Latin Just Another Focus for Kristjan Järvi

(This story was first published in The Cincinnati Post on July 10, 2007 as "Kristjan Järvi His Own Man" when Järvi was in Cincinnati to conduct John Adams' opera "Nixon in China." He returns to guest conduct the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in an all-Latin American program Oct. 2 and 3, 2009 at Music Hall.  The program will feature bandoneon soloist Carel Kraayenhof in Piazzolla's Concerto for Bandoneon, "Aconcagua," and works by Ginastera and Silvestre Revueltas. All are CSO premieres.)

   Estonian born Järvi is Cincinnati Symphony music director Paavo Järvi's younger brother and very much his own man.
   I caught up with him at a cafe in Tallinn, Estonia in May, where he conducted
a show-stopping "Aladdin" Suite by Carl Nielsen on a concert honoring
their father Neeme Järvi's 70th birthday.
   Kristjan Järvi has a rakish look, with wavy brown hair, a broad smile and a fierce-looking facial scar, trophy from a close encounter with a dog as a child.  With him were his two sons, Finn Byron, born in February to Kristjan and his wife Hayley Melitta, and Lukas, 7, from his first marriage to violinist Leila Josefowicz.
   There are three Järvi conductors (so far), Paavo, 44, Kristjan, 35,
and Neeme.  Formerly music director of the Detroit Symphony, Neeme is music
director of the New Jersey Symphony and the Hague Residentie Orchestra
in The Netherlands.
   Like Paavo and their sister, flutist Maarika Järvi, 43, Kristjan was inoculated with music at an early age.  Neeme likes to tell the story of toddler Kristjan complaining "Mozart hit me!" after tumbling from a loudspeaker he had been climbing to see where the sound came from.  He was seven when the family left Estonia and came to the U.S. in 1980.  A decade younger than his siblings, he adjusted quickly to life in America, speaks without an accent and grew up a hip New Yorker.
   He was not at all sure he wanted to pursue the family business, he said.
   "It's an intimidating thing when you have a very well known father and a brother who is following very successfully in his footsteps.  And to have been ten years removed from that and surrounded by a lot of people saying that music is a very tough business  . . ."

  
Kristjan and Paavo, Tallinn, May, 2007 (photo by Mary Ellyn Hutton)

