At Munich’s prestigious opera house, the Russian-born Vladimir Jurowski has broadened the repertoire while rooting his work in political awareness.
The conductor Vladimir Jurowski, who is in his third year run the Bavarian State Opera. “You can try to convince people of your vision one by one in private conversations,” he said, “but I think you can only persuade by the quality of the delivered product.”Credit...Julian Baumann
During Jurowski’s tenure in Munich, the opera company has added works like “The Nose,” “The Devils of Loudun” and “War and Peace” to its repertoire.Credit...Wilfried Hösl
By Joshua Barone
Reporting from Munich
April 9, 2024, 5:02 a.m. ET
One by one, the singers came out to bow. They had just finished a performance of Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s little-known “The Passenger,” at the Bayerische Staatsoper, or Bavarian State Opera. Each received not just respectful, but also enthusiastic applause. The loudest cheers, though, were reserved for the conductor: Vladimir Jurowski.
Now in his third season as the opera house’s music director, Jurowski, 52, is attracting the kind of adoration from the Munich public that was routine under Kirill Petrenko, who left in 2021 to lead the Berlin Philharmonic. But Jurowski is not merely winning over audiences; he has maintained the Bavarian State Opera’s reputation as one of the finest — if not the finest — companies in Europe while pushing its repertoire in new directions and rooting his artistry in political awareness.
“We classical musicians tend to keep ourselves way from politics,” Jurowski said over lunch in March. “We always say that the music should be apolitical. Music can be, and art can be, but people who are making art should not be apolitical. At a certain point it becomes not about politics, but about ethics.”
The new productions that Jurowski has led in Munich include Shostakovich’s satirical “The Nose,” directed by Kirill Serebrennikov while he was still under house arrest in Russia; Penderecki’s “The Devils of Loudun,” an allegorical tragedy about fanaticism that read in the moment as a warning against cancel culture; and Prokofiev’s “War and Peace,” staged by Dmitri Tcherniakov as an indictment of Russian nationalism after the invasion of Ukraine.
When Jurowski started at the Bavarian State Opera, there were grumblings among audience members that his changes to the repertoire would come at the cost of the classics. But he has led new productions of standards like “Der Rosenkavalier,” “Così Fan Tutte” and “Die Fledermaus,” and will embark on Wagner’s “Ring” beginning this fall. And the audience hasn’t resisted: Attendance, as usual, continues to hover around 95 percent, which is extraordinary for opera.
“You can try to convince people of your vision one by one in private conversations, but I think you can only persuade by the quality of the delivered product,” Jurowski said. “That’s what counts.”
AFTER YEARS of a peripatetic career, Jurowski has consolidated his work in Germany, where he has lived since the 1990s. (He grew up in Moscow, and was born to an extremely musical family: His grandfather was a Soviet film composer, his father was the conductor Michail Jurowski.) By design, his calendar now includes a lot of time at home in Berlin.
There, he has led the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra since 2015. When not in Munich, he spends a welcome amount of time with his family — including his daughter, who works at the Komische Oper Berlin, where both Jurowski and his father have also conducted.
Focusing on Germany has meant wrapping up in Britain, where Jurowski was the principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and, earlier, the music director of Glyndebourne Festival. He also had a post in Russia, leading the State Academic Symphony Orchestra of the Russian Federation, but his tenure there ended in 2021, independent of the war in Ukraine.
Jurowski has strong feelings about Russia under President Vladimir V. Putin, and has been outspoken about the war. He renounced his Russian citizenship in 2000, as a condition of becoming a German citizen, and declined an offer from the Russian government to reclaim it in 2014 — the year Russia invaded and annexed Crimea. (Another conductor, Teodor Currentzis, who has faced repeated scrutiny over his financial support from the Russian government, accepted a similar offer at the time.)
“They didn’t seem to mind that I didn’t serve in the military or that my parents had defected,” Jurowski said, referring to Russian officials. “They basically acted against their own law to do me a favor.”
Jurowski has little family left in Russia, but maintains friendships with people there, and was extremely active on social media in the days leading up to the country’s most recent presidential election, on March 17, which extended Putin’s reign to 2030. “If I’m posting something,” Jurowski said, “I see that a lot of people are viewing my posts, but most of them are not replying — only people who are living outside Russia.”
He became especially vocal after the recent death of Aleksei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opponent of Putin. It “has shaken my foundations,” he said. “Now that he’s gone, it’s like the last hope for Russia is gone.”
Jurowski remains determined to be both in tune with and opinionated about Russian politics. Although he isn’t a citizen, it is his home country, he said, and “I cannot just pretend that nothing happened, that I’m indifferent to it.” He doesn’t see himself returning there as a conductor, at least not while Putin is power, and even then not until Russia goes through “a proper cleansing.”
