I'm probably younger than most people in this group, and when I was coming of age musically in the Baltimore/DC area, there were three Soviet conductors doing a fair amount of work in the area: Yuri Temirkanov who was the Baltimore Symphony music director, Valery Gergiev who had a Kennedy Center residency, and Mariss Jansons, who would regularly come to the area - either as a guest in Baltimore, or with the Pittsburgh Symphony, or with a bigger name touring orchestra from Europe.
Musicians are a bit like athletes. They have peaks and slumps, and even the best only 'get a hit' one in three performances - everybody knows what it's like to hear a routine performance that's OK, it's perfectly decent, you leave the hall feeling glad you went, but it's forgotten the next day. But when you're in the presence of a 'hit', you immediately know it, and when you're in the presence of a 'home run', your life feels changed forever.
Back in the early 2000's, Gergiev was a better conductor than he is now. He was force of nature who risked literally everything on every performance; it was either a home run or a strikeout. I remember going to a concert expecting to hear him conduct Mahler 6, and at the last minute he'd substituted an all-Tchaikovsky program. The opening was Romeo and Juliet, and this piece the Mariinsky orchestra must have performed a thousand times in its history came so disastrously unglued in a fight section that I thought they'd have to start over, but at the end came the greatest Tchaikovsky 5 I've ever heard live to this day. Gergiev at his best is a literally awesome experience, but his best is getting less frequent as the years go on, and if anything, recordings make him sound like a much more reliable conductor than he is. Sadly, the fact that you never know if bad Gergiev will show up is part of his mystique.
Temirkanov is a different experience because he was no guest to my area, he was a community leader, and a terribly irresponsible one. Temirkanov in Baltimore was always a bittersweet experience: the true author of my hometown orchestra's problems, his absenteeism, his frequent cancellations, his insistence of firing seven of Zinman's core principals and then never being around for long enough to retrain the orchestra. He, not Marin Alsop, was the true disaster for Baltimore, and whatever conductor replaced him as Music Director would inherit the mountain of problems he left for them. On the other hand, while his Beethoven and Brahms weren't particularly special, in the Russian repertoire and certain other warhorse composers like Mahler, he was transcendence itself: a kind of poet-magician. He could be nearly as fiery as Gergiev (whom I believe was once his assistant), but Temirkanov had the heart and warmth of a musician with a much more generous spirit. But in generosity of spirit, even Temirkanov did not move the heart and tearducts the way Jansons did.
Gergiev is often improved by recording, which documents what's unique about him and airbrushes his technical shortcomings. Temirkanov on recording is a matter of taste: if you like his interventionist style you will thrill to him either recording or live, but live, Temirkanov's musicmaking obviously has an extra tangible vividness which will sell his musicality to skeptics who'd only know him from recording and video.
But to understand Mariss Jansons, you had to have heard him live. So many Jansons recordings make him sound generic, antiseptic, a master technician with little original to say and whose few 'outside the box' ideas seem elementary. In music whose intellectual content is not straightforward he often can seem lost, as though he tries to shoehorn Mahler and Strauss into sounding like Tchaikovsky. But so much from Jansons that seems generic on a stereo was magic in person.
The difference between Jansons and Temirkanov was partially a matter of technical approach. Temirkanov is a musician of great soul, but precision is something he seems almost to discourage. He doesn't wants the notes, he wants the spirit behind the notes - in a similar way perhaps to that Furtwangler or Bernstein did, or Barenboim does. Jansons's conception of making music is very very different: much less personal, but also in some senses deeper.
Temirkanov was a romantic, and while Jansons had the soul of a romantic, it was entirely contained within the discipline of a classicist, and that balance: romantic expression by classical means, created a luminous spirituality in his music making, a glow that was very rare: until Jansons, the master practitioner of this spiritual art was probably Klemperer.
For years, I never understood how Jansons did it. On the surface, it sounds as though it would be so boring, and yet it mesmerizes, drawing you into the music ever closer and closer, bar by bar. But today, I finally understood the reason: humility.
So many Toscanini-like conductors say that they don't impose their personal whims on the music, but the coldness with which they drill the orchestra is as large an imposition as anything in Mengelberg and Stokowski. When Reiner and Karajan and Szell and Leinsdorf and Solti are at their worst, it's not musicmaking, it's simply machines playing notes.
