reasons these were not assignments that focused scrutiny on the conductor.
These days Mr. Jurowski will do opera only at Glyndebourne and select houses where he can participate in the creative process even before the design process has begun. Theaters are like huge airports, he said over lunch at Lincoln Center this month. People come and go. You meet in the executive lounge, not even at the bar. Whether or not his work reaps him personal glory, it affects his colleagues backstage deeply, as attested by several who worked on the Met's Hansel.
I entirely trust his instinct and his theatrical literacy, the director Richard Jones said recently. He's the son of a conductor and a dancer, and that's a good pedigree.
The British tenor Philip Langridge, a distinguished veteran of Mozart, Wagner, Mussorgsky and Britten who was daringly cast as the Witch in Hansel and Gretel, likened Mr. Jurowski to the conductor Claudio Abbado. Abbado would even come to a costume fitting, Mr. Langridge said. This is the first time I've worked with Vladimir, and he's the same way. So often conductors just disappear when the stage work begins. I think it's crucial for the director and the conductor and the singers all to be in the same room. Without that, the performance isn't organic. Vladimir is interested in the whole piece, not just the music.
Alice Coote, the British mezzo-soprano who sings Hansel and has worked with Mr. Jurowski several times, is another fan. He has just a true understanding of the dramatic elements, she said. I feel he would be a very good director. He is so unusually calm and open and himself, absolutely without ego in the rehearsal room. Working with him has been the happiest experience of my musical life.
As a symphonic conductor Mr. Jurowski has appeared in New York for two seasons running with the Russian National Orchestra in the Great Performers series at Lincoln Center. In 2006 he conducted three concerts of Tchaikovsky, balancing greatest hits against neglected, unwieldy works like Manfred and the incidental music for Hamlet, again to mostly enthusiastic reviews.
After more than a decade of thematic investigations of Russian music familiar and obscure by Valery Gergiev and the Kirov Orchestra, Mr. Jurowski's series made less lasting an impression than it might have. But the temperaments of the two conductors are completely distinct. Mr. Gergiev paints as if in oil, using a lavish palette; Mr. Jurowski works in the hazier hues of fresco. Against Mr. Gergiev's Dionysian abandon, Mr. Jurowski, even at moments of peak drama, retains a sense of reserve, of hovering reflection.
The latest American tour of the Russian National Orchestra reaches New York on Feb. 23 and 24. Apart from Tchaikovsky's far-from-forgotten Pathetique Symphony, Mr. Jurowski's programs offer Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, as completed by Anton Safronov, a contemporary Russian composer, and the two Brahms piano concertos.
Lincoln Center wanted to give the orchestra the chance, now rare, to present non-Russian repertoire in the West, Mr. Jurowski said. We're leaving our safe territory. It's beneficial not to play the standard works only at home. It's silly that people think it's exotic for Russians to play Brahms.
Next season, Mr. Jurowski will return to Lincoln Center with the London Philharmonic, bearing Mozart, Mahler, Strauss, a full evening of Rachmaninoff and the American premiere of Vladimir Martynov's opera Vita Nuova, after Dante's neo-Platonic treatise on love in verse and prose.
Martynov is like a Russian minimalist, but he's more than that, Mr. Jurowski said. It sounds categorical, but I don't think one can call oneself a musician if one has no interest in new music. It's always been the natural state of things that the new music of today was more interesting to people than music created yesterday or two days before. But since the golden age of Mozart and Beethoven, the interest in the past has been increasing every day.
It all started with Mendelssohn resurrecting -- from the dust -- Bach's 'St. Matthew Passion.' And that passion for the past is very dangerous. Times are changing, but we still have a hard fight to introduce new work. Most presenters still feel very threatened when orchestras want to program new music.
Mr. Jurowski's discography, not yet huge, features the predictable Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich but also Giya Kancheli's Exil, a contemporary chamber piece for soprano, instruments and tape that hovers on the threshold of silence, and new music by the spiky British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage.
