PJ to Take Up Baton as Part of Jarvifest, Detroit!
As the Detroit Symphony's beloved maestro Neeme Jarvi's tenure draws to a close, here is another look at his son Paavo's first in-depth interview with the Detroit Free Press's Mark Stryker:
Taking up the baton
Rising conductor Paavo Jarvi ascends his famous father's podium for a week of DSO performances
by Mark Stryker
Detroit Free Press, October 4, 1998
NEW YORK -- Paavo Jarvi puts down his fork in this bustling outdoor cafe in the shadow of Lincoln Center and launches into a favorite story about the summer Leonard Bernstein changed his life.
Jarvi, barely into his 20s, had enrolled in Bernstein's conducting institute in Los Angeles and was on the podium one day, stymied by Brahms' "Tragic Overture." Lenny was explaining how to conduct the opening chords when an aide interrupted to tell him it was time for another appointment; Bernstein brushed him off. A few minutes later, the aide again urged Bernstein to stop teaching and keep to his schedule.
Bernstein whirled on his chair and, smoldering, said: "I'm not teaching. I'm changing lives!"
"It was a tremendously egotistical thing to say, but you know what? He absolutely was changing lives, and that summer made all the difference to me," Jarvi says. "I realized that if I ever wanted to become a conductor, you have to live, breathe and eat the art of conducting."
Of course, Jarvi's father could have told him that, but you know how kids are: They never believe their parents until they hear it from someone else.
Jarvi, the eldest son of Detroit Symphony Orchestra music director Neeme Jarvi, will guest-conduct his father's orchestra for the first time this week at Orchestra Hall. The younger Jarvi, 35, arrives in Detroit with a reputation and resume of a rising star.
Especially well-known in Europe, Paavo (PAH-voe) Jarvi is the principal guest conductor of both the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic in Sweden and the City of Birmingham Symphony in Britain and also has led such top orchestras as the London Philharmonic and Czech Philharmonic. He's rapidly building his North American career through appearances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Toronto, Houston, Dallas and Cincinnati symphonies, and he conducts regularly in Japan and Australia.
Jarvi, who was born in Estonia but emigrated with his family to the United States in 1980 at age 17, also has recorded 13 compact discs for a variety of labels, including music of Sibelius and a portrait disc of Estonian composers Arvo Part, Erkki-Sven Turr and Eduard Tubin. Jarvi's latest CD, an all-Bernstein homage, will be released Tuesday on Virgin Records.
Jarvi has apartments in both London and New York, but if he's in either for more than a few days a month, it's an anomaly. In fact, nothing better illustrates the globe-trotting lifestyle of the modern maestro and the internal dynamics of the Jarvi clan than two nutty episodes from the DSO's European tour last spring.
As the DSO and Neeme Jarvi arrived in London, Paavo Jarvi was driving to the airport; the two spoke by cellular phone. Two weeks later in Vienna, the DSO was greeted by posters plugging an upcoming performance by Paavo Jarvi with the Stockholm Philharmonic.
A modest son
Following in the footsteps of a famous father in any field is never easy. Just ask Frank Sinatra Jr. or Gary Nicklaus. Paavo Jarvi, a deeply serious and self-critical musician, is well aware that his father's imposing shadow begs constant comparison. Let's see, 13 CDs. He's only 310 behind his father.
Born: Tallinn, Estonia
Age: 35
Residence: Apartments in New York and London
Occupation: Conductor
Current appointments: Principal guest conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic in Sweden and the City of Birmingham Symphony in Britain
Key recordings: "Searching for Roots," including Estonian music by Part, Tuur, Tubin (Virgin); Sibelius' "Kullervo" and "Lemminkainen Legends" (Virgin); Leonard Bernstein's "Prelude, Fugue and Riffs," "Divertimento," "West Side Story -- Symphonic Dances" (Virgin)
Favorite music (subject to change): Bruckner symphonies; Sibelius, Fourth Symphony; Nielsen, Fifth Symphony; Haydn symphonies
Favorite recordings conducted by his father, Neeme Jarvi: Rachmaninoff, Third Symphony; Shostakovich, Ninth Symphony; Prokofiev, Sixth Symphony; Dvorak symphonies; Strauss tone poems
On conducting: "I think a conductor should bring out a certain emotion in you, move you in some way, make you think in some way. There's nothing worse than a boring, straight, middle-of-the-road, good, correct performance. I would much rather witness a real disaster than a ...safe kind of a performance. That's the worst kind of conducting I can imagine."
