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Vladimir Jurowski on his start at the Bavarian State Opera: "A kind of coming home"

2021-09-15T17:53:15.972Z


His first official act as the new general music director of the Bavarian State Opera is an open-air concert with the Bavarian State Orchestra and Jonas Kaufmann in Ansbach on September 17th. In future, Vladimir Jurowski wants to open every season in a different Bavarian city with “Opera for Everyone”. And this very programmatic conductor has also come up with a few other ideas for the new post. An encounter in his Munich office.


His first official act as the new general music director of the Bavarian State Opera is an open-air concert with the Bavarian State Orchestra and Jonas Kaufmann in Ansbach on September 17th.

In future, Vladimir Jurowski wants to open every season in a different Bavarian city with “Opera for Everyone”.

And this very programmatic conductor has also come up with a few other ideas for the new post.

An encounter in his Munich office.

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"The conductor is an expert on the composer": Vladimir Jurowski in conversation with music editor Markus Thiel.

© Marcus sleep

Shostakovich's “Nose” will be your first premiere as General Music Director on October 24th.

A garish, also political satire: What does this business card say about you and the new start?

The piece was never shown in Munich, it is from the 20th century, and it is also a Russian work.

It's avant-garde, surreal, surrealistic too, with a pretty crazy story that I'm kind of part of.

My family knew Shostakovich very well.

“The nose” also means: curiosity about the unfamiliar, wanting to push boundaries.

I've always called the piece a time bomb.

And the further time goes on, the more modern and fresher this opera appears.

The explosive, anarchic, and at the same time enormously structured, fits right into our time.

And all of this, taken together, also says a lot about me.

This season there are academy concerts that are an artistic commentary on the premieres.

Should this also be the case in the future?

Not necessarily.

We also work with guest conductors who do not necessarily know or need to know what is currently being played in our theater.

My first academy concert as general music director would have been unthinkable given the Shostakovich premiere with a different program.

So I cannot say whether we will continue to do this.

In the first season in particular, I wanted to clarify the uniformity that lies behind the programmatic planning.

Your Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra has developed its own programmatic niche with you - and it has to do so in view of the competition there.

Is the programmatic work in Munich easier because the Bavarian State Opera is a solitaire and does not have to set itself apart?

The situation in Munich reminds me a lot of that in London.

Berlin is more like Moscow, where there are a lot of orchestras and all of them are in competition with each other.

Every orchestra in London has its own audience.

And there is also a very healthy separation in Munich.

There are people who go to the opera, others prefer the Gasteig and so on.

For the most part, the regular audience, i.e. die-hard lovers, comes to us at the State Opera.

But we also want to address a wider audience.

I believe that my opera premieres in particular can also be of interest to younger audiences.

You say you need a change every seven to ten years, some kind of redefinition.

General music director of a state opera: is this the biggest upheaval in your career?

I was never the chief conductor of an opera house.

I was part of a house as Kapellmeister of the Komische Oper Berlin and directed the festival in Glyndebourne.

I didn't look for the Bavarian State Opera, the offer came - a principle that I've actually always lived by.

And since I grew up in a large music theater in Moscow through my father's work, the principle of such a house is anchored in my DNA.

It's kind of coming home, plus I wanted to spend more time in one place and fly less.

Therefore, apart from my positions in Berlin and Munich, I gave up everything else.

This is also and above all a question of ecology.

Do other colleagues think the same way?

So is the time of the jet set coming to an end?

I have been traveling by train within Europe since 2016/17.

That works quite well, except for trips to London.

Because of a snow chaos at the beginning of 2017, I actually took the train from Berlin to London for a Christmas oratorio with a few changes.

I see in many of my colleagues that they are rethinking and concentrating.

It's not always easy because human bonds have also developed.

For example, I spent almost 20 years in London.

You can't just say, “Bye, we'll never see you again.” That's not my style.

So I will continue to perform there twice a year.

The same applies to Moscow.

It remains my hometown, even if I haven't lived there for 30 years ...

... how can something like that be?

You somehow peel yourself out of such a world.

And it would be a big, hard-to-manage change for me if I wanted to live in Moscow again.

But that is out of the question anyway, because I live with my family in Berlin.

Artistically, however, I will definitely find connections.

I feel like a kind of courier who mediates between cultures.

I taught as a visiting professor at the Moscow Conservatory.

It gives me great pleasure to make contact with a young generation who grow up there under completely different circumstances than me.

The attachment to Moscow makes me a more complete person.

Oksana Lyniv, also Mariss Jansons, said that they were suspiciously viewed by their home countries as lost children because they were looking for a career in the West.

That was not the case with me because I emigrated very early and was not yet a conductor. In 1990 I wasn't allowed to tell my friends that we were leaving. My parents were afraid that I would be drafted into the military - I was already conscripted. So I only gathered my friends and told them the night before the flight was due to take off. And I promised them that I would come back. My parents, however, fled with the idea of ​​never going back. When I went to Moscow twelve years later, I was already a conductor. As a man of his own, no longer just as the son of my conducting father. Coming and going then became more and more the norm. My parents belonged to the last generation that really emigrated completely, also internally. They traveled to Russia afterwards,but more on the initiative of their children.

