Paavo Järvi
is accustomed to meeting himself on arrival at Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky
International Airport (CVG).
The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra music director passes himself on the way to baggage claim over the moving walkway at CVG where the CSO has mounted a poster of him welcoming passengers to Cincinnati.
He’s not so used to hearing himself, i.e. his orchestra, which he did Monday upon arrival in Cincinnati from Europe.
“I thought, What is it?” he said Tuesday in his office at Music Hall.
What it was (and is) is excerpts from CSO and Cincinnati Pops CDs, to be broadcast to passengers throughout the airport as part of a new partnership agreement to help promote the region.
The music was kind of a welcome back to the maestro, who leads the CSO at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday at Music Hall in music by Stravinsky, Britten, Bartok and Mozart. Guest artist in Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 (“Turkish”) will be star violinist Hilary Hahn.
One of Jarvi’s
first stops in town was to Fountain Square to ice skate with his daughters Lea and
Ingrid. The girls, ages 6 and 4,
respectively, are getting the hang of it, he said. “They’re good, but they like to walk. You have to stop walking and let the skates
do the work for you. I used to be very good
when I was younger, but it comes back quickly.”
Tuesday, still wrapped in a scarf, Järvi did an interview with WGUC-FM’s Brian O’Donnell, and then it was on to Music Hall for more meetings, more interviews and, of course, rehearsals.
This is Jarvi’s last season as CSO music director so his plate is full, indeed. Since the opening concerts in September, he has had many international commitments to fulfill, including beginning his tenure as music director of the Orchestre de Paris and a tour of Japan with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen (DKB), which he also heads. Just before coming to Cincinnati, he led concerts with the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra in Germany, his fourth orchestra, if you don’t count the Estonian National Orchestra, where he has the title of artistic advisor but rarely conducts.
He will have one less post when he leaves the CSO in May, but even so, how does a mortal maintain such a pace? How does one deal with the administrative and artistic responsibilities that adhere to such a punishing schedule, and how does one keep up with loved ones at home?
“It’s easy,” said Järvi who has lived like a bird on the wing since emigrating from Soviet-occupied Estonia in 1980. “In today’s world, you click on the computer and you’re basically connected immediately. You Skype, you have all the social media, Facebook and so on. There’s e-mail. Pictures and videos are being sent. The world is actually very small. Because of Skype (a technology developed in Estonia, by the way), it has never been easier to keep in touch with people at home. Literally, you can not only just hear the voice, but you can see them. I talk to my kids (via Skype) all the time.”
Still, meeting so many obligations must take superhuman organization. Right?
Said Järvi, “I am blessed that I have very good people around me who organize me,” or to quote Blanche du Bois in “A Streetcar Named Desire”: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
The remainder of the CSO season will be as rich and fulfilling – and as hard work – as a Järvi season always is. There are eight concerts to come, with music by Bela Bartok, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Igor Stravinsky, Benjamin Britten, Claude Debussy, Gabriel Faure, Gustav Mahler, Franz Liszt, Jean Sibelius, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johann Sebastian Bach, Olivier Messiaen, Antonin Dvorak, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, Edgar Varese, and Erkki-Sven Tüür. That’s a near 300-year stretch across a wide swath of repertoire, which is what Järvi thrives on, he said.
“I want to have an interesting musical life. I don’t want to always have the same four composers that people think that I know how to conduct. I am happy when I have a variety of music and it all complements itself.”
The 47-Year-old,
Estonian born conductor (he turns 48 on December 30) stunned the musical world
this past year when he was named ECHO Klassik Conductor of the Year by the
German recording academy (equivalent of the American Grammy) for his recording
with the DKB of Beethoven’s Symphonies No. 2 and 6.
He was circumspect about the honor. “Awards are kind of a strange thing. In any country, it’s a little bit of a show. It’s nice to be recognized. And to be given the title of Conductor of the Year in Germany for Beethoven was fun for an Estonian. It was good for the orchestra. It was good for all my orchestras because all the orchestras were mentioned, and visibility is important to a certain extent.
“The award is a good thing for a person who doesn’t know anything about classical music -- this is the only classical music event or show that is broadcast all over Germany – so it wins a lot of people over to classical music and a lot of people who might not have known about our Beethoven Project. There is definitely PR value to it, but from an artistic profound point of view, it’s not so important.”
Järvi has recorded 17 compact discs with the CSO. One, Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” won a Grammy for Best Surround Sound, and CSO discs were enumerated when Telarc president Robert Woods was named Classical Producer of the Year. None has won a performance Grammy. Järvi won a Grammy for Best Choral Performance for Nordic repertoire, Cantatas by Finnish composer Jean Sibelius with the Estonian National Orchestra, National Male Choir and Ellerhein Girls Chorus.
“That’s the thing,” said Järvi, “associating somebody with some repertoire. Just because your name is Nordic doesn’t mean that you do good Sibelius. It doesn’t always work like that.”
Järvi will conduct Mahler’s Symphony No. 7 with the CSO Feb. 3 and 5. Feb. 18-20, he will lead Beethoven’s iconic Fifth Symphony. He expects the Beethoven performances to be influenced to some extent by his experience leading the entire cycle of Beethoven symphonies with the DKB. “It (the CSO) is a bigger orchestra and a bigger sound, but fundamentally the concept is the same (brisk tempos, crisp articulation, energetic interpretation, etc.). I don’t think I can do it any differently now. I don’t think I can go back to the sort of old way of doing it because I don’t believe in it any more. Still, you have to work with the size and sound of the orchestra and make the concept work for this group. Certain things that are easier for a smaller orchestra might need to be a little bit re-thought, but the overall picture is going to be the same as I do with the Kammerphilharmonie.”
