WILD AND SPONTANEOUS
Symphonie Fantastique Saturday
Minutes after a performance of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, Andris Nelsons, 38, music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, was on the phone explaining his approach to Berlioz’s problematic metronome markings in the Symphonie Fantastique with a reference to Shostakovich. Somehow it was all connected. “The great Russian conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky, who was a friend of Shostakovich, said that for Shostakovich, metronome markings, they just gave the direction of what he felt,” Nelsons said.
“For some composers, the metronome means more. For some, it is a suggestion.
“Berlioz was a wild, spontaneous person and a revolutionary composer.”
The conclusion I was invited to reach was that the Symphonie Fantastique to be heard Saturday at La Maison symphonique on the occasion of the first visit by the BSO to Montreal since 1984 would not adhere strictly to the math Berlioz left us.
If this sounds like a balanced rather than radical philosophy, it is bearing fruit. Nelsons and the BSO just won their second consecutive Best Orchestral Performance Grammy for recordings of Shostakovich symphonies on the Deutsche Grammophon label.
To judge by his biography, Nelsons has all the Shostakovich cred a conductor could hope for. Born to musicians in Riga in 1978, he got a taste of the Soviet system as a youngster. Nelsons learned Russian at school and can still speak it (though not, by his own account, especially well).
DG released those Grammy-winners with an overtly political subtitle: Under Stalin’s Shadow. Yet the conductor cautions against undue stress on politics when approaching Shostakovich’s art.
Yes, this careworn composer was infamously accused in public of the hard-to-define esthetic crime of “formalism.”
“Even if it is subconscious, if you live in those times, it is there,” Nelsons said of the authoritarian atmosphere. “You breathe that air. I know this personally. I have experienced the Soviet system and the opposite.
“But we should not over-politicize Shostakovich’s music. He was very interested in music around the world. He followed what was happening in other countries.
“In instrumentation and compositional technique, Shostakovich was trying to explore and use the positive influence of Mahler. And this had nothing to do with politics.”
Besides, Nelsons says, listeners today with no awareness of the politics greatly enjoy the music.
“And there are many composers who were working in the Soviet regime and accused of being ‘formalist.’ We don’t know about them so much. Their music is not performed because it is not as strong.
“But Shostakovich, he goes beyond that. Even if you take out the political context, you are left with music of genius. It is beyond political.”
Now to Beethoven, whose symphonies Nelsons is recording with the Vienna Philharmonic. (There will also be a tour in 2020, the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth.) Does Nelsons bring a small-scale historical consciousness to the podium? Or is he a full-blast Beethovenian?
“Beethoven in his time simply couldn’t afford an orchestra of the size he would like to have,” the conductor responded. “And there is the question of what he would do nowadays.
“But the scale in which Beethoven works, particularly starting with the Third Symphony, is so huge. It’s a revolutionary piece.”
We can be confident Nelsons will also summon a full complement of strings for a cycle of Bruckner symphonies with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the venerable ensemble of which Nelsons becomes Kapellmeister — music director — in September.
All this might suggest a musician with few early-music leanings. In fact, Nelsons’ mother was the founder of Latvia’s first early-music ensemble. Young Andris grew up hearing and loving Monteverdi and Bach, and even did some singing.
Another landmark of his childhood was attending Wagner’s Tannhaüser as a five-year-old and being reduced to tears.
Adding to his stylistic upbringing was his early employment as a trumpet player for the Latvian National Opera. It was in this house he began his career as a conductor in 2003, with the encouragement of his elder colleague and compatriot, Mariss Jansons.
The operatic element of Nelsons’ agenda is now confined to guest appearances (not counting such enterprises as concert performances of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, with which the 2016-17 BSO subscription season rather spectacularly began). He is also inevitably linked to opera through his soprano wife, Kristine Opolais, with whom he still lives in Riga, along with their daughter, Adriana.
Nelsons made operatic headlines last summer not by conducting but by declining to conduct a new production of Wagner’s Parsifal at Bayreuth.
“Owing to a differing approach in various matters, the atmosphere at this year’s Bayreuth Festival did not develop in a mutually comfortable way for all parties,” was the elliptical official explanation.
One speculation was that the relocation of the setting of the mystical (and Christian-themed)
opera from medieval Europe to the Middle East at a time of high security precautions in Europe played a role in the decision. Nelsons was not eager to discuss the particulars of the Bayreuth case but was willing to expand on the state of opera in general.
“Regietheater is a general direction and not connected (exclusively) to Bayreuth,” he said, using the Franco-German word for director-driven stagecraft. “It is worldwide.
“It is a complex question. Opera is music and drama, as Wagner said, and the highest art because it combines the genres. If you go to the opera and experience only music, you are missing something.
“Now I don’t connect this to Bayreuth, but more generally, we see now a lot of Regie orientation in opera. Some productions are successful, some are quite unsuccessful, I should say. There is a fine line.
“The question is whether we are saying, ‘I want to tell, subjectively, what the composer wanted to say in this piece, what is the message,’ or, ‘I don’t care about this, but I as a director or conductor want to tell what I feel about this story.’
“This is wrong. We musicians, and every professional, have the mission to carry these great scores, these art works, to bring it to the audience, and say what the composer wanted to say.
“Even early in my career I worked with many different directors. The most disappointing thing was to hear someone say, ‘Well, we all know that composer and that story, so who cares about that? Let’s do something new. Let’s change and try to have the audience look at the opposite perspective.
“You have to tell the story of the composer and the dramaturge of that time … This is also true in making music. If you say, ‘I don’t care what is written in the score, I just want to express my own thing,’ you are not fulfilling the mission of your profession. The first priority is to serve the composer.
“It is not a secret that this is a time of Regietheater, and sometimes it is very exaggerated. But I do not connect this with Bayreuth. Because there are good productions in Bayreuth and not good productions in other places.”
Where Nelsons finds more room for optimism is in the high global standard of orchestral playing. Far from creating a worldwide equilibrium, as some allege, the rise in technical standards has made it more possible to cultivate stylistic differences.
“At one point there was a concentration on perfectionism,” Nelsons said of the mid-to-late 20th century. “It was connected to technology, inventing things. This period is over.”
With technical accomplishment now the norm, orchestras are freer to choose players suited to the intrinsic style of the ensemble.
“I have been so privileged to conduct so many great orchestras,” Nelsons said. “The Boston Symphony, and next year the Gewandhaus. They sound so different playing the same repertoire.
“I think orchestras are taking more care of keeping tradition and individuality. When hiring young musicians in an audition, there is more consideration of whether the musician has the style and sound that the orchestra is looking for.
“Now, playing the notes, there is no question. It is actually how you play them. And I am very happy about that.”