More than a decade ago, Vladimir Jurowski, one of Russia’s best-known musical sons, began to realize that things in his native country were taking a sinister turn.
“It was a feeling, a premonition that things would get worse, especially after Russia annexed Crimea,” says the 52-year-old conductor. “The irony was that at that exact moment they reached out to me. The government offered to return my Russian passport, which I lost after immigrating to Germany with my family at the age of 18. It was actually Leo Tolstoy’s great-grandson who approached me from the Ministry of Culture. Other emigrated Russian artists and musicians received the same offer, and some people accepted it, but I just couldn’t do it. I remembered the case of Sergei Prokofiev, who in 1936 accepted an offer to return to the Soviet Union, and from then on was trapped. He could never leave again. I didn’t want this to be my fate.”
Jurowski’s career has essentially focused on Germany and Britain since he became music director of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera in 2001 at the age of 29, where he dazzled audiences with his sheer balletic grace and the fine-grained subtlety of his performances. But he retained his artistic and personal ties with Russia. He often conducted the Russian National Orchestra and was artistic director of the Russian State Academic Symphony Orchestra until 2020, but that chapter of his life is now closed.
“I don’t think I can ever return. I would be endangering my own safety because my views on Russia are public knowledge,” he says. “I think the country is moving towards what they call a national state and what I would call a fascist state. Obviously it doesn’t look exactly like Stalin’s Soviet Union, or Hitler’s Germany of 1938, but there are many similarities, and they are growing every day. Things have gotten particularly bad since the last elections, with things like the death of Alexei Navalny. There are the restrictions on freedom of expression, the repression of dissidents and the media and homosexuals. And the people who run the country are, in my opinion, criminals, they are real mafiosi. So it is actually a terrorist state, which you can compare with Iran or North Korea.”
Jurowski says all this with weary equanimity, with a hint of sadness. His long hair of a romantic poet is now speckled with gray, but he is still as thin as ever and still enunciates his English words with careful precision. We meet in one of the many performers’ rooms at the back of the Royal Festival Hall, where he is rehearsing what he calls ‘Wagner’s most immense and immensely complex’ opera, Die Götterdämmerung, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. the orchestra he led for fifteen years.
Jurowski has the emigrant’s hyper-sharp awareness of cultural and political reality, which prevents him from floating complacently above politics. Most recently, he provoked some negative reactions by remarking in a New York Times interview that “no musician is ever apolitical.”
“That was misunderstood,” 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 for making music, it happens in a certain place and at a certain time. Even Bach’s Mass in B minor was political; he wrote them partly to curry favor with the Catholic court in Dresden. And now certain types of music have become intensely political. Tchaikovsky’s music is 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 can understand why the Ukrainians think differently.”
Even more controversial was Jurowski’s decision to allow two young climate change protesters to make a public statement after they invaded the orchestral stage during a performance of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra last September in Lucerne . It is clear that the public was not at all happy with his decision. Why did he do it?
“We kept playing while they glued themselves to my stage, and I thought, ‘Let them finish for two minutes now,’” Jurowski says. “Many people in the audience were shouting in protest at this, and I said, look, I promised they could speak, so if you don’t stop shouting, I’ll leave and the concert will be over. If you give them a chance, we’ll finish the symphony. I had an email correspondence with the protesters afterwards explaining that you want to save the environment, but there is also an ecology of the human soul – and this ecology is nourished by the arts and also by classical concerts. I really wanted them to understand that, but at the same time, with the planet on fire, we shouldn’t be so petty as to forbid them from expressing their concerns.”
It has now been three years since Jurowski resigned from the LPO to direct the State Opera in Munich and the Radio Orchestra in Berlin, where he lives with his wife Patricia (he has two children, one now works in a German opera house, the other in a boarding school). at a cathedral school in England). In doing so, he seemed to follow in the footsteps of other conductors such as Kent Nagano and Esa-Pekka Salonen, who struggled for a while with the underfunded and high-pressure British orchestra scene before sinking gratefully into the gentle embrace of a European or American orchestra , where funding and rehearsal time are so much more generous. Except, he tells me, things are changing.
“The world is moving on and in Germany things are very different now. For example, German radio orchestras, which for many years have been the most protected area of funding, are now becoming an endangered species. The bosses of the two main public radio and television stations have stated that they may not need all these orchestras in the near future. So the debate about possible closures and redundancies, which we know from other countries such as Italy, and more recently at 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