This spirit of a citizen-artist has been a major feature of Jurowski’s tenure in Munich, but not the only one. He entered with a mission to add what he called “masterpieces of the 20th century, unjustly or forgotten music, and contemporary music” to the company’s vast repertoire. Hence “The Nose” and “The Devils of Loudun”; the house has also championed the Australian composer Brett Dean, in both its opera and orchestral programming, and will present a premiere by him in a future season.
The orchestra has warmed to new scores increasingly quickly. “The collaboration is much easier," he said, “and getting to final results takes a much shorter span of time and much lesser effort.”
Jurowski’s partner in programming is Serge Dorny, the house’s manager, who also started in 2021 and said they “speak the same language.”
“We suggest scores to each other, we have conversations, and it’s always productive,” Dorny said. “We both want the same things.” That extends to the social identity of the company. “We know what opera should be,” he added, “and what an opera house should do — that a house should be political.”
The directors that pass through the Bavarian State Opera have been partners, too. Jurowski has a reputation as a true opera conductor, engaged in the art form as theater. For new productions, he meets with directors early and often and, remarkably, doesn’t miss a single staging rehearsal if he can.
Sometimes, he has worked closely with directors to create new versions of scores, or to restore previously conventional cuts, always with dramaturgical purpose. His “War and Peace,” with Tcherniakov, excised about 30 minutes of material that was transparently written for Soviet censors; his “Rosenkavalier,” with Barrie Kosky, on the other hand, was unabridged, the third act longer but smoother.
“Each piece has its own character its own personal features,” Jurowski said. “I treat pieces as persons. I’m trying to find out what they are, what it is they want, and what it is they lack.”
With Tobias Kratzer, the director of “The Passenger,” which contains scenes at Auschwitz, Jurowski trimmed about a half-hour from the running time; his cuts included getting rid of an unnecessary character and gratuitous representations of the concentration camp. The opera, which Weinberg wrote in 1968, didn’t premiere until this century, and it hadn’t been presented with edits until the Munich production. The result — the performance, the staging and the architecture of the piece itself — was shattering and stark, far from the kitsch that it runs the risk of being.
“He will stay after the rehearsal to solve a detailed problem, some problems you might have never thought of, that can keep you up at night,” Kratzer said of Jurowski. “But he’s a great musician, and he knows that music is just one part of this world.”
THE BAVARIAN STATE OPERA is an openly partisan house, sometimes controversially, because opera houses in Germany receive substantial state funding. During the country’s refugee crisis a decade ago, it championed “Willkommenskultur,” or welcome culture, creating youth programs for the children of migrants to perform with their local peers. In 2022, it hung a large Ukrainian flag over the columns of its grand entrance.
And when the Bayerische Staatsorchester, the house’s pit orchestra, performed at the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland last year, Jurowski didn’t stop climate change protesters who stormed the stage during a Bruckner symphony. After a brief disruption, he told the audience that he had made a deal with them: They could speak their minds, then remain quiet for the rest of the concert. When audience members tried to shout down the protesters, Jurowski gestured for them to be respectful.
He later exchanged emails with the two protesters, from Renovate Switzerland, sharing his worries about the mounting crises of the world. But, he told them, “I hardly believe that you are helping the environment by ruining a classical music concert.” He argued for music as a source of spiritual comfort, and for the need to protect it.
It would have been better, he wrote, if they had contacted him before the concert, so that the audience — “admittedly very complicated and certainly a bit stuffy” — would be more open to their message. Jurowski invited them to work together in the future, but they didn’t respond to that message. Now, he is thinking about programs with his Berlin orchestra that make space for speeches about climate change.
In the interview in Munich, Jurowski said he was proud that the incident in Lucerne happened as he was representing the Bavarian State Opera — an institution that, he said, “doesn’t stick its head in the sand and pretend that we’re just here to make beautiful music.”
But he does also make beautiful music, and will truly claim his place in the company’s core repertoire next season when he leads the new “Das Rheingold,” directed by Kratzer, as well as a new “Don Giovanni,” two works with a rich tradition in Munich.
“It’s going to be a big challenge, twice,” Jurowski said. But after three seasons, he added, he feels prepared. And now, he is looking forward to a possible second term; his contract ends in 2026, but he would need at least one additional year to finish the “Ring.” The decision, though, rests with the local government and not with the house itself.
“I cannot influence it,” he said. “So, I shouldn’t worry about it. If they offer me an extension, I won’t say no. If they want another change, I will move on. Life is full of surprises.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/09/arts ... opera.html
And the fact that their neighbours have sworn to have them exterminated. Again.