100 Musicians
Mariss Jansons 1943 - 2019
THE CONDUCTOR Mariss Jansons died over two years ago in December 2019, but it is still difficult to comprehend that he has gone. Jansons was one of the most instinctively brilliant musicians ever to wield a baton, a man who poured every drop and sinew into his performances and then some more. A heart condition had forced him to scale back considerably —including leaving his decade-long association with the Concertgebouw orchestra — but even by strictly rationing his concerts, he succumbed all too soon at just 76.
Janson’s father was the distinguished, if somewhat stolid, Latvian conductor Arvid Jansons (who had a long association with the Halle orchestra, and who died in 1984 in the green room after a performance with them of Mahler’s 5th). His mother was the singer Iraida Jansons. Mariss was born in hiding 1943 in Latvia, where his mother was being sheltered having been smuggled from the Riga ghetto where her family were murdered by the Nazis.
Maris learned the violin as a child and by the time he was 17 was sent to the Leningrad Conservatory. It was there that he took up conducting, eventually moving to Vienna in 1969 to study under Hans Swarowsky and then Karajan in Salzburg.
The Soviets refused to allow him to remain, so he returned to the USSR as associate conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic, then becoming associate principal conductor in 1985 — the year in which he first came to the attention of British audiences as guest conductor of the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra.
Meanwhile he had been appointed music director of the Oslo Philharmonic in 1979. Under Jansons the orchestra’s sound was transformed. A set of the complete Tchaikovsky symphonies was something of a sensation and the Oslo orchestra became a regular on the international touring circuit — and Jansons, too.
He was a frequent guest conductor in London, but it was his appointment to the Bavarian RSO in 2003 and the Concertgebouw in 2004 that lifted him in the conducting stratosphere. His regular concerts with the latter in London were among the most eagerly awaited of the season, especially in the likes of Mahler, Bruckner and Strauss.
Jansons was not just one of the greatest conductors of the past few decades — he was adored by his orchestras as a mensch, with countless stories of his personal kindness to players, and their (unusual) joy at the prospect of a rehearsal under his tutelage.