But for at least one New Yorker it was Mr. Jurowski's Met Onegin that brought his musical character most clearly into focus, lingering in the mind for its subtlety of mood.
That was a different me, Mr. Jurowski said. I would do it differently today. I don't know how. I'll find out this spring in Glyndebourne. But it has always been my conviction that 'Onegin' isn't an opera. Tchaikovsky calls it 'lyric scenes.' It's very Chekhovian, filled with a nostalgia that is common to all the characters, even the young ones. It calls for atmosphere as a driving force. It's the exact opposite of 'Queen of Spades,' which is pure psychodrama, driven by the characters. There the conductor must concentrate on events.
The sheer scale of the Met, Mr. Jurowski said, made it hard to realize his conception of Onegin as a dream play. The problem was worse at the Bastille, in Paris, an even less intimate house, where he capitulated and delivered a symphonic account of the score. (It was recorded for video, but Mr. Jurowski has refused to release it for DVD.) At La Scala, in Milan, he found the solution he was looking for, and was rewarded by the Italian press with slings and arrows.
It was like a Japanese ink painting, all black and white, 'not too many notes,' seen from the inside, he said. An experiment. The critics compared it to performances long ago with Galina Vishnevskaya and conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich, whose approach was the exact opposite of what I wanted to achieve. And the orchestra wasn't on my side. I didn't care. They wanted me to inspire them to explosions of emotion. They accused me of a lack of Russian soul.
The Russianness of Russian artists is surely a topic best left to the natives. Mr. Jurowski, for his part, was 18 when his father, the conductor Mikhail Jurowski, moved his family to Germany. The son's musical studies, begun in Moscow, ended in Dresden and Berlin.
By the time I moved to the West, I was very young but already a grown-up human being, he said. I've always fought consciously to absorb as much as possible of foreign cultures without losing the culture I grew up with. I enjoy the mix. As a musician I'm as much German as Russian.
Among conductors who influenced him, Mr. Jurowski first named the versatile Gennady Rozhdestvensky, whom he assisted for a time. He was the one, Mr. Jurowski said. He was a big light for me.
Simon Rattle's programming has been an inspiration, and also the writings of Nikolaus Harnoncourt, which Mr. Jurowski called his bible. Although he said he never heard Carlos Kleiber live, he quoted with approval a German critic who said that Kleiber had squared the circle. Kleiber managed to combine Apollo and Dionysus, Mr. Jurowski said. He created pure harmony. I don't say perfection, though he was a perfectionist too.
Where Mr. Jurowski's curiosity will lead him next is an open question. Bach's Christmas Oratorio, generally the preserve of Baroque specialists, is in his datebook for Moscow. He mentions a fascination with Monteverdi, and with a cappella choral works by Rachmaninov, Arvo Part and Alfred Schnittke, which usually fall to choral conductors.
I feel connected to the music I play for various reasons, Mr. Jurowski said. Some because it's the music of my native country, some because it's the music of Germany and Austria or is music that sprang from there. The musical heritage, especially the European heritage, is so vast. Nowadays performers are in the position of playing the Glass Bead Game, putting things together to see what happens, to learn about ourselves, our past. To look at the simplest questions: Why are we here? Where are we going? It's a life's task to answer.
Correction: January 27, 2008
An article on Page 26 of Arts & Leisure today about the conductor Vladimir Jurowski misstated one date that he will lead the Russian National Orchestra at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center. In addition to a performance on Feb. 24, the orchestra will appear with Mr. Jurowski on Feb. 23, not Feb. 25.
Correction: January 27, 2008
An article on Page 26 of Arts & Leisure today about the conductor Vladimir Jurowski misstated one date that he will lead the Russian National Orchestra at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center. In addition to a performance on Feb. 24, the orchestra will appear with Mr. Jurowski on Feb. 23, not Feb. 25.
[Illustration]PHOTOS: Vladimir Jurowski with the Russian National Orchestra at Avery Fisher Hall in March. He will return to Lincoln Center with the orchestra next month. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY RICHARD TERMINE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)