Like father, like son: Paavo Jarvi also wields a passionate baton
by Bradley Bambarger/For The Star-Ledger
Thursday February 26, 2009, 11:59 AM
Thursday February 26, 2009, 11:59 AM
Like his father, conductor Paavo Jarvi has an obsessive love of music-making. The eldest son of esteemed New Jersey Symphony Orchestra music director Neeme Jarvi, the 46-year-old Paavo is similarly driven, having cultivated deep relationships with multiple orchestras and a discography as extensive as any conductor of his generation.
Paavo, who emigrated from Estonia with his family at age 17, is music director of the Cincinnati Symphony, Germany's Frankfurt Radio Symphony and, as of fall 2010, the Orchestre de Paris. He has kept his ties to the old country, too, as artistic adviser to the Estonian National Symphony. And it wasn't just a work ethic that Paavo inherited from his father. More than his free-spirited, very American younger brother Kristjan, also a conductor, Paavo has his father's natural European gravitas.
Yet Paavo is his own man, and a modern one, as anyone who has experienced his conducting of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie-Bremen on record or, especially, in concert knows. He bolsters traditional values with the latest thinking on period style for Beethoven that is sinewy and visceral. This team's take on the "Eroica" Symphony's Funeral March hits a listener like a blow to the sternum, giving one a sense of what this revolutionary music must have felt like to its original audience.
Jarvi and the German chamber orchestra return with their Beethoven this weekend, playing the "Eroica" along with the Symphony No. 8 and "Consecration of the House" Overture at New Brunswick's State Theatre on Sunday afternoon. As part of the inaugural festival for Lincoln Center's wonderfully renovated Alice Tully Hall, they play two concerts there on Monday, the first performance repeating the "Eroica" program and the second featuring Symphonies Nos. 1 and 7.
On the line from Frankfurt during a rare spare moment, Jarvi talked about Beethoven, his father and the beauty of taking chances.
Q: What's different about your Beethoven with the Bremen orchestra?
A: Well, I have to say that it's not "my" Beethoven. It's very much "our" Beethoven. There are orchestras, such those of New York or Vienna, that perform this music so well. But it is rare that an orchestra would play, say, the "Eroica" dozens of times with the same conductor, as the Bremen has with me over the past decade. We have been able to pay such attention to detail that it is as if we are constantly discovering the music. This is a self-governing orchestra, so they play as if their livelihoods depend on it -- which they do. And we only do special projects together, so nothing is routine.
Q: Tell me about the period aspects to your approach to Beethoven.
A: I grew up listening to records of old maestros like Szell and Furtwangler in these symphonies. Later, I also came to admire the best period-instrument groups and the contributions of such historically minded conductors as Harnoncourt and Norrington. For instance, like them, I feel that vibrato should be an embellishment, not a constant. And our approach to tempo is more dynamic. In the past, people felt that the extreme speeds Beethoven asked for were impossible. But Beethoven was deaf, not stupid. One must consider the lighter tone of the instruments used in that day, the smaller size of the orchestras.
Most important, though, is the image the music is meant to convey. The "Eroica" Funeral March has to be a real Andante, calm but at a march tempo. If you have a coffin on your shoulder, you have to keep moving, after all. But for all our attention to the latest scholarly scores, an emotional-spiritual conductor like Furtwangler had it right: The point is to go beyond stylistic issues to inner meaning -- the soul of the notes.
Q: What do you think you got from your father, musically?
A: I got everything from my father. We still talk a lot about the process of conducting. On the podium, he knows what he wants and how to get it, but he isn't the professor type. He wants to have a good time making music, and he has a gift for transmitting this tremendous joy to the orchestra and the audience. And he never seems to perform the same piece the same way twice. This is something that's very important to me, too -- that music has to live in the moment. It means nothing to be technically proficient, if the performance is routine. One must take chances.
That's what I loved about Leonard Bernstein. Once, I was driving and heard on the radio one of his performances of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. It was so strange and overdone, but it was impossible not to listen to. I had to pull the car over. So many of us think we know how this symphony goes, but we don't, really -- and Bernstein showed us this, even thrust the fact in our faces. Immaculate and tasteful don't mean good. A performance is only good when it's the kind that makes you stop your car.