Professionally, Jarvi consciously downplays his lineage. His official biography doesn't mention his father. He has painstakingly climbed up the ladder of Scandinavian orchestras to his current post in Stockholm. Moreover, he deliberately waited until he had established himself in other American cities before guest-conducting in Detroit to sidestep charges of nepotism.
Yet in terms of learning the craft, the advantages of family are incalculable. Remember, he grew up in a home in which composers like Dmitry Shostakovich and Aram Khachaturian were frequent guests. "You get so much inside information about music and the art of conducting, which can take others years and years to discover," he says.
"You learn a lot about the conductor's hidden side -- the homework. We grew up with a father who was always studying, and we were always listening to music together. We were always playing games like 'name that composer.' And if you couldn't tell the composer, you should be able to tell the century."
Neeme Jarvi says he and his wife, Liilia, never pressured their children into music -- daughter Maarika, 34, plays flute in a Madrid, Spain, orchestra; son Kristjan, 26, a newly appointed assistant conductor at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is also pursuing a conducting career. But as parents, they carefully organized their children's activities, including music lessons.
"Discipline is very important," says Neeme Jarvi.
'His own ideas'
On the podium, Paavo Jarvi looks like his father; they share the same high forehead and fleshy cheeks, and their baton techniques are similar. Artistically, however, they are far from clones, a result of both temperament and generation.
They are both fiery and dramatic musicians. But if the elder Jarvi favors impulsive sweep and momentum in his Sibelius recordings, to cite one example, the son etches the same music with sharper details and greater fastidiousness.
"He always has his own ideas," Neeme Jarvi says, pointing to his son's recording of Sibelius' epic symphonic poem "Kullervo."
"The last movement is so slow, but so deep and so sad. He has gone through this piece deeply; much more than me. He's thinking what he's doing. When I was young, I didn't have much time to think. I just did. He's always trying to learn why?"
Like most young conductors, Paavo Jarvi believes in historically informed performances of Beethoven and Mozart -- readings that take into account the performance practices of the composer's day. Neeme Jarvi's Beethoven is the work of an unreconstructed, big-boned romantic.
"On the other hand, my understanding of Haydn really comes from my father," says Jarvi, "because of the experience of growing up playing Haydn symphonies with him four hands on the piano, and always trying to discover their essence and being so amazed at how Sir Thomas Beecham gets so much fun out of them."
Jarvi has more of a bent for contemporary music than his father, though both champion the music of composers from their native Estonia and both have forged close relationships with the orchestras and composers of Scandinavia.
Yet perhaps the strongest link between the two musically is their curiosity. Both love to explore unfamiliar repertoire, and both remain impatient with received musical wisdom. "Tradition can be an excuse for intellectual laziness," says Paavo Jarvi.
In many ways, however, Jarvi's keen mind and meticulousness suggest his mother more than his father. Liilia Jarvi can be as tenacious as a terrier when the interests of her husband and children are at stake. It was Liilia who maneuvered through the Soviet bureaucracy, pressuring the authorities for years to let the family emigrate.
To this day, she and a full-time secretary micromanage the home offices for Neeme, Paavo and Kristjan; Paavo Jarvi hasn't seen his American Express or phone bill in years, and it's Liilia who wrangles with the lawyers and accountants. "My mother is very, very into detail," Jarvi says between bites of angel hair pasta. "We are a combination of both parents."
Neeme and Liilia Jarvi own a palatial Upper West Side apartment in New York in a 61st Street high-rise that neighbors Lincoln Center: three bedrooms, buffed hardwood floors, art deco trimmings, grand piano and a million-dollar balcony view in all four directions. Paavo Jarvi has his own modest apartment in the same building.
After lunch, back in his parents' place, he digs out a black-and-white photo of himself at age 12, behind a xylophone, with Khachaturian standing nearby. As a boy, he traveled with a small band of musicians as a soloist, often performing the composer's knuckle-busting "Sabre Dance."
