Richard Morrison

Conductor Vasily Petrenko’s move to the RPO could be a game changer

Iwouldn’t say all classical music critics are snobs. Perish the thought! But I have been startled by the disdain some colleagues have shown following the appointment, from 2021, of Vasily Petrenko as music director of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO). ‘Appropriate: a conductor going nowhere leading an orchestra going nowhere,’ one sneered on Twitter.

Let’s unpick the dark subtext to that remark later. For the moment, the facts. Petrenko, still only 42, has had a terrific time on Merseyside. He has lifted the quality of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, left a string of highlypraised recordings and – perhaps most important of all – reconnected the people of the city with classical music, not least by immersing himself in the Merseyside football scene.

People genuinely love him there. But 15 years is enough for any conductor with any orchestra. Familiarity breeds, if not contempt, certainly routine. Petrenko’s appointment to the Oslo Philharmonic in 2013 was supposed to be his stepping-stone from Liverpool to the stars, but in Norway he hasn’t made anything like the impact that illustrious predecessors such as Mariss Jansons did. Perhaps this conductor and orchestra come from different musical planets. Petrenko once made a revealing remark to me about the different procedures for getting rid of orchestral players who didn’t cut the mustard. ‘In Russia you can do it in six hours; in Britain six weeks; in Scandinavia anything from six months to six years.’

Anyway, for whatever reason, he’s leaving Oslo in 2020 – even earlier than Liverpool, which he departs in 2021. In that sense his career has flattened out. And it doesn’t help that the ‘other Petrenko’ – the unrelated Kirill – is the one succeeding Simon Rattle in Berlin.

However, to write him off as my colleague did is harsh. Petrenko has shown that he can forge a rapport with audiences and youngsters. That quality will be crucial in his new role, because the RPO has repositioned itself as a London orchestra doing its most important work outside the capital – serving many communities in southern England with concert series backed by valuable educational projects.

Vasily Petrenko has shown he can forge a rapport with audiences and youngsters

Let’s not be naïve. That role has been forced upon the RPO. London’s other symphony orchestras have solid, contractual homes: the LSO and the BBC at the Barbican, the Philharmonia and LPO at the Festival Hall. With a hugely reduced Arts Council grant, the RPO was compelled to become nomadic and, to some extent, sporadic. Yet I have nothing but admiration for the resourceful way that its management has sustained and broadened its work over the past 20 years and kept 70-odd excellent musicians in work.

The problem is that the RPO’S choice of music directors has not reflected its new reality. The last was Charles Dutoit, who was a ‘yesterday’s maestro’ even before his career imploded in a spate of post-weinstein allegations. And when the RPO did pick someone young and upwardly-mobile – the 33-year-old Daniele Gatti in 1994 – he rarely proved willing to repeat his London concerts in, for instance, Ipswich or Reading.

Petrenko will be ideal in this missionary role. It’s really a geographical extension of everything he’s been doing in Liverpool, and it’s good news that his appointment will coincide with an increased presence for the RPO at the Festival Hall – one of the orchestra’s main image problems has been playing in the joyless Cadogan Hall.

What, though, of the ‘dark subtext’ I mentioned earlier? Well, for as long as I can remember there have been music journalists and bureaucrats who believe London has too many orchestras, and would dearly love to banish one or two permanently to the regions or, better still, abolish them altogether. I have lost count of the number of schemes aimed at making this happen – and the RPO has always been first in the firing-line.

I rejoice that the British musician’s innate genius for survival – which means being flexible and inventive – has thus far proved stronger than this desire to ‘tidy up’ accidents of history. Today, London’s music lovers enjoy not only its quintet of long-established symphony orchestras, but also a host of upstarts – Aurora, the Southbank Sinfonia, the London Contemporary Orchestra et al – who are finding fresh venues, fresh ways of presenting music and fresh audiences. Now the RPO has a conductor young and clued-up enough to respond to the new opportunities of the digital age and, I hope, give this resilient band a profile it hasn’t enjoyed for decades.

Richard Morrison is chief music critic and a columnist of The Times