Paavo, who emigrated from Estonia with his family at age 17, is music director of the Cincinnati Symphony, Germany's Frankfurt Radio Symphony and, as of fall 2010, the Orchestre de Paris. He has kept his ties to the old country, too, as artistic adviser to the Estonian National Symphony. And it wasn't just a work ethic that Paavo inherited from his father. More than his free-spirited, very American younger brother Kristjan, also a conductor, Paavo has his father's natural European gravitas.
Yet Paavo is his own man, and a modern one, as anyone who has experienced his conducting of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie-Bremen on record or, especially, in concert knows. He bolsters traditional values with the latest thinking on period style for Beethoven that is sinewy and visceral. This team's take on the "Eroica" Symphony's Funeral March hits a listener like a blow to the sternum, giving one a sense of what this revolutionary music must have felt like to its original audience.
Jarvi and the German chamber orchestra return with their Beethoven this weekend, playing the "Eroica" along with the Symphony No. 8 and "Consecration of the House" Overture at New Brunswick's State Theatre on Sunday afternoon. As part of the inaugural festival for Lincoln Center's wonderfully renovated Alice Tully Hall, they play two concerts there on Monday, the first performance repeating the "Eroica" program and the second featuring Symphonies Nos. 1 and 7.
On the line from Frankfurt during a rare spare moment, Jarvi talked about Beethoven, his father and the beauty of taking chances.
Q: What's different about your Beethoven with the Bremen orchestra?
A: Well, I have to say that it's not "my" Beethoven. It's very much "our" Beethoven. There are orchestras, such those of New York or Vienna, that perform this music so well. But it is rare that an orchestra would play, say, the "Eroica" dozens of times with the same conductor, as the Bremen has with me over the past decade. We have been able to pay such attention to detail that it is as if we are constantly discovering the music. This is a self-governing orchestra, so they play as if their livelihoods depend on it -- which they do. And we only do special projects together, so nothing is routine.
Q: Tell me about the period aspects to your approach to Beethoven.
A: I grew up listening to records of old maestros like Szell and Furtwangler in these symphonies. Later, I also came to admire the best period-instrument groups and the contributions of such historically minded conductors as Harnoncourt and Norrington. For instance, like them, I feel that vibrato should be an embellishment, not a constant. And our approach to tempo is more dynamic. In the past, people felt that the extreme speeds Beethoven asked for were impossible. But Beethoven was deaf, not stupid. One must consider the lighter tone of the instruments used in that day, the smaller size of the orchestras.
Most important, though, is the image the music is meant to convey. The "Eroica" Funeral March has to be a real Andante, calm but at a march tempo. If you have a coffin on your shoulder, you have to keep moving, after all. But for all our attention to the latest scholarly scores, an emotional-spiritual conductor like Furtwangler had it right: The point is to go beyond stylistic issues to inner meaning -- the soul of the notes.
Q: What do you think you got from your father, musically?
A: I got everything from my father. We still talk a lot about the process of conducting. On the podium, he knows what he wants and how to get it, but he isn't the professor type. He wants to have a good time making music, and he has a gift for transmitting this tremendous joy to the orchestra and the audience. And he never seems to perform the same piece the same way twice. This is something that's very important to me, too -- that music has to live in the moment. It means nothing to be technically proficient, if the performance is routine. One must take chances.
That's what I loved about Leonard Bernstein. Once, I was driving and heard on the radio one of his performances of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. It was so strange and overdone, but it was impossible not to listen to. I had to pull the car over. So many of us think we know how this symphony goes, but we don't, really -- and Bernstein showed us this, even thrust the fact in our faces. Immaculate and tasteful don't mean good. A performance is only good when it's the kind that makes you stop your car.
Paavo Jarvi with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie-Bremen. When and where: 2 p.m. Sunday, State Theatre, 15 Livingston Ave., New Brunswick. 7:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. Monday at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall, Broadway at 65th Street, New York. How much: $15-$60 in New Brunswick; visit statetheatrenj.org or call (732) 246-7469. $25 in New York; visit lincolncenter.org or call (212) 721-6500.
The photo above was taken by Ixi Chen.
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