He thought of going into the business of music, but his piano teacher, Nina Svetlanova, stepped in.
   "At the moment when I needed her the most, when I was most
skeptical about even pursuing music, she was the one who guided me
back.  She insisted that I come and continue with her at the Manhattan
School of Music."
   Svetlanova pegged him as a conductor right away.
   "She said, 'you're really not going to become a pianist, you're
going to be a conductor.' She was very persistent about it.  I formed
my first ensembles in the Manhattan School and one of them turned out
to be Absolute Ensemble."
   Järvi's Absolute, an electro-acoustic chamber ensemble with a core of 18 players, positioned itself on the very cutting edge of classical music.  Founded in 1993 when Kristjan was 21, it served as an outlet for composers of his generation, "people who really wanted their music to speak to people again" (including Charles Coleman, composer of "Streetscape," premiered on Paavo's CSO inaugural in 2001, and "Deep Woods," heard on CSO concerts in May).
   Absolute performed in clubs and small venues around New York and
began attracting attention with their "catholic" mix of disparate music
(New York Times, June 28, 2001).  They produced their own recordings,
including "Absolution," a 2002 Grammy nominee for Best Small Ensemble
Classical Recording.
   A typical Absolute concert mixes old and new works, the older ones
often in unexpected guises, like Richard Strauss' "Till Eulenspiegel'
arranged for eight players (I heard this at the Library of Congress in
2002) and Mahler's Symphony No. 4 for a 12-piece ensemble, including
synthesizer.  Absolute concerts are fast-paced, with no intermission,
and include special lighting, amplification, improvisation and spoken
commentary.
   "I never see anybody bored in a jazz club and I never see any bored
people at a rock concert.  I don't want my concerts to be anything that
doesn't have the same vibes as those concerts," he said.
   Järvi did not abandon the mainstream, however.  He was invited to
audition for assistant conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and
worked from 1998-2000 with music director/composer/new music advocate
Esa-Pekka Salonen.
   "It was a great learning experience for me, the beginning of my
conducting career," he said.  (After the Manhattan School, he studied
conducting at the University of Michigan with Kenneth Kiesler.)
   In 2000 he became chief conductor of Norrlands Opera in Umea,
Sweden.  "We made many recordings and started touring for the first
time.  We even won a Swedish Grammy (for Hilding Rosenberg's "The Isle
of Bliss" in 2004).
   After four years in Umea, he went to one of the musical capitals of
the world, Vienna, as chief conductor of the Tonkünstler Orchestra of Vienna.  In May, he was named artistic advisor of the Basel Chamber Orchestra
(Switzerland).  His mission in both places is to push the envelope, he
said.
   "For the most part, people are used to a certain way, and if you
announce to them, 'hey, things are going to change,' then immediately
they react with skepticism.  If you start to introduce slowly but
surely, people don't even notice, but in the end they love it.'
   He has begun a 'Plugged-In Series' with the Tonkünstler Orchestra.  "It's actually a collaboration with non-classical artists doing things with symphony orchestra in the Musikverein which are slightly amplified. We are doing one with a Tunisian singer and a jazz guitarist (Dhafer Youssef and Wolfgang Muthspiel)."  Others include Australian jazz trumpeter James Morrison and an "All that Tango" concert featuring bandoneon player Carel Kraayenhof.
   He plans to do the same thing in Basel and with other orchestras he
regularly visits, such as the Berlin Radio Symphony and Scottish National Orchestra.
   "I want to create my own kind of trademark programming.  It's not the same kind of Dvorak Ninth and a concerto and overture to start.  I think people are tired to hear the same pieces again and again.  The problem is that it has to be done with the right pieces, things that people actually can take in.
   "Music in any genre, whether it's old or new, should be performed for the people, not for a select few who are super-educated about the customs and traditions of classical music.  I feel music should primarily appeal to the soul and spirit rather than the intellect.  If it has both, fantastic.  Mozart was new music once and the hippest thing of the time."
   Järvi and Australian born Hayley, a flutist with Absolute, make
their home in Vienna. "I just bought a new place and I'm definitely
going to stay there.  It's my European base."
   "What American orchestras know about me is very limited and based mostly on the early success of Absolute, he said.
   "The weird thing is that I've been doing more of Absolute now internationally, where it is seen as a very creative, progressive American creation.  It definitely is a product of New York.  However in America, that is less appealing.  If they haven't seen Absolute, people still try to put it into a kind of new music ghetto, but that's really not what it is now.  It has become an incredibly inventive and
successful place for my creative craziness. We just did a 13-concert tour, two in the U.S and 11 in Europe in all the biggest concert halls.
   Marketing an ensemble that says it does everything is a "problem,"
he said, "so we have basically created these projects.  One is Arabian
music ("Absolute Arabian Nights," heard at New York's Town Hall in April
and coming up at Lincoln Center's Out of Doors Festival Aug. 24). 
We've done a new project with Joe Zawinul, creator of Weather Report. 
We're doing projects with Paquito di Rivera.  We have a complete Frank
Zappa project.  We're starting a Bach project, and we're doing Mahler's
'Das Lied von der Erde' with (baritone) Thomas Hampson.
   "Absolute Ensemble is about wrapping things up into a unity and trying to
erase the artificial borders and bring music back together again."
   Järvi has even won over his father, who could be seen clapping and
cheering at an Absolute concert in West Palm Beach in 2005.  From 'why
can't you play some nice Mozart?' he has become 'a fan,'" Kristjan said.
   "We are trying to create more of a presence in The States with
Absolute, and I am also trying to introduce myself back to orchestras there. 
I see myself as very much an American.  I like this country and I feel
that the quality of the orchestras is such that you can do incredible
things with them."
   So how do three conductors co-exist in one family?

  
(left to right) Paavo, Kristjan and Neeme Järvi at the National Song Festival in Tallinn, Estonia, July, 2003 (photo by Ants Liigus)

   "If we are living on different continents there's a lot of room," he joked.  "But I also feel it's a great situation for the three of us because we share a lot of information and help each other.  We are a family and not really competitive.  If we were three kids like a year apart, maybe there would be a little hostility, but I'm ten years younger than Paavo, and he is in a completely different stage of his career.  My father is the big daddy in the family."
   Kristjan Järvi conducts John Adams' "Nixon in China" at 8 p.m.
Thursday and Saturday at Music Hall.  For ticket information, call
(513) 241-2742, or order online at www.cincinnatiopera.com.
(first published in The Cincinnati Post July 10, 2007)