Mariss Jansons
Conductor who delivered warm and intense musical interpretations
MUSIC WAS food for the soul and the essence of his life, according to the conductor, Mariss Jansons, who has died aged 76. The son of Iraida Jansons, the diva of the Riga Opera, and Arvids Jansons, conductor of the opera orchestra, he was born in German-occupied Riga, where his Jewish mother was in hiding afterbeing smuggled out of the ghetto where her father and brother had been killed.
Watching his mother rehearse Carmen as a toddler, he screamed “Don’t touch my mother!” when she was being hand-cuffed by Don Jose, fearing she would be taken away.
When he was three, his father was appointed assistant conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic and Mariss and his mother joined him there some years later. Fearing Antisemitism in the Stalinist dictatorship, his mother had him baptised. Having attended his parents’ concerts and rehearsals as a young child, conducting an orchestra became a second home for him and he made a toy orchestra from buttons and needles. A pencil was his baton.
As a teenager, he entered the Leningrad Conservatory where he met Ira, a pianist, whom he married in 1966 and with whom he had a daughter, Ilona. But the marriage ended in divorce and in 1985 in Yalta he met Irina Outchitel, a Russian speech therapist. They married in 1989.
In 1968 he was invited to study with Herbert von Karajan in Berlin, but Soviet laws prevented him from leaving Leningrad. However, he was allowed to study with Hans Swarowski in Vienna and three years later won second prize in the Karajan conductors’ competition in Berlin. Nevertheless, with the Cold War at its height, he was unable to take advantage of this and returned to the Leningrad Philharmonic.
He escaped Communism in 1979 when the Soviet Ministry of Culture allowed him to become musical director of the Oslo Philharmonic. In Norway, he fought the egalitarian system that paid all musicians the same, winning higher wages for the best players, and managed to acquire more state funding. He also won a profitable recording contract with EMI and found a place for the orchestra on the international concert circuit.
His reign in Oslo ended in 2000 after technical disagreements about acoustics. In the meantime, however, in 1996, he had suffered a near fatal heart attack while conducting a concert performance of La Boheme. With this direct reminder of his father’s fatal heart attack while performing in 1984, Jansons admitted his own near-death experience changed him musically.
“Of course, you start to analyse what is important in life, really, and what is a priority, and how to divide your time and calculate your energy,” he told The Times in 1997. “But then something comes unconsciously, and this is what I felt in music. I started to like calmer music, quieter music. I like slower tempos. I enjoy it more, because I enjoy, perhaps, a more philosophical approach.”
He was appointed music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (1997 to 2004), and transformed its soullessness into the capacity to deliver warm and intense musical interpretations. In Britain, too, he was guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and frequently returned to conduct at the Royal Albert Hall and other London venues. In 1999 he was awarded honorary membership of the Royal Academy of Music.
In 2003 he took over the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra from Lorin Maazel and in 2007 conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for Pope Benedict XVI in the papal audience hall. He was also chosen to take control of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, and in 2002, 2012 and 2016 conducted the high-profile New Year’s Day concerts in Vienna. Andris Nelsons, the Latvian born music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra regarded Jansons as his mentor.
Jansons was particularly noted for his interpretations of Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and Strauss, and for his collegiate warmth towards his colleagues.
He said his mother had shown him the way to religion and that he had a – “universal religious feeling”. He is survived by Irina and his daughter Ilona from his first marriage.
Mariss Ivars Georgs Jansons: born January 14, 1943. Died November 30, 2019