Percussion, then piano
Jarvi was born in the Estonian capital of Tallinn. Like his father, he studied percussion. The lessons began at age 4. He soon took up piano, too, attending elementary school during the day and music school at night. He can't remember a time when he didn't want to become a conductor.
He'd follow his father to work at the state opera house and wander through as if it were a carnival, mesmerized by the exoticism of guys in false noses, grotesque makeup and funny wigs and the ballerinas and fiddle players on break, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.
Jarvi started formal conducting lessons as a teenager. After the family emigrated in 1980, settling in New Jersey, he entered a precollege program at the Juilliard School in New York as a percussionist. He also began private conducting lessons with Leonid Grin, a recent emigre himself from Moscow who was steeped in the emotional Russian school.
Grin, now music director of the San Jose Symphony in California, says that Paavo Jarvi displayed a bouquet of natural gifts -- the flamboyance, enthusiasm and insight necessary to communicate his vision to an orchestra -- coupled with a strenuous work ethic and a dexterous mind. "I think Paavo is one of those born to be a conductor," Grin says.
For two years, Jarvi attended Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he started his own semipro orchestra, then he moved to the University of Houston when Grin took a position there. Later, he studied at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia with Max Rudolf, whose Germanic orientation stressed the technical and pragmatic side of the conductor's craft.
After graduating from Curtis in 1988, he began building a career. He got a radio recording gig with a small orchestra in Norway and was invited back for a concert the next year, which led to contact with a Scandinavian agent. If you're good, word travels quickly, and in 1993, Jarvi was hired as chief conductor of the Malmo Symphony, a regional orchestra in Sweden's third-largest city.
In 1995, he became principal guest conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic. In 1996, he took the same post with the City of Birmingham Symphony, which brought him into the orbit of Sir Simon Rattle, the onetime wunderkind who has built the orchestra into the most vital in England through talent, charisma and exploratory programming.
When Jarvi takes over his own top U.S. or European orchestra -- and some industry insiders say it could happen sooner rather than later -- expect him to recreate the Birmingham model in his own image.
"The real emphasis there is integrity," says Jarvi. "Not box office. Not sales. Not stars.
"When integrity is in place, the box office, stars and everything else follows, just like it should.... That's one reason why I accepted the position. It wasn't just the music but also the association with Simon and an orchestra that stands for something in England."
Mark Stryker can be reached at 1-313-222-6459.
Taking up the baton
Rising conductor Paavo Jarvi ascends his famous father's podium for a week of DSO performances
by Mark Stryker
Detroit Free Press, October 4, 1998
NEW YORK -- Paavo Jarvi puts down his fork in this bustling outdoor cafe in the shadow of Lincoln Center and launches into a favorite story about the summer Leonard Bernstein changed his life.
Jarvi, barely into his 20s, had enrolled in Bernstein's conducting institute in Los Angeles and was on the podium one day, stymied by Brahms' "Tragic Overture." Lenny was explaining how to conduct the opening chords when an aide interrupted to tell him it was time for another appointment; Bernstein brushed him off. A few minutes later, the aide again urged Bernstein to stop teaching and keep to his schedule.
Bernstein whirled on his chair and, smoldering, said: "I'm not teaching. I'm changing lives!"
"It was a tremendously egotistical thing to say, but you know what? He absolutely was changing lives, and that summer made all the difference to me," Jarvi says. "I realized that if I ever wanted to become a conductor, you have to live, breathe and eat the art of conducting."
Of course, Jarvi's father could have told him that, but you know how kids are: They never believe their parents until they hear it from someone else.
Jarvi, the eldest son of Detroit Symphony Orchestra music director Neeme Jarvi, will guest-conduct his father's orchestra for the first time this week at Orchestra Hall. The younger Jarvi, 35, arrives in Detroit with a reputation and resume of a rising star.
Especially well-known in Europe, Paavo (PAH-voe) Jarvi is the principal guest conductor of both the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic in Sweden and the City of Birmingham Symphony in Britain and also has led such top orchestras as the London Philharmonic and Czech Philharmonic. He's rapidly building his North American career through appearances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Toronto, Houston, Dallas and Cincinnati symphonies, and he conducts regularly in Japan and Australia.
Jarvi, who was born in Estonia but emigrated with his family to the United States in 1980 at age 17, also has recorded 13 compact discs for a variety of labels, including music of Sibelius and a portrait disc of Estonian composers Arvo Part, Erkki-Sven Turr and Eduard Tubin. Jarvi's latest CD, an all-Bernstein homage, will be released Tuesday on Virgin Records.
