Living his dreams

The day Semyon Bychkov went to the local KGB office to apply to leave the Soviet Union under the terms of the US Jackson-Vanik amendment (a detente-era swap of Soviet Jewish emigration for western technology) he came home and switched on his transistor radio.

"I started listening to the BBC or VOA, and what do I hear? That the Soviet government had that day denounced Jackson-Vanik and said that under no circumstances would it `give in to blackmail'. And there I am, sitting probably white as a wall. I said to myself: `I am cooked as a goose'."

Bychkov likes to laugh. The 47-year-old orchestra conductor laughs often, an operatic, Pavarotti laugh that starts as a throaty chuckle and builds to baritone peals of jubilation. Even when recounting his desperate encounters with the KGB in January of 1975 and the anti-Semitism encountered by him and his family, Bychkov punctuates his tale with humour.

Born in Leningrad in 1952, he directed his first choir at 14, an orchestra at 17 and an opera at 18, when he entered the Leningrad Conservatory. But Bychkov's father was prevented from working for a year as a scientist because he was Jewish. In November 1974, Soviet authorities cancelled Bychkov's debut with the Leningrad Philharmonic orchestra. "It was clear doors would be closed to me," he said. "I had to get out."

A month after his application, Bychkov was summoned to KGB headquarters and against all his expectations was given an exit visa. By the summer of 1975 he was in the US, where he would spend 14 years before settling in France, where he was music director of the Orchestre de Paris from 1989 until 1998.

Had it not been for the KGB's seemingly arbitrary decision to allow him to emigrate, Bychkov would probably not be performing with the WDR Symphony Orchestra at the National Concert Hall, Dublin on May 19th. The programme includes Mendelssohn's Concerto for two pianos and orchestra, Beethoven's Leonora Overture and Brahms's 1st Symphony. Bychkov's wife, Marielle Labeque and her sister Katia are famous piano duettists, and they will play the Mendelssohn under his direction in Dublin. The Brahms symphony is also unique for him.

"It was the first piece I ever conducted, when I was 17. It's one of those first loves that one never forgets, but that fortunately one can always revisit."

Bychkov and Labeque rarely have a chance to work together - on average once a year. They met in 1986, at a dinner with friends after Bychkov conducted Shostakovich's Symphony number 5 at the Salle Pleyel in Paris. Labeque joins us briefly in the living room of their Paris apartment to talk about the 13 years they have spent together, and their wedding at their home on the Basque coast near Biarritz last summer. A slender woman with long, dark hair, she stands while he holds her hand and answers questions succinctly, almost shyly. He already knew of the Labeque sisters when he met her. "Of course" she was impressed by Semyon's talent, Marielle says. "It wasn't only that," she adds, "but I admire the musician that he is, the way he directs, the way he questions everything, tries everything. We have the same rhythms, the same desires."

The couple spend half of each year together. Semyon is booked up until 2005, but Marielle's schedule is more flexible. Three days after I met them, he was to return to Dresden, where he is conductor of the Dresden Semperoper, while Marielle was leaving for concerts in Vienna, Innsbruck, Bregens, Madrid and Barcelona. "The telephone companies are very happy with us," Bychkov says. "They love us. They adore us." And that deep laugh bursts from him again.

The fundamental question facing conductors, Bychkov says, "is how a symphony orchestra wants to see itself in the conditions of today's society. Having lived with this music of Beethoven and Brahms and Mahler for centuries, are symphony orchestras such an inflexible and immovable elephant that they just routinely produce concerts? Should they play contemporary music, and how and to whom? Do you force it down people's throats?"

BYCHKOV has been a guest conductor with most of the major orchestras in the US and Europe, including the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, and the Berlin Philharmonic - where he was once considered a possible successor to Herbert von Karajan. But Bychkov prefers the word "dream" to "ambition", and likens his present jobs - conducting both a symphony orchestra in Cologne and the Dresden opera - to living at the same time in the 21st and 19th centuries.

"I'm realising my dreams," he says. "I will conduct my first Ring (Richard Wagner's 16-and-a-half-hour cycle) in Dresden from 2001 until 2003. As a guest conductor I wouldn't be able to do that. I dreamed of conducting Tristan, and I conducted it in Chicago and I will do it in Vienna next season. I dreamed of conducting Strauss's Elektra, and I conducted it in many places - Vienna, Dresden, Cologne and Paris. It is really a privilege to be able to do things you dreamed of doing."

On the wall above the grand piano in the Bychkov-Labeque apartment hangs a black-andwhite photograph taken in Leningrad in 1957. The picture resembles a pre-1917 image of the Romanovs more than a modern music school. But the little boy with black curls at the end of the front row stands out among the taller, fair-headed Russian children. He is five-year-old Semyon Bychkov on the day of his first piano concert. The woman is Anikina Stepanova, his first piano teacher, who was like a grandmother to him, calling him "little Pushkin" because of his curls.

Bychkov is what the French call a grand sentimental. He is effusive in his praise and affection for close friends such as the actor Daniel Day Lewis and the photographer Franco Ferri. But the pictures that decorate his study show that the fraternity of music comes first. He proudly takes an original photograph of Johann Strauss and Brahms down from the wall, to show me where they both signed it on the back. There is a charcoal portrait of Mahler, still decked with a blue ribbon embossed with tiny gold musical instruments - a gift from the 15-year-old daughter of a WDR Symphony Orchestra cellist.

A black-and-white photo of Ilya Musin, Bychkov's conducting teacher at the Leningrad Conservatory, hangs over his desk. For 24 years after Bychkov emigrated, he kept in contact with Musin, and the two conducted at the same concert in Leningrad - now St Petersburg - last year, five months before Musin died at the age of 95. A few days before I interviewed him, Bychkov received a letter and photographs of the concert from one of Musin's students.

"Ilya Alexandrovitch always talked about you very warmly and with great love," Bychkov translates proudly. "Of his outstanding pupils he considered you closest to his spirit, and would always ask, `Don't we have a recording of Bychkov conducting that?' "

Semyon Bychkov conducts the WDR Symphony Orchestra at the Dublin National Concert Hall on May 19th. The programme in- cludes Beethoven, Brahms and Mendelsohn, with piano duettists Marielle and Katia Labeque