Kirill Petrenko, the chief conductor the Berlin Philharmonic, is famously disinclined to sit for media interviews. A conversation with Malte Krasting and Tobias Müller, posted on the orchestra’s website, may be the most personally and professionally revealing remarks that Petrenko has made for public consumption.
Since taking over artistic direction of the Berliners in 2019, Petrenko says, “I don’t believe that I shall ever feel as if this is an established relationship, because our work together always feels very much as if it is taking place in the here and now. . . . It’s a matter of leaving our comfort zone behind us and exploring extremes,” aiming for a performance in which “the demands of the composer are comprehensively aligned with the abilities of the musicians,” producing what he calls “fragile moments of happiness.”
Petrenko learned his craft the old-fashioned way, beginning as a répétiteur in provincial opera houses, working his way up the professional ladder in a succession of theatrical and concert engagements. The technique of conducting is “the sort of thing that you can grasp after only two or three sessions,” he says; but the art of conducting “is something that you can learn only with practice.”
“[A]s a conductor you are not actually producing the sound. You are literally left hanging in the air. If, as a pianist, I play a particular passage in five different ways, I know at the end of this process which is the right way. As a conductor, on the other hand, I don’t have any immediate way of checking to see if what I am doing is any good. For this, I have to stand in front of an orchestra. Only then do I notice – sometimes to my horror – that a particular idea isn’t right. This is why a conductor is constantly questioning himself and his interpretation.”
Born and reared in the former Soviet Union, the son of musicians, Petrenko was schooled in conducting in Austria, initially in the provincial conservatory in Feldkirch, subsequently at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. Although he has conducted much of the Russian concert repertory, his work generally has been more focused on works composed in Central Europe.
Petrenko discusses at some length his kinship with the music of Gustav Mahler and Anton Bruckner, especially his identification with Mahler’s famous self-description as “homeless three times over: as a Bohemian among Austrians, as an Austrian among Germans and as a Jew in the whole of the world.” During his youth in the Soviet Union, his family “had to do everything we could to hide the fact that we were Jewish. . . . Of course, my parents kept reminding me where I come from. But I never had any contact with any living tradition of Jewish musical culture.”
About leading the Berlin Philharmonic, Petrenko says, “I feel an undying reverence for this orchestra, because they are all such damned good musicians. . . . It makes no difference how many years we may continue to work together, it will never feel normal for me to stand in front of this orchestra.”
http://www.berliner-philharmoniker.de/en/stories/conversation-with-kirill-petrenko/
(via http://slippedisc.com)
