‘Women on the podium are not my cup of tea’
Mariss Jansons has all the qualities you could possibly hope for in a great conductor. Well, almost all. Ivan Hewett meets him
The old-style conducting maestro is a legendary creature, now consigned to history. Admittedly, he (it was always “he”) often had wonderful skills. His training was slow and extraordinarily thorough, so by the time he arrived on the podium he knew his craft inside out. But there were other aspects of the maestro-figure that were less treasurable – the vanity and the egomania that can all too easily spring from enjoying absolute power over 80-odd musicians.
The great thing about the maestro Mariss Jansons is that he has all the good qualities without the bad ones. Orchestral players and his peers speak with reverence about his patience, his quiet attention to detail, his encyclopedic knowledge. The status he enjoys has just been honoured by the Royal Philharmonic Society, which tomorrow will present Jansons with its Gold Medal, placing him alongside other luminaries such as Herbert von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein.
Now in his mid-seventies, the Latvian-born conductor has had a slow but sure rise, which began out of sight of the West in the late Sixties in the Soviet Union, and peeped into view only in 1979, when he became music director at what was then a second-rank orchestra, the Oslo Philharmonic (thanks to Jansons, it no longer is). Since then the appointments have only got bigger, unlike many conductors whose moves are often merely sideways. After a spell as principal guest conductor of the London Philharmonic in the early Nineties came the music directorship of the Pittsburgh Symphony in 1997. Then, in 2002, he was named as the sixth chief conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, in Amsterdam, one of the world’s greatest orchestras, and the following year he also took over the helm of the scarcely less renowned Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.
“It was crazy, directing these two great orchestras,” he says ruefully. “When I was offered the Concertgebouw, I had already accepted the job in Munich, but how could I say no to such a great orchestra? I was constantly running back and forth between the two cities. It was the most enormous pressure. Sometimes I felt as if I couldn’t breathe.”
Even for a man in good health, this would have been a punishing workload. But Jansons had already suffered a heart attack, in 1996. After 14 years, something had to give, and last year Jansons announced he would step down from the Dutch orchestra. “It was such a hard decision, I loved working with both these orchestras. There was absolutely no reason on musical grounds to leave one or the other. But in the end I had to stay in Munich, because I was involved in the campaign there for a new concert hall. Things had reached a very delicate stage, and I realised it would be a real stab in the back if I left. So I had to say goodbye to Amsterdam. Thank God I did because six months later the Bavarian government said yes to the new hall.”
Was an expensive new hall really needed, given that Munich already has two symphony-sized halls? “But none of them is actually a home for the orchestra,” says Jansons. “We are constantly moving from one to the other, and this is not good for the orchestra’s spirit. Also the Herkulessaal is just too small, and this hall we are in now sounds very poor,” he says, gesturing around at the concert hall of the Gasteig, built in 1985. “When Bernstein came to conduct here, his advice was, ‘Burn it’. It’s bad for the audience, but it’s also bad for the orchestra. We cannot give of our best here. A concert hall is like an instrument, and an orchestra needs a great instrument to develop its sound, just as a violinist needs a great violin. This is why London will soon have a new concert hall, no? I believe it was a condition of Simon Rattle moving to the London Symphony Orchestra.”
When I tell Jansons the new concert hall in London is far from certain, and will go ahead only if a private donor steps forward, he is speechless. “Ja, well, I suppose there are many rich people in London…” he says eventually, shaking his head as if he can’t believe London’s rulers could be so philistine.
Now that Munich’s new concert hall is secured, Jansons can turn to one of his other great passions in life, opera. Conductors of Jansons’s generation are often suspicious of modern opera productions, but Jansons insists it’s not a question of modern versus conservative. “I am not opposed to modern productions at all. I recently conducted a production of Lady Macbeth of Mtensk
with the Norwegian director Stefan Herheim, which was very bold, but I was persuaded because he knew the score so well. Herheim used to be a cellist, and is very musical, so he knows just how far he can go. But if a director is not musical and does not know the score, the result can be tragic, absolutely tragic,” he says, again with that disbelieving shake of the head.
Is the art of opera conducting fundamentally different from leading an orchestra in the concert hall? Jansons ponders before replying. “The fundamentals are the same, but there’s a special difficulty, because if you are giving directions to a singer on the stage up here,” he says, raising his arms above shoulder height, “it becomes difficult to indicate dynamics [gradations of loud and soft], and this is something that needs great professionalism to manage.”
“Professionalism” is a word that keeps cropping up in our conversation, pronounced in Jansons’s fruity Latvian accent, and it leads us naturally to another of his great passions in life, which is the education of the next generation of players and conductors. He taught for almost 30 years at the St Petersburg Conservatoire, and often works with the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra and the youth orchestra of his own orchestra. He is astonished at the speed with which young conductors are promoted. “My own development was very slow, I did not really start to conduct professionally until I was 28. I am amazed at how young some conductors are nowadays. Of course if they are incredibly talented they can do it, but if they are pushed too fast, it’s bad for them and the orchestra, which cannot feel confident if they sense the conductor does not know his job.”
Is he enthused by the biggest change in the conducting scene, the rise of young women to positions of prominence in the orchestral world? “Hmm, well…” Jansons pulls an embarrassed face, knowing he’s about to say something deeply politically incorrect. “Well, I don’t want to give offence, and I am not against it, that would be very wrong. I understand the world has changed, and there is now no profession that can be confined to this or that gender. It’s a question of what one is used to. I grew up in a different world, and for me seeing a woman on the podium… well, let’s just say it’s not my cup of tea.”
It’s a brave man now who admits to such a sentiment, and it will no doubt bring on a storm of social media condemnation. But Jansons doesn’t do social media, and in any case he’s weathered far greater tribulations – such as the Cold War and the chaos that followed the liberalisation of the old Soviet Union. “I remember after perestroika [the period of self-questioning ushered in by Mikhail Gorbachev] and the fall of the Soviet Union there were some terrible years, when cultural and educational life went into a bad decline. Now we are enjoying a fantastic cultural renaissance in Russia. In material terms some people are suffering badly. But concert halls and theatres are full, there is a completely different spirit in the country. So in general I am optimistic about the future.”
‘I am amazed at how young some conductors are nowadays. If they are incredibly talented they can do it’