Jarvi has apartments in both London and New York, but if he's in either for more than a few days a month, it's an anomaly. In fact, nothing better illustrates the globe-trotting lifestyle of the modern maestro and the internal dynamics of the Jarvi clan than two nutty episodes from the DSO's European tour last spring.
As the DSO and Neeme Jarvi arrived in London, Paavo Jarvi was driving to the airport; the two spoke by cellular phone. Two weeks later in Vienna, the DSO was greeted by posters plugging an upcoming performance by Paavo Jarvi with the Stockholm Philharmonic.
A modest son
Following in the footsteps of a famous father in any field is never easy. Just ask Frank Sinatra Jr. or Gary Nicklaus. Paavo Jarvi, a deeply serious and self-critical musician, is well aware that his father's imposing shadow begs constant comparison. Let's see, 13 CDs. He's only 310 behind his father.
Born: Tallinn, Estonia
Age: 35
Residence: Apartments in New York and London
Occupation: Conductor
Current appointments: Principal guest conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic in Sweden and the City of Birmingham Symphony in Britain
Key recordings: "Searching for Roots," including Estonian music by Part, Tuur, Tubin (Virgin); Sibelius' "Kullervo" and "Lemminkainen Legends" (Virgin); Leonard Bernstein's "Prelude, Fugue and Riffs," "Divertimento," "West Side Story -- Symphonic Dances" (Virgin)
Favorite music (subject to change): Bruckner symphonies; Sibelius, Fourth Symphony; Nielsen, Fifth Symphony; Haydn symphonies
Favorite recordings conducted by his father, Neeme Jarvi: Rachmaninoff, Third Symphony; Shostakovich, Ninth Symphony; Prokofiev, Sixth Symphony; Dvorak symphonies; Strauss tone poems
On conducting: "I think a conductor should bring out a certain emotion in you, move you in some way, make you think in some way. There's nothing worse than a boring, straight, middle-of-the-road, good, correct performance. I would much rather witness a real disaster than a ...safe kind of a performance. That's the worst kind of conducting I can imagine."
Professionally, Jarvi consciously downplays his lineage. His official biography doesn't mention his father. He has painstakingly climbed up the ladder of Scandinavian orchestras to his current post in Stockholm. Moreover, he deliberately waited until he had established himself in other American cities before guest-conducting in Detroit to sidestep charges of nepotism.
Yet in terms of learning the craft, the advantages of family are incalculable. Remember, he grew up in a home in which composers like Dmitry Shostakovich and Aram Khachaturian were frequent guests. "You get so much inside information about music and the art of conducting, which can take others years and years to discover," he says.
"You learn a lot about the conductor's hidden side -- the homework. We grew up with a father who was always studying, and we were always listening to music together. We were always playing games like 'name that composer.' And if you couldn't tell the composer, you should be able to tell the century."
Neeme Jarvi says he and his wife, Liilia, never pressured their children into music -- daughter Maarika, 34, plays flute in a Madrid, Spain, orchestra; son Kristjan, 26, a newly appointed assistant conductor at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is also pursuing a conducting career. But as parents, they carefully organized their children's activities, including music lessons.
"Discipline is very important," says Neeme Jarvi.
'His own ideas'
On the podium, Paavo Jarvi looks like his father; they share the same high forehead and fleshy cheeks, and their baton techniques are similar. Artistically, however, they are far from clones, a result of both temperament and generation.
They are both fiery and dramatic musicians. But if the elder Jarvi favors impulsive sweep and momentum in his Sibelius recordings, to cite one example, the son etches the same music with sharper details and greater fastidiousness.
"He always has his own ideas," Neeme Jarvi says, pointing to his son's recording of Sibelius' epic symphonic poem "Kullervo."
"The last movement is so slow, but so deep and so sad. He has gone through this piece deeply; much more than me. He's thinking what he's doing. When I was young, I didn't have much time to think. I just did. He's always trying to learn why?"
Like most young conductors, Paavo Jarvi believes in historically informed performances of Beethoven and Mozart -- readings that take into account the performance practices of the composer's day. Neeme Jarvi's Beethoven is the work of an unreconstructed, big-boned romantic.
