breathing music
At the age of 34, Maestro Vladimir Yurovsky has scaled career heights most conductors never reach in a lifetime. He talks to element about the joys and pitfalls of the profession in the lead-up to his concert with the Russian National Orchestra.
TEXT FRANCIS MERSON feedback
There is a stereotype of the great conductor: stern, imperious, grey-haired and, most crucially, old. Kind of like Dumbledore from “Harry Potter,” if you shaved off his beard and swapped his magic wand for a baton. But all these components of the conductor identikit are inapplicable to Vladimir Yurovsky. Nonetheless, at the mere age of 34, he has become the principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, music director of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera and principal guest conductor of the Russian National Orchestra. Yurovsky (or Jurowski as he is known in the West) is, without rival, the hottest young conductor on the circuit today. This Friday, he leads the RNO through a program of music written on the territory of the Austro-Hungarian empire — Zoltan Kodaly, Joseph Haydn and Bela Bartok — at the Tchaikovsky Hall. This self-effacing, Moscow-born conductor seems, if anything, alarmed by the breakneck pace of his success. “All I’ve been doing since this all started,” he told the Guardian after his 2004 appointment to the London Philharmonic, “is pulling the handbrake.” Yurovsky’s shock at his sudden fame is easy to comprehend, although it would be coy to pretend that his success is altogether unexpected. Vladimir’s father Mikhail is a respected conductor in his own right, and his grandfather was a minor composer, a colleague of Prokofiev and Shostakovich. To say that the Yurovskys were a musical family is like saying that the Vanderbilts were well-off. “Music was the air I breathed, the food I ate, the water I drunk, ever since I was conceived, even before I was born,” Yurovsky told element. After an education at the Moscow’s Central Music School, the 18-year-old Vladimir was uprooted to Germany in 1990, from where his father pursued an international conducting career. The young Vladimir studied in Dresden and Berlin, absorbing the German musical tradition, which he views as equally fundamental to his work as his Russian roots. “My first teacher was my father, he gave me my first conducting lessons, so he was obviously the most important figure, but I also had other teachers in Germany, so I feel equally at ease with the German school.” His breakthrough came in 1995, with a series of appearances at Ireland’s Wexford Opera Festival, where he conducted Rimsky-Korsakov’s “May Night.” Those few performances were enough to spark a feeding frenzy among impresarios, and launch Yurovsky’s international career. He was only 23. Since then, Yurovsky has turned down, so he says, ten more offers than he has accepted. He restricts the number of his performances to 80 a year — comparatively few in the age of air travel and international star conductors. Still, Vladimir is a busy young maestro — the only time he could find to talk to us was in the lounge at JFK before his flight to Moscow — and his life is mapped out until the end of the decade. “That’s the worst thing about conducting […] having your life planned several years in advance: it gives you the feeling of a complete loss of freedom. You agree to an engagement in a few year’s time, and when it comes around you may not feel like doing it.” Still, what Yurovsky has lost in negative freedom he has gained in positive: the freedom to conduct the greatest orchestras in the world — the Berlin Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera, to name but a few. What makes these orchestras so keen to see Yurovsky at the helm is his knock-down combo of intellect, technique and sheer animal magnetism. The last of these three attributes is the least examined in writing about conductors, and the most difficult to quantify. Conducting is, to a large extent, a confidence trick: you have to make the orchestra want to follow you into the world of the score. You might have the musical mind of Mozart, but if you don’t have the charisma of Sean Connery, the players won’t make the effort to play at their best. Some conductors bend the orchestra to their will through intimidation, but the greats do it by force of personality. It was said of Furtwangler that the orchestra began to play better as soon as he walked in the rehearsal room. His mere presence was enough. Yurovsky’s backstage nickname of Vlad the Impaler suggests that he is not afraid of exerting his will, but seeing him on stage makes you understand how deeply he feels the music, and how aptly he is able to communicate it. After all, a conductor is not just the leader of the music, he is the music — or at least its visual correlative, the point of reference by which the orchestra members hone their interpretation. Yurovksy’s expression changes little during a performance — his brows are knitted, his mouth pinched forward into a pout of what looks like derision, but must be concentration. His body is what really directs the music: his hands speak the language of sound, communicating nuances of dynamics, color and tempo through fluid movement. Vladimir conducts with all the vigor that his youth allows, and his eyes dart from section to section, always controlling, ablaze with musical meaning. Yurovsky is so much fun to watch that his success must be at least partly explained by his visual allure, a point which he concedes gracefully. “I would be happier if people came to my concerts just for the music, rather than to see me, but if they come away knowing the Bartok music for strings or Haydn symphony I will feel that I have done my job. The main thing is that they connect on an emotional and spiritual level, that they have a feeling that they have received food for thought.” Vladimir Yurovsky conducts the Russian National Orchestra in Kodaly’s “Dances of Galanta,” Haydn’s Symphony No. 63 and Concert Symphony for Violin, Cello, Oboe, Bassoon and Orchestra, and Bartok’s “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.” Tickets to the concert at 7 p.m. on Jan. 18 range from 770 rubles on parter.ru. |
