by More than ten years ago, Vladimir Jurowski, one of Russia’s most famous musical sons, began to realize that things were getting stronger in the country where he was born.
“It looked like things were about to get worse, especially after Russia annexed Crimea,” says the 52-year-old conductor. “The irony was that they reached out to me at that exact moment. The government offered to return my Russian passport, which I lost after immigrating to Germany with my family when I was 18. It was Leo Tolstoy’s ancestor who came to me from the Ministry of Culture. Other artists and musicians from Russia received the same offer, and some accepted it, but I could not. I remembered the case of Sergei Prokofiev, who accepted an offer to return to the Soviet Union in 1936, and from then on he was arrested. He could never leave again. I didn’t want that to be my fate.”
Jurowski’s career has been centered around Germany and the UK since he became music director of Glyndebourne Festival Opera in 2001 at the age of 29, where he dazzled audiences with his balletic grace and subtlety. shown. But he maintained his artistic and personal ties to Russia. He conducted the Russian National Orchestra many times, and until 2020 he was the artistic director of the Russian State Academic Symphony Orchestra, but that chapter of his life is now closed.
“I don’t think I can ever go back, I would risk my own safety, because my views on Russia are well known,” he says. “I think the country is moving towards what they call a nation state and what I would call a fascist state. It is obviously not exactly like Stalin’s Soviet Union, or like Hitler’s Germany of 1938, but there are many similarities, and these are growing every day. Things have gotten particularly bad since the last elections, with things like the death of Alexei Navalny. There are restrictions on freedom of speech, repression of dissidents and the media and gay people. And the people who are running the country, in my opinion, are criminals, they are real mafiosi. So really it’s a terrorist state, which you can compare to Iran, or North Korea.”
Jurowski says all this with a tired equanimity, tinged with sadness. His romantic poet’s long hair is now gray with gray, but he is as slim as ever, and still sings his English words with careful precision. We are meeting in one of the many artists’ rooms at the back of the Royal Festival Hall, where he is rehearsing for “Wagner’s biggest and most complex opera”, Die Götterdämmerung, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the orchestra that headed it for 15 years.
Jurowski has a very acute awareness of cultural and political realities that will not allow him to float complacently above politics. He recently sparked some negative comments by saying in an interview with the New York Times that “no musician is ever apolitical”.
“That’s not understood,” he tells me. “I didn’t mean that all music is political, in fact I think music is essentially non-political. But there is always a context to making music, it happens in a certain place at a certain time. Bach’s B minor Mass was even political – he wrote it partly to ingratiate himself with the Catholic court in Dresden. And now certain types of music have become extremely political. Tchaikovsky’s music is being used by the Russian regime for propaganda purposes, and of course many people in the West wanted to ban his music, and the music of other Russian composers, when Russia invaded Ukraine . This seems completely stupid to me. We cannot blame Tchaikovsky for the crimes of the current Russian state. Of course, I understand why the Ukrainians feel otherwise.”
Even more controversial was Jurowski’s decision to allow two young climate change protesters to make a public statement, after they invaded the orchestra stage during a performance of Bruckner’s 4th Symphony by the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra last September in Lucerne . It is clear that the audience was not at all happy with his decision. Why did he do it?
“We kept playing and they were gluing themselves on my podium, and I thought – let them talk now, for two minutes,” says Jurowski. “Many people in the audience were shouting in protest about this, and I said, look, I promised they could talk, so if you don’t stop shouting I will leave and that will be the end of the concert. If you give them a chance, we will complete the symphony. I then had this email correspondence with the protesters where I explained that, okay, you want to save the environment but there is also the ecology of the human soul – and this ecology is also nurtured by the arts and classical concerts . I wish they would understand that, but at the same time as the planet is burning, we shouldn’t be so small as to prevent them from voicing their concerns.”
It is now three years since Jurowski left the LPO to lead the State Opera in Munich and the Radio Orchestra in Berlin where he lives with his wife Patricia (he has two children, one of whom works at home opera in Germany now, the other on board. at a cathedral school in England). In doing so he seemed to be following in the footsteps of other conductors such as Kent Nagano and Esa-Pekka Salonen who struggled for some time with Britain’s underfunded and under-pressure orchestral scene, before gratefully submerged in a soft suit. A European or American orchestra, where funding and rehearsal time are much more abundant. Except, he tells me, things are changing.
“The world is moving on, and things are very different in Germany now. For example, German radio orchestras have been the most protected funding area for years and in recent years, are now becoming an endangered species. The heads of the two main public radio and television stations have said they may not need all those orchestras any time soon. So there is the debate about possible closures and redundancies, which we know from other countries like Italy, and later the BBC with the debate about the orchestras. [the planned closure of the BBC Singers and cuts to the English BBC orchestras of 20 per cent were actually withdrawn under public pressure), is now happening in Germany. And because of the economic downturn in Germany, and the demands on public money from Covid, the refugee crisis and so on, people are beginning to ask questions we never heard in Germany before, such as – why do we need this elitist form of art? They are not asking as loudly as in the UK, but it’s coming.”
Jurowski is still sad that the UK has left “the European family of nations” as he called it, and is dismayed about the funding crisis in the arts sector. And he’s still fond of the country that gave him his first big post (a feeling which is reciprocated – in February Jurowski was awarded the highest honour available to a non-UK citizen, an Honorary KBE.) He can even find words of praise for our orchestral scene, “because everything moves so much quicker, and there is so much less time for everything, and because of that people are incredibly well prepared and super engaged.
“Also you have these wonderful audiences, I wish German audiences could learn from them, they are so open-minded and curious. It is remarkable what the British art scene is still achieving, despite all the funding problems. Really the artistic resources of your country are astonishingly rich.”
Vladimir Jurowski conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra in Wagner’s ‘Götterdämmerung’ at the Royal Festival Hall on Saturday; lpo.org.uk. Vol 3 of the LPO’s Stravinsky CD series, conducted by Jurowski, is released on Friday on the LPO label
