Interview with Vladimir Jurowski

When Putin sent Russian troops to invade Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Vladimir Jurowski was one of the first artists to publicly voice his opposition to this war of aggression. Two days later, the Moscow-born conductor began his concerts with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, where he has been principal conductor since 2017, with a rendition of the Ukrainian national anthem. And at his other place of work, the Bavarian State Opera, where he has been General Music Director since 2021, he has also made a series of statements through his choice of programme, which has included Prokofiev’s opera »War and Peace« based on Tolstoy’s famously pacifist novel.

The 52-year-old has long been declared a persona non grata in his Russian homeland, in the wake of his outspoken sentiments about Putin’s regime, and he has resigned from his position as Artistic Director of the Russian State Academic Symphony Orchestra. For his concert with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, which forms part of the Hamburg International Music Festival, he has put together a programme very close to his heart, based around the theme of »War and Peace«.

Interview: Bjørn Woll, April 2024
 

How did the programme for your concert at the Elbphilharmonie in May 2024 come together?

It started with Josef Suk’s »Fantasie«, which was an idea that came to me together with the violinist Christian Tetzlaff, who I’ve been friends with for many years and who I’ve often had the pleasure of performing works with from the standard violin repertoire in the past. Then came the invitation to the music festival – and that is when the theme of »War and Peace« began to take shape. I remembered straight away that Suk had written variations on an old Bohemian chorale at the beginning of the First World War: a clear protest against the German-Austrian war alliance.

This got me thinking more and more about Czech music, and Bohuslav Martinů came to mind, who I regard as one of the most important proponents of 20th century Czech music. He wrote his »Memorial to Lidice« while in exile in the US: an outcry and testament to horror, in response to the barbaric destruction of the Czech village of Lidice by an SS commando in 1942. This meant there was just one work missing for the second half of the concert.
 

Why did you opt for Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony?

There was no question in my mind. It had to be Shostakovich and it absolutely had to be his Eighth Symphony. For me, it is a kind of absolute, and therefore timeless myth about war itself. It is not concerned with any particular war, any specific warfare or crimes, any battles or other military goings-on. It is simply about people and war as a philosophical juxtaposition. In a way, the symphony is a philosophical essay put to music. I am not aware of any work that it could be compared to. The Eighth stands out on its own. It is detached from any current political, ideological or social context. And it really does remain – sadly – thoroughly relevant, whichever times we live in.

Your father Mikhail was a friend of Shostakovich and worked with him as a conductor. Has that had an effect on how you see Shostakovich?

Most certainly. I have to admit that there have been times in my life when I’ve tended to distance myself from Shostakovich’s music for precisely these reasons. I was keen to somehow detach myself from my father’s influence, from his overbearing presence in my life. And that meant that I developed a radically critical view of Shostakovich, who had been an icon in our household ever since my childhood. But I’m also grateful to my father for the many conversations we had where, for instance, he would walk me through certain passages in the Eighth Symphony, with the score in his hands. Only after talking through them with him have I come to understand them.

I think it’s entirely natural to want to cut the ties at some point from such an incredibly strong and positive influence, and then establish your own relationship with the music. My father is of precisely the same sentiment. Rather than worship great works from the past like icons, he believes we need to learn to speak their language and then enter into a dialogue with them on an equal footing.

Shostakovich died just a few years after you were born, so you probably don’t have any memories of him. Did your father tell you what kind of person he was?

Not just my father, but my mother and my grandmother too, who in fact knew Shostakovich for much longer than my father. They told me a great deal about him. But I also knew many other people from his circle. Like his widow Irina, who came to several of my concerts when I was conducting his works. Sometimes I even have the feeling that I knew the great man myself.

I also have a »mystical« experience with the 15th Symphony, because I was actually there, hidden away, at the premiere. My mother was sat right next to Shostakovich in the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory and was already pregnant with me. Later, as a child and teenager, I would often listen to this music at home on records that my father played.

You left Russia with your family in 1990 and moved to Germany. What memories do you have of your youth in the Soviet Union?

That time is still very vivid in my mind. I spent the first 18 years of my life there, my formative years as it were. I enjoyed a very sheltered and happy childhood. I was unaware of all the misery going on in society, thanks to my parents’ best efforts. Starting school was my first encounter with the real world and it was a shock. I went on to study music theory at the Moscow Conversatory, as a budding musicologist. At that time, they really did offer the best possible education to be found anywhere.

Is it true that you didn’t want to move to Germany at first?

I really didn’t. I was happy where I was and yearned to keep on studying there. I also felt like I had finally found myself and made some genuine friends for life. During that period the  social adversities and problems were growing bigger and bigger though; it was the time of perestroika. It brought many positive things along with it, but a lot of uncertainty as well.

