Paavo Järvi: Coming to America

   From the Mozart Orchestra to the Cincinnati Symphony, it's been a journey of the American spirit for CSO music director Paavo Järvi.
   Järvi, who is back in town after two months of guest conducting, didn't know English when he first set foot in the U.S. in 1980. But he knew the meaning of Yankee self-reliance.
   Son of Detroit Symphony music director Neeme Järvi, who emigrated from Estonia with his wife and family after clashing with Soviet authorities, Järvi knew that he, too, wanted to be a conductor. "I never wanted anything else in my life."
   But how? He was 17, had no undergraduate degree (conducting is a graduate program), and no money.
   Leaving his native Estonia had been "difficult," he said. "It's not where you just pick up your bags and go somewhere else. It meant literally never seeing your home again. (Estonia was part of the Soviet Union until 1991.) You were told in no uncertain terms that if you leave, you will never come back. You will never see this country. You will never see your friends."
   "Never," he said, is "a very difficult thing to deal with when you are 17. I was just starting to grow up and I was in love."
   Not that Järvi and his younger siblings Maarika and Kristjan "wanted to resist," he said. "Part of the psyche of the Soviet person was always, 'I wish somebody would let me out.' The country when we were there was a prison. The borders were not open. You had no choice to leave or travel." (Neeme Järvi's offense was conducting Arvo Pärtäs Credo, which contained words from the Bible, on an Estonian National Symphony concert.)
   For the first year or two, the Järvis lived with an Estonian family in New Jersey. "We were very lucky. My father had a friend he had met when he did 'Onegin' (Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin") at the Metropolitan Opera a year before we left. These people took us into their house."
   The first year was "a little bit depressing," said Järvi, but things picked up when he enrolled at Rutgers University (low tuition for state residents). "If you are in school and you are going to classes, even though you might not be able to understand what any teacher is saying, slowly you sort of get into the social environment and make friends. I had a girlfriend. Before you know it, you are speaking English."
   Since Rutgers had no conducting program, Järvi was faced with a problem, but not for long.
   "My piano teacher was a wonderful man, Samuel Dilworth-Leslie (a student of the legendary Nadia Boulanger). He became very much a supporter of mine. I talked to him and said, 'What is the likelihood of us being able to put a little orchestra together so I can conduct now and then?'"
   Quite likely, it turned out, with Järvi's energy behind it.
   "We ended up having a small orchestra that gave three or four concerts a year that was originally and brilliantly called the Mozart Orchestra. We had a guest artist every time. Sometimes it was Tchaikovsky, sometimes Beethoven. I used to have posters, and I can't help smiling when I think about it."
   "It was a quite good orchestra," said Järvi, who learned a bit about American orchestras in the process.
   "The trick was to find money."
   When he had money he had to scout talent. Rutgers wasn't particularly strong in strings, so he would call friends in New York "similarly off the boat" and ask, "Do you know any Russian string players?"
   Before the next concert, a bus load of Russian string players would show up.  "They were all immigrants doing gigs. One was a concertmaster in the Leningrad Philharmonic. We had really good concerts, but there was a lot of pressure because, with a limited amount of rehearsal time, you had to figure out how to organize everything. It didn't help that I was carrying chairs and timpani from one place to another."
   Järvi had an orchestra. Now he needed a conducting teacher.
   "Somebody in New York told me there was a man who just recently immigrated who lived in Brooklyn at 175th St. past Harlem. He was the last student of the same teacher my father studied with. I contacted him (Ukrainian born Leonid Grin) and he became an extremely important person for me. I would drive there every Friday night and stay in his flat. I studied privately with him, and then tried everything out when the Mozart Orchestra reconvened."
   So far so good. Then Grin was recruited to be director of orchestral activities at the University of Houston. "He said to me, 'Look, we don't have a conducting department in Houston either, so what do you have to lose? You don't study conducting for a diploma. You need to be with somebody who teaches you conducting.'  Every now and then he gave me 15 minutes of his rehearsal time where I could try out little things."
   It was Grin who prepared Järvi for Philadelphia's renowned Curtis Institute, where he studied with former CSO music director Max Rudolf and graduated in 1988.
   As Rudolf's successor, Järvi, 39, now calls Cincinnati his "musical home" (He became an American citizen in 1985, but his true "home" always will be Estonia, he said.)
   And he is working just as hard for the CSO as he did to become a conductor in the first place.   
   Though he has an apartment downtown, he has never eaten there "not even breakfast" but spends virtually all of his time at Music Hall. "I feel that now is the time to really work, because now we have the attention. We are being noticed in a very positive way here in Cincinnati. It's a real push to try to make the orchestra visible and I must participate in this."
   The CSO also has an "ambitious program of trying to get many things off the ground." One of them is touring (East Coast next spring, Japan in November 2003). "But there are so many other things. I can't wait to move the connection with CCM (the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music) from words to deeds. And there are many other organizations that we are establishing relationships with."
   Someday he would like to attend his first basketball game. His father has seen the Detroit Pistons "and loves it," Järvi said. And he would like to get his car "out of the parking lot" and do some things besides music.
   Meanwhile, working with the CSO has him "excited."
   "There is something here that is different from other orchestras I conduct. It is interesting to conduct here. It's a kick."
(first published in The Cincinnati Post March 21, 2002)