"On the other hand, my understanding of Haydn really comes from my father," says Jarvi, "because of the experience of growing up playing Haydn symphonies with him four hands on the piano, and always trying to discover their essence and being so amazed at how Sir Thomas Beecham gets so much fun out of them."
Jarvi has more of a bent for contemporary music than his father, though both champion the music of composers from their native Estonia and both have forged close relationships with the orchestras and composers of Scandinavia.
Yet perhaps the strongest link between the two musically is their curiosity. Both love to explore unfamiliar repertoire, and both remain impatient with received musical wisdom. "Tradition can be an excuse for intellectual laziness," says Paavo Jarvi.
In many ways, however, Jarvi's keen mind and meticulousness suggest his mother more than his father. Liilia Jarvi can be as tenacious as a terrier when the interests of her husband and children are at stake. It was Liilia who maneuvered through the Soviet bureaucracy, pressuring the authorities for years to let the family emigrate.
To this day, she and a full-time secretary micromanage the home offices for Neeme, Paavo and Kristjan; Paavo Jarvi hasn't seen his American Express or phone bill in years, and it's Liilia who wrangles with the lawyers and accountants. "My mother is very, very into detail," Jarvi says between bites of angel hair pasta. "We are a combination of both parents."
Neeme and Liilia Jarvi own a palatial Upper West Side apartment in New York in a 61st Street high-rise that neighbors Lincoln Center: three bedrooms, buffed hardwood floors, art deco trimmings, grand piano and a million-dollar balcony view in all four directions. Paavo Jarvi has his own modest apartment in the same building.
After lunch, back in his parents' place, he digs out a black-and-white photo of himself at age 12, behind a xylophone, with Khachaturian standing nearby. As a boy, he traveled with a small band of musicians as a soloist, often performing the composer's knuckle-busting "Sabre Dance."
Percussion, then piano
Jarvi was born in the Estonian capital of Tallinn. Like his father, he studied percussion. The lessons began at age 4. He soon took up piano, too, attending elementary school during the day and music school at night. He can't remember a time when he didn't want to become a conductor.
He'd follow his father to work at the state opera house and wander through as if it were a carnival, mesmerized by the exoticism of guys in false noses, grotesque makeup and funny wigs and the ballerinas and fiddle players on break, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.
Jarvi started formal conducting lessons as a teenager. After the family emigrated in 1980, settling in New Jersey, he entered a precollege program at the Juilliard School in New York as a percussionist. He also began private conducting lessons with Leonid Grin, a recent emigre himself from Moscow who was steeped in the emotional Russian school.
Grin, now music director of the San Jose Symphony in California, says that Paavo Jarvi displayed a bouquet of natural gifts -- the flamboyance, enthusiasm and insight necessary to communicate his vision to an orchestra -- coupled with a strenuous work ethic and a dexterous mind. "I think Paavo is one of those born to be a conductor," Grin says.
For two years, Jarvi attended Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he started his own semipro orchestra, then he moved to the University of Houston when Grin took a position there. Later, he studied at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia with Max Rudolf, whose Germanic orientation stressed the technical and pragmatic side of the conductor's craft.
After graduating from Curtis in 1988, he began building a career. He got a radio recording gig with a small orchestra in Norway and was invited back for a concert the next year, which led to contact with a Scandinavian agent. If you're good, word travels quickly, and in 1993, Jarvi was hired as chief conductor of the Malmo Symphony, a regional orchestra in Sweden's third-largest city.
In 1995, he became principal guest conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic. In 1996, he took the same post with the City of Birmingham Symphony, which brought him into the orbit of Sir Simon Rattle, the onetime wunderkind who has built the orchestra into the most vital in England through talent, charisma and exploratory programming.
When Jarvi takes over his own top U.S. or European orchestra -- and some industry insiders say it could happen sooner rather than later -- expect him to recreate the Birmingham model in his own image.
"The real emphasis there is integrity," says Jarvi. "Not box office. Not sales. Not stars.
"When integrity is in place, the box office, stars and everything else follows, just like it should.... That's one reason why I accepted the position. It wasn't just the music but also the association with Simon and an orchestra that stands for something in England."
Mark Stryker can be reached at 1-313-222-6459.
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