The BBC Music Magazine Interview
Paavo Järvi
Estonian conductor Paavo Järvi talk to James Naughtie
Paavo Järvi is in London, unusually immobile. For a conductor settled with three orchestras, in Zurich, Bremen and Tokyo, running his own festival at home in Estonia each summer and in demand around the world, to be forcibly marooned in one city is strange. ‘I know London so well. But, you know, I’m usually rehearsing or studying a score, preparing for a concert, ready to leave for somewhere else.’
We’re talking on the phone, and it’s one of those conversations where you realise that the tyranny of scheduling – the next meeting, the afternoon rehearsal, tomorrow’s flight to the US – has fallen away in the most unexpected way in the virus lockdown. ‘You know, for me, it has been unbelievably therapeutic. If I think about what I have been doing for the last couple of years, it’s just an endless cycle. Now, not being in transit or constantly under pressure – I, for one, love it. I am starting to think that this is maybe the best thing.’
Like all musicians, he thinks of the effect on performers who have lost livelihoods and wonders if the wreckage can be salvaged, but his anxieties are laced with optimism. ‘There’s an unspoken realisation of what is possible, because we are asking ourselves: what can music actually mean to us in our lives?’
It’s inevitable that among professionals, he says, the music business is a way of paying the bills. Of course, there’s the understanding that it is a privilege to be able to make music with friends and fellow players and singers, but sometimes its importance is taken for granted. ‘Now, in this time of the virus, we are re-evaluating everything and a lot will become clearer. For example, we have to decide just what we can do when we can have audiences again. What do they really want?’
There is a good example in the Zurich Tonhalle orchestra, where he became
‘‘There is a need to gather with other people for the ritual of sitting in a hall with the lights going down’’
chief conductor and music director last autumn – in addition to being in charge at the Kammerphilharmonie in Bremen and the NHK symphony in Tokyo – and where his plans for his first couple of seasons, and their recording schedule, have been turned upside down. But it’s an opportunity to think clearly about the challenge in Zurich. And part of that challenge is how to make the most of the considerable talent he has at his disposal.
‘One of the things that I was immediately drawn to when I conducted them for the first time is their deep sense of their own culture. Very often in a famous orchestra, everybody is a wonderful player but they don’t have a sense of what it sounds like over and above being just a very talented group of musicians.’ In Zurich, he insists, the playing has a core. ‘What would you give to be lucky enough to inherit an orchestra where that basic culture already exists? It allows one to have no limit to how far and how much you can develop and how we think about our business. That’s how I feel about the orchestra. Everything is there.’
For the moment, at least, his Tchaikovsky symphony recordings with the Tonhalle have been put on hold.
And touring? When, realistically, is the international roundabout going to start to turn again? Not for many, many long months, and when it does, how many orchestras, for example, will be planning money-spinning trips to China? Will the big international festivals be able to rely on American orchestras, for example, heading to Europe as often as they used to?
When Järvi thinks about what he wants to do in Zurich, it’s with a different world in mind. Recalling some of the mad scamperings across the United States and then the world as a young conductor – trained latterly in the US – it’s with relief that he looks forward to a less frenetic musical calendar. And he has no doubt that it might be a good thing.
‘It’s a question of prioritising values and realising what are the really important things that need to be preserved. In our case – in music – I mean a new focus on why these things matter. It makes you realise how fundamentally we are social animals. You know, listening to music at home is wonderful, but there is also a need to gather with other people for the ritual of sitting in a hall with the lights going down. The moment.’
Järvi is convinced that the intensity of live music-making will have a profound effect on people deprived of it. ‘In a way, what people are missing the most is seeing or having music as a part of an elevated reason, or as an excuse, to see each other. One of the worst things is isolation and a lot of people might be wondering if it’s something that becomes a way of life. People need to come together to hug each other or give each other things or share them.’
That instinct is inseparable from highquality music making. The simple and profound together – for Järvi, that’s the essence of the Pärnu Festival, which he founded in Estonia and where he conducts the festival orchestra each July. ‘It is an anchor in my life,’ he reflects.
First of all, it happens in a small seaside town and not, as he puts it, in somewhere bigger and more glamorous. Intimacy again. ‘My number one criterion in the orchestra is what kind of people they are. When you want to meet together or eat out, are they, you know, friendly, giving or warm? People with empathy or respect? This is the type of group you want to be
‘What people are missing is having music as an excuse to see each other’
together with. This kind of group will always make better music.’
For him it is naturally a chance to champion Estonian music, for which composer Arvo Pärt has been such a trailblazer over the decades. Erkki-sven Tüür, who turned 60 last year and had the Pärnu Festival dedicated to him, is less well known, but Järvi – who recorded his Ninth Symphony in a live performance two years ago, celebrating a century of Estonian independence – is determined to bring his music to a worldwide audience.
‘Erkki-sven knows how to use the orchestra, and knows how to write for strings, how to write for layers of sound,’ he explains. ‘These are rich sounds. They can appeal to a child. That’s wonderful. Very often I listen and I can tell when somebody writes on a computer because somehow there is no depth to the sound. In his case, it’s not like that. He played in a rock band and was a flautist as well as a composer. I was in a band, too, so I have a deep relationship with him and his music. Somehow it has become kind of a mission for me to play his works and bring Estonia to the world through his music.’
Of course, to bring Estonian music to other countries will mean the reopening of concert halls and festivals. Might he imagine that accompanied by a rethink about the frantic marketing of music?
‘Look at the opera singers,’ he replies. ‘They all look like supermodels now because they are all put under so much pressure to look like they do. Marketable image has so much to do with it. And everybody is told to be more international and aggressive all the time. Well, I think all of that needs to be changed. That’s just one of the challenges that I’m very excited about. I think that the Tonhalle orchestra plays with a lot of passion and is absolutely never scared. That’s what we’ve got.’
He is blessed to be endowed with such optimism, away from the concert hall in a strangely dormant London. His belief in the hunger among audiences for live performance means that even with the fearsome financial strictures that are bound to cause pain among musicians and orchestras for years to come – reduced performances, squeezed sponsorship, governmental parsimony – he retains confidence that the rediscovery of the fundamental desire for communication through music will prevail. In a way, it is a testimony. Despairing at the lack of planning among many arts organisations for the possibility of a catastrophe of this kind, he nonetheless believes that there may be a purifying effect.
‘It is a chance to change,’ says Järvi as our telephone conversation reaches its conclusion. ‘That’s why I hope.’