Nobody would have exempted me from compulsory military service either, which came around automatically when I turned 18. My parents in particular were worried that something might happen to me during my military service. Back then the whole thing was a pretty rough ride. And for someone used to moving in these intelligentsia circles, military service was all the more difficult. You also ran the risk of being sent off to one of the military conflicts going on at the time: to Afghanistan or one of the breakaway republics where more and more uprisings were happening in the late 1980s. It was entirely possible, just as young recruits are being sent off to Ukraine as cannon fodder as we speak.

When Russia invaded Ukraine you were one of the first Russian artists to voice your opposition to this war of aggression. Why was that so important to you?

Probably due to the ten years I spent actively working in Moscow, where I held a relatively high position as Artistic Director of the State Academic Symphony Orchestra, arguably one of the most important symphony orchestras in Russia. I didn’t feel like a guilty party, but I did somehow feel like I was jointly responsible for the whole thing. I could have stopped working there after the annexation of Crimea, for example. I really gave it serious thought, especially after the shooting down of the Malaysian plane in July 2014. It shocked me at the time and I was on the verge of writing my letter of resignation. I didn’t do that in the end because I felt that the orchestra needed me. And the people who came to listen to our concerts needed us too. Or to put it another way, as long as it was possible to maintain civil society there, an alternative society with alternative values, we had to fight for it.

How did you go about that?

I actually had carte blanche back then. Nobody else had a say in my choice of programmes – and I used that entirely in the pursuit of disseminating liberal and democratic values. But things gradually started to get tighter and tighter in terms of what could be featured in the programme. At the very end it became clear that ideology was gaining the upper hand once again. And yet I was one of those who, right up to the end, kept on saying, even just a day before the war broke out: You’ll see, nothing is going to happen, it’s all just sabre-rattling. I really was convinced about that.

The situation must have been difficult on a personal level too, with some of your family coming from Ukraine.

It was a shock! Probably more than half of my family comes from Ukraine. They were not of Ukrainian nationality, but my mother studied in Kiev and spoke Ukrainian, as did my grandmother who died in 2014. When I was a child, we used to travel to Kiev every year to visit our relatives. It was a part of my homeland. This war, this whole situation just seemed so absurd to me. If we look at what has been happening in the Donbas though, we need to acknowledge that Ukrainian governments over the last 30 years have not always acted fairly either. There has definitely been discrimination against the Russian population. But that is no reason to start a war like this.

Speaking out so unequivocally against the war has not been without consequences for you. Do you regret it?

There can be no justification for such barbarism, so I don’t regret my emotional reaction back then in the slightest. I do regret though that, as a result, I no longer get to go to Russia to see my friends and make music there. Although I wouldn’t perform publicly in Russia in the current climate. Even if 90 percent of the audience at our concerts were like-minded people, there might still be ten percent among them who I might describe as these overzealous patriots. And I really don’t want to have anything to do with those people at the moment. What is happening is pure fascism, if you ask me. The way dissenters are being persecuted and discriminated against in Russia today is so very reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s. I would say that Putin’s domestic policy towards his own citizens is an even stronger reason for me not to want to go back there right now than the war against Ukraine.

The pressure on Russian artists to take a clear stand against the war was high, particularly when it first broke out. What is this pressure like nowadays?

That pressure was indeed there. A number of unfair things happened, like artists’ concerts being cancelled without any proper reason. I don’t agree either with instances of how the Russian repertoire has been handled. Be it in music, theatre or literature, where the attempt has been made to silence an entire section of world culture, namely Russian culture. That is exactly what Putin wants. It justifies his actions. Thank goodness things have now changed again in Germany and other Western countries. Only Scandinavia remains a little more problematic, and the Eastern European countries bordering Russia, like Poland and the Baltic states, are very difficult. But generally speaking, the situation has eased and we are now seeing, here in Munich at the Bavarian State Opera for instance, that inviting artists from Russia to perform is not an issue at all, provided they are not clearly and demonstrably linked to Putin’s government. The only problem is that people cannot travel directly, so they have to fly via Turkey or the Arab Emirates.

What can music and art do, what can you as an artist actually do, in times like these?

A few months ago, we performed Beethoven’s »Missa solemnis« with the Radio Symphony Orchestra in Berlin. At the time, it felt like a direct response to the events in Israel, when the apocalyptic trumpets of war suddenly sound their fanfare in the »Dona nobis pacem«, the plea for inner and outer peace. It is frightening to think that Beethoven wrote something 200 years ago that is still so incredibly relevant today. I believe that true art, high art, has the ability to transcend events of the past, to process them emotionally and philosophically – and at the same time is capable of predicting all events of the future, especially the tragic ones. Whenever we listen to Bach’s »Mass in B minor« after some tragedy in the world, for example, we feel a sense that the music was composed specifically for this one event. For me, that is the power of this transcending emotion that can be found in all great works of art.

This interview was published in Elbphilharmonie Magazin (2/24).
Translation: Robert William Smales