Gennady Rozhdestvensky
Brilliant Russian conductor who led the BBC Symphony orchestra and promoted British composers
GENNADY ROZHDESTVENSKY, who has died aged 87, was chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra from 1978 to 1981; he was also a leading collaborator with many of the great composers of the 20th century, including Benjamin Britten, Dmitri Shostakovich and Alfred Schnittke.
He had an individual style on the podium, impulsive to the point of being mercurial. His wild hair, excitable eyes, seraphic smile and shiny red nose would be comical if they were not so hypnotic.
With audiences he could be highly affable, but orchestral players could find his minimalist approach in rehearsal to be irksome. He had his detractors, with the curmudgeonly pianist Sviatoslav Richter writing in his diaries that Rozhdestvensky’s conducting was “no better than a mechanical doll”.
Rozhdestvensky championed British composers, notably Elgar, with a distinction that surprised those who perhaps maintained that English music required an English conductor. But when he conducted the Royal Philharmonic at the Proms in 2007, the Daily Telegraph’s critic found his account of the Enigma Variations to be “affectionately and often stirringly characterised”.
In his homeland he would promote British composers such as William Walton and Arthur Bliss, and in 2013 conducted all Michael Tippett’s symphonies in Moscow. Most significantly, in 1965 he led the first performance in Moscow of Britten’s opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Undoubtedly Rozhdestvensky’s greatest affinity was with the music of Shostakovich. He gave the western premieres of the composer’s Fourth and Twelfth symphonies at the Edinburgh Festival in 1962, performances of the former having been resisted by the Soviet authorities for quarter of a century. He also rediscovered and in 1974 resuscitated the composer’s opera The Nose, a surrealist fantasy from 1930 that had similarly been discarded in the face of official disapproval.
He had first met Shostakovich in 1945 or 1946 and, despite regarding him as “one of the most outstanding teachers of all time”, soon discovered that he was “a man who spoke very little, and very sparingly”. Like the composer, Rozhdestvensky also trod a skilful diplomatic path.
The critic Rodney Milnes once described him as a “not-quite dissident”, adding that even though Rozhdestvensky was associated with many who were dissenters, he was considered “safe” enough to be allowed to take up posts in London and other western cities.
Gennady Nikolayevich Rozhdestvensky was born in Moscow on May 4 1931, the son of Nikolai Anosov, a distinguished orchestral conductor, and his wife Natalia Rozhdestvenskya, a singer; his younger brother, Pavel Anosov, became a painter of some renown. Gennady recalled at the age of eight or nine being taken to see Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro in Moscow conducted by Georges Sébastian. During wartime bombing raids by the Germans he would shelter with his mother in a bunker beneath the Bolshoi Theatre.
He studied piano with Lev Oborin at the Central Music School before turning to conducting under the guidance of his father, which he recalled as a mixed blessing. On the one hand he was able to observe many of the leading musicians of the day at first hand; on the other, his father set higher standards for him than he did for other students, who in turn were convinced that he had an easier time than they did. To avoid such allegations young Gennady took his mother’s maiden name.
In 1951, aged only 20, he won a competition to be assistant conductor at the Bolshoi, where his first public performance was conducting Tchaikovsky’s ballet Sleeping Beauty, with Stalin in the audience.
By the age of 33 Rozhdestvensky was principal conductor. He soon developed a strategy for dealing with truculent dancers who complained during rehearsals about his tempos. “I would respond by saying, ‘Yes, you’re absolutely right. I will increase the tempo.’ But in fact I would keep conducting in exactly the same way. ‘How is it now?’ ‘That’s much better, great.’”
He stumbled across the score of Shostakovich’s The Nose when he was asked to clear out his former wartime bunker beneath the Bolshoi to make way for building work.
“I looked around and saw a large book on the floor, full of dust,” he recalled. “This was the score, drawn up by the copyist … with a lot of comments written in the margin by Shostakovich.” He also conducted dozens of Schnittke’s new works, and when in 1974 the first performance of Schnittke’s Symphony No 1 was banned by the authorities in Moscow, the conductor paid for the entire orchestra to be transported to Gorki for the premiere.
Rozhdestvensky first came to London in 1956 and soon became a regular visitor, roaming Charing Cross Road and its side streets for historic cartoons of musicians. Although his tenure with the BBC Symphony Orchestra was cut short ostensibly because of visa problems, John Drummond, the former director of the Proms, claimed that the players “hated him for his laziness and refusal to rehearse”.
Nevertheless, his guest visits in the 1980s and 1990s brought cries of acclamation, including his Prom with the BBCSO in 1996 when, as one critic enthused, in Bruckner’s Second Symphony “he received glowing playing from the orchestra”.
That summer “Noddy”, as Rozhdestvensky was known to British players, also conducted Glyndebourne’s staging of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin with a rarely heard intensity.
Despite his bonhomie, the over-excitable Rozhdestvensky could at times be brittle and many of his orchestral appointments were short lived. In 2001 he resigned from another position at the Bolshoi after only a year in office when technical problems mounted and the press turned hostile.
On another occasion he cancelled a concert in the US because his name on the posters was in smaller type than that of the soloist.
He was showered with Russian and other honours, among them People’s Artist of the USSR, and last year became honorary president of the DSCH Journal, which champions the work of Shostakovich.
Gennady Rozhdestvensky, who in 2014 was appointed honorary CBE, was briefly married to Nina Timofeyeva, the Bolshoi dancer. He married secondly, in 1969, the pianist Viktoria Postnikova; they met in Moscow when playing music by Stravinsky for two pianos. They had a son, Sasha, a violinist conducted by his father at the 1998 Proms in Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto.
Gennady Rozhdestvensky, born May 4 1931, died June 17 2018