How to conduct the family business

Dmitri Jurowski is the latest in his family to take up the classical music baton, and has established himself as a striking talent, writes MICHAEL DERVAN

THERE’S NOTHING at all unusual that a child in a musical family should grow up and become a musician. But Dmitri Jurowski is not the only conductor in his family. His father Michail is also a conductor, as is his older brother Vladimir.

He explains: “I was never put to the music with violence. I think you have only two choices when you grow up in a family like mine: you either start to love music or you hate it. In my case, I’m happy that I chose the first one.”

His first memories are of going to the opera, to concerts, and always having musicians around. “I think this atmosphere just makes you feel for it more. And I could never imagine doing something different.”

He didn’t set out to be a conductor, he began as a cellist. “That was a very happy marriage for a lot of years. I would never have thought I would one day be in front of the orchestra.”

His father believed one day he would outgrow the cello, “but I didn’t see this day coming”. But destiny intervened: “I had some pain in my hands, and went to the doctor. He made a scan, and said, ‘Sorry, I think you’re going to have to change your profession.’ It was arthritis. This happened when I was 22. This was unpleasant, but I always try to be practical. I’m not religious, but I believe in something or somebody who is taking care so much that you can trust that things which happen don’t happen just like that.”

He knew he still wanted to be involved in music. “There were only two choices – composer or conductor. My grandfather was a composer, but I knew I didn’t have the personality. I cannot keep things inside. This is the opposite of a composer. And when I started to conduct, I didn’t know how successful I might be. Just because most of the family is doing that doesn’t mean automat- ically it’s something for you.”

It’s true, he says, conductors work alone when studying scores and preparing for a performance, just as a composer works alone when writing music. “But everything the conductor prepares, he also gets to bring to fruition on the stage. The composer has to hand over to an interpreter once he’s written the piece.”

It was a huge advantage knowing so much from within the family about what’s involved in conducting. “Of course it’s different when you do it yourself. It was not easy in the beginning. It’s not only a change from the bow to the stick, it’s a psychological change. You have to be a leader, and to be that you have to have it in your character. When you’re an instrumentalist, you take care of yourself, mostly. As a conductor you take care mostly about everything but yourself. This change was not easy in the beginning.”

There was never, he says, any rivalry between the three Jurowski family conductors. “We have a lot of things in common, but everyone is a very different personality. That makes it easy. The world is very big. There are a lot of orchestras. And it’s a great help if you can just talk about a symphony or an opera you have to conduct, and have so many opinions on the highest level. You don’t have to agree with everything, but you get a reaction from people you trust. This is a really luxurious situation.”

As a student conductor in Berlin he encountered the usual problem: inadequate exposure (half an hour once every two months) with an inexperienced orchestra. “My advantage was that I’d played in orchestras myself for 10 years. I knew the other side. Even now, it helps me a lot. Very often I see their thoughts and reactions before they even know them. But you also need luck. It’s not only what you can do, you have to get a chance to show what you can do.

"My chance was when my father was doing Parsifalin Genoa – I was still a student – and he thought I would be at least far enough on to be an assistant. I would have to deal with piano rehearsals, and with a cast full of well-known singers, it's quite a responsible thing to do.

"It was a risk, of course. It went well, nothing outstanding, but went quite well, and – you need the stars to be in line at times – the artistic administrator was in the house at the time. He was involved in an academy for young singers, and he asked me to conduct a project of Prokofiev's opera The Love for Three Oranges, in a production aimed at young audiences. It played in north Italy 83 times in two months. It was probably the best promotional tour I could have done. That's how it started. After a short time, I had an agent, and everything happened very quickly."

Offers started to come in, not just for opera, but also for concerts. “But I don’t feel that I would want to leave out anything. I feel every step that I made – all the mistakes I made, I made them all myself. It was the best schooling I could ever have. There’s not a conservatory anywhere that could have given such an experience to me.”

Opera, of course, was Ireland's introduction to Jurowski – he conducted Dvorak's Rusalkaat the Wexford Opera Festival in 2007, and Rimsky-Korsakov's Snegurochka, the first work to be heard in the town's new opera house, in 2008.

In opera, he says: “You don’t conduct a musical piece, you conduct a story, and the performance includes the work of the stage director, with whom you have to establish a relationship. Of course, when you deal with singers in opera, you’re dealing mostly with actors who also have to sing. It makes everything more complicated, because you have to give more freedom to the people you’re working with, and at the same time you have to control everything.

“It’s an art. You’re working with feelings, with emotions. Dealing with emotions, you have to be able to make compromises. It’s the same in life. Every singer is different. Some of them are nervous because they feel controlled, some of them are nervous because the don’t feel controlled enough.”

And his verdict on his Wexford experiences? “I’m in love with Wexford. Probably forever.”

The first time he worked with the RTÉ NSO, last February, he thought Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony was a work he’d like to conduct them in. And that’s what’s going to happen at the National Concert Hall on Friday.

Dmitri Jurowksi conducts the National Symphony Orchestra at the NCH on Friday, 8pm