March 25 and 26, Järvi will conduct his first “Turangalila-symphonie” by Messiaen. The 20th-century classic features ondes martenot, an electronic instrument similar to a theremin (think outer space), played by today’s leading exponent of the ondes martenot, Cynthia Millar. He leads a special, non-subscription concert May 3, an all-Dvorak program with cellist Yo Yo Ma that is already sold out. And he will lead an American-themed concert May 6 and 7, with music by Bernstein, Copland and Ives. The Ives’ work, Fugue from his Symphony No. 4: “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains,” arranged by former CSO music director Leopold Stokowski. Concluding that intriguing program will be “Ameriques” by Edgar Varese, “a little chamber piece,” Järvi remarked, quite tongue-in-cheek, with “nine extra percussionists, two timpanists, eight horns, five trumpets, five flutes, five oboes and five bassoons.”
The 2010-11 season and Jarvi’s ten-year journey with the CSO conclude May 13 and 14 with Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 and the CSO premiere of Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür’s Piano Concerto with soloist Awadagin Pratt of the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.
Closing with the Mahler 5 is ”very symbolic because we have a connection to it,” said Järvi. “The American premiere was here. We did a tour with it in Europe, so it’s kind of revisiting something that makes sense.”
There is also an Anniversary Fanfare project extending January to May, with fanfares by Jonathan Holland, Jorg Widmann, Stewart Goodyear and Charles Coleman specially commissioned for Jarvi’s tenth anniversary year.
Holland and
Coleman are also featured on “American Portraits,” the newest CD by Järvi and
the CSO, to be released January 25. It
will be the inaugural release on the orchestra’s new in-house label Cincinnati
Symphony Orchestra Media. The music was
transferred to disc from live recordings of CSO performances at Music Hall. The CD is on sale to CSO patrons at the Bravo
Shop at Music Hall, and Järvi will sign copies at this week’s concerts. “What is important to me is that it exists,”
he said, “that these pieces are now sort of set in stone in performances with
the Cincinnati Symphony. A couple of
them were world premieres (Coleman’s “Streetscape” and “Deep Woods” and Holland’s
“Halcyon Sun”). These are the important
things that we should be doing. New works
by young composers get performed sometimes once and then never again, or maybe
once in ten years. They are good pieces.”
Järvi said he would record with the CSO again “if it’s a project that is interesting and is doable -- something that has a reason for being recorded and would be kind of a continuation of our legacy. I am very happy that we have the new label now, our own label. That’s exactly the right way to go. In order for this label to be accepted and to make a real label, it needs to have a variety of repertoire. It cannot be just one thing. Honestly, I would love to do nothing more than the Mahlers (Mahler symphonies) here.”
“American Portraits” was possible “only because of the live nature,” he said. Because of financial constraints, “it would have been much more difficult to record,” he said. The recording was underwritten by a gift from John and Farah Palmer.
CSO director of communications Christopher Pinelo elaborated: “Every project we do is fully funded. That’s our mode of operation. It’s our own label. We cover all the production costs and we decide what we want to do. Distribution is handled by Naxos. That have nothing to do with the artistic decisions or the production. The manufacturing of the discs and the distribution electronically for digital download sites, yes, but the actual production will all be done in house by the CSO.”
Järvi considers recordings “a kind of a track record of what you’ve done in your life. People can track my ten years here through those recordings. There is a value to it, and hopefully, some of the performances are OK, too.” Recordings are how an orchestra “becomes visible,” he added, “even when we are not actually there. They represent us.”
“If you don’t release recordings worldwide, you don’t get invited for international or domestics tours,” said Pinelo.
Guest artists yet to come with Järvi and the CSO this season include pianist Andre Watts (January 28-29, Beethoven Concerto No. 4), violinist Vadim Repin (Feb. 18-20, Sibelius Concerto), pianist Stewart Goodyear (March 25-26, Bach, Keyboard Concerto No. 1), cellist Ma (May 3, Dvorak Concerto), clarinetist Martin Frost (May 6-7, Copland Clarinet Concerto) and pianist Pratt (May 13-14, Tüür Concerto). There will be many events, farewells, tributes and the like during Jarvi’s home stretch as CSO music director. He will be recognized as an Outstanding Cincinnatian at the Emanuel Community Center Triumph Awards on Feb. 2 in a special ceremony at the Hilton Cincinnati Netherland Plaza Hall of Mirrors. Keynote speaker will be Nick Clooney, with Courtis Fuller of WLW-TV as master of ceremonies (information and tickets, $60 per person, at www.emanuelcenter.org or call (513) 241-2563, ext. 32).
“Home stretch” is kind of the way Järvi would like to put his last months in Cincinnati, since he intends to guest conduct the CSO in the future. He has not set “exact dates yet,” he said, “but it’s in the works.”
Järvi reflected on his feelings now that his “very fast” ten years in Cincinnati have flown:
“I feel very sad and very emotional, because it’s been ten years of my life. It’s like all changes in life. There’s a sense of anticipation of something new and also a little bit of sadness of leaving behind your friends. But on the other hand, I also look at it in a way that I don’t leave for real. I am coming back. The relationship will change somewhat, but hopefully, it will continue in a musically good way.
“It’s sort of bittersweet, you know? Certain things are inevitable and you know you have to move, but at the same time, you come back. I am proud of what we’ve done here. I am very happy with the progress we have made. You know, it’s life.”
Paavo Järvi conducts the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday night (December 17 and 18) at Music Hall. On the program are Bartok’s Divertimento (1939), Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 (“Turkish”) with guest artist Hilary Hahn, Benjamin Britten’s “Simple Symphony” and Stravinsky’s “Pulcinella” Suite. Tickets began at $10 at the CSO box office, 241 Elm Street in Music Hall; or call (513) 381-3300. You may also order online at www.cincinnatisymphony.org.