If you compare the situation in Russia with that in the West: Was there a cultural clash for your father, and therefore also for you, when it came to the image of the conductor?

Did you both have to learn to rethink?

Naturally.

The Soviet-style conductor was above all a leader.

Just think of Yevgeny Mravinsky.

There have also been attempts to revise this picture - for example in the cases of Gennady Roshdestvensky and Kirill Kondrashin.

And yet they were old-school artists.

You can't blame them for that, the world was just different.

Many of them later found themselves unable to cope with a situation in which the conductor's authority was no longer unshakable, but first had to be artistically proven.

For me, the conductor is an expert on the composer who needs his help to organize the notes.

That may be the case in musical work. But public awareness is lagging behind. There you still need the worship of leaders' figures.

I find all of this a shame - precisely because the conductor in orchestral work has been seen as an employee in a kind of music workshop for at least 30 years. In the public, however, this profession is perceived as a social post. In some countries like Italy or Russia even as a political one. I am happy and even a little proud that I was the first conductor in the history of a Soviet state orchestra to have its contract terminated on its own initiative. I can still remember the conversations with the minister at the time: he could not understand that someone wanted to leave of his own free will. It is amazing that sometimes you still have to explain to politicians what is better for the art establishments they control.

Your assumption of office in Munich coincides with a turning point in social development, if you look at the past year and a half.

Now tell yourself: We should have planned different things and responded programmatically at the State Opera?

Possibly.

But the program of our first season, even if we planned it much earlier, is a mixture of what is feasible under Covid-19 and what is artistically desirable.

Take “The Nose” alone, a piece that was composed for a medium-sized house, but which celebrated its greatest success 50 years ago in a very small Moscow theater with a correspondingly reduced cast.

And yet you can play it with a lot of orchestral effort.  

There is currently an extreme politicization of society. Can art use that for itself as it was in the 68s? Or is culture, on the contrary, increasingly seen as a nice accessory that you can feast on in confusing times?

I'm feeling a bit of both right now. It's not as heated as 1968, but it can come. People are surely looking for poles of calm in art like never before. But also because religion has largely become obsolete as a soul comforter in European society. I'm not an atheist, but I'm not a denominational either - it's just a sober statement about the role of religion. Art is often treated as a substitute for religion. But I believe that in art we take on an extremely important responsibility. We have to be able to entertain on the one hand, and to educate on the other. Especially when it comes to the climate crisis or political activity.

But will there really be a rethink after the crisis? Or does everything flow back into the old river bed and you travel happily to the Maldives again and look for distraction in art?

It will not and cannot be the same as it was before Covid-19. At the moment, we cannot even imagine the extent of the economic impact. It's like in nature: if you influence the climate, the results won't be noticeable until 25 or 30 years later. The next ten, twenty years will not be easy in this new world, in any way. It is to be feared that the division in society will deepen. It's just about human interaction - just look at the disputes on the Internet when it comes to the issue of gender, for example. In some cases this is taking on dimensions that are very worrying. And that's where I see our task in art as a seismograph of the social situation. We can sound the alarm bells. The things,For example, those in the operas “The Nose” by Shostakovich or “The Devils of Loudun” by Penderecki are incredibly modern. One cannot comfort oneself with the fact that this happened in some ancient tsarist times or in Cardinal Richelieu's France.

But it's not just about the broader social framework, but also about the financial conditions for cultural institutions. Were the artists too quiet during the pandemic?

I don't think so. At least as far as the situation in Germany is concerned - compared, for example, to the unbelievable events at the New York Met, where the choir and orchestra were dismissed. This is one of the worst things that happened in cultural life during the pandemic. Germany seems to me to be one of the safest places for art in the world. But we too will be faced with new problems. When the season opened in Berlin, the Philharmonic concert was not sold out. Even the State Opera in Berlin does not manage to get rid of all tickets. We have to live with that first. That is precisely why we often have to leave our home, our regular stage, to roam the country and to advertise it with our art. Hoping that people will come back. Even more projects with schoolswith day-care centers, for example, that will also come up to the Bavarian State Opera. We are looking for completely new formats here.

Such pressure to justify can also have something positive and fruitful.

I'm not saying it's bad.

Due to my Soviet character and a youth that coincided with perestroika, I am used to adapting to the circumstances.

I am an idealist.

I believe in the cause we serve.

And that it is not only important to us artists.

I saw that during the second wave of the pandemic in St. Petersburg.

Older people who were expressly forbidden to make contact or to go out came to the concert anyway.

And they said: “It's like a sip of fresh water or fresh air for us.” I also said to my Berlin orchestra at the first concert after the lockdown in front of only 300 listeners: “Those who came, they missed us.

They really need it. "

The interview was conducted by Markus Thiel.

Source: merkur

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