Aside from his father, Jansons's two great mentors are Karajan and Mravinsky, both of them expert technicians and cold fish. Perhaps that's not fair to Mravinsky, his musical personality was either ice cold or scorchingly hot, but rarely anything in between. But Karajan's ultramanicured sound is like an imitation of human warmth from a person who has none. Every note is deconstructed and reassembled for an exact shade of color, but Karajan seemed almost incapable of playing music as though he had anything to express within himself.
And yet from these two supertechnicians came a supertechnician who only used his technique toward the music's spirit. I suppose Kirill Petrenko has something of the same spirit, and is a far truer heir to the Jansons torch than Andris Nelsons, whose musicmaking is far more outwardly personalized.
There was very little in the spirit of a Jansons performance that felt personalized, and yet the spirit of the music was so enormous and genuinely felt. Whereas a Temirkanov (or Nelsons) will move you by guiding you to whatever in the music they wish to emphasize, Jansons never guided, he simply made sure that every single nuance in the work was allowed its chance to speak clearly. It was a kind of musical humility: as though he treated musical notes like human beings, each of whom requires respect and a space to be heard.
So those concerts I heard from Jansons in his American years were lifetime experiences. In those years, Jansons was reviewed as though he hit a home run at every concert, and people seemed to come out of every Jansons concert completely changed: speechless, cleansed, moved, electrified, and transported to unseen dimensions. Petrenko (the short one) seems to be having a similar effect on people these days, but in the years on either end of 2000, the three conductors who seemed to leave listeners speechless were Jansons, Gergiev, and Simon Rattle, and by 2010, none of the three seemed as compelling as they were ten years before when they were still working with less establishmentarian orchestras and expectations weren't nearly so high.
Once Jansons got to Munich and Amsterdam, something of the old spirit seemed to go out of him. He certainly still got to that exalted spiritual plane, particularly of course with the Bavarian Radio Symphony, but he could not make these orchestras into something other than the Karajan-influenced polished-stone instruments they are. To me, the truly great Jansons performances are generally not the impeccably played performances from the world's greatest orchestras recorded by the world's greatest radio engineers, but live broadcasts from Pittsburgh, Oslo, Cardiff, where he makes musicians in less distinguished orchestras understand what great music they're capable of making, and empowers them to be equal partners to both him and the composer. He makes them play not like a monarchy where they are mere servants to his will, but a real community in which everyone participant is crucial and valuable.
It would be easy to put together a playlist of Jansons greatest hits - Oslo Tchaikovsky, St. Petersburg Rachmaninov, Bavarian Radio Strauss, one of the Shostakovich recordings with the umpteen orchestras on that cycle, a New Year's Concert (and frankly, Jansons might have been the best of the New Year's conductors, even including Kleiber...) a Concertgebouw.... is there anything from his Concertgebouw period that people universally recommend? But that would not be representative of Jansons's greatest gifts, because his greatest gift is the way he empowered his musicians in concert, staying completely within the lines of discipline, and yet, expressing so passionately and sensitively with their whole souls. To do that, you'll need to listen to or watch some scratchy TV broadcasts of live concerts.
Greater, I think, than any more famous Tchaikovsky performance of his is this magnetizing performance of Tchaikovsky's Winter Daydreams from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in 1986. Aside from this performance, the two best recordings in my experience are Temirkanov and Gergiev. But listen to the passion of this orchestral sound, which plays with their whole heart even as they play with execution which is just about ideal.
Jansons recorded a lot of Mahler toward the end, and the truth was, he was a pretty terrible Mahler conductor. I remember a Mahler 7 at Carnegie Hall, sadly my last Jansons concert, that sounded as though Jansons didn't understand the first thing about that elusive and underloved masterpiece. Jansons was much too earnest for Mahler's ironies and modernisms, but this performance of Mahler 1 from the Oslo Philharmonic on tour in Japan is magnificent, and recalls to me the broadcast I heard as a teenager of Jansons's inaugural Pittsburgh concert of Mahler 1 that so magnetized me even at that age. It has a generosity of spirit, a sincerity, that is rare in Mahler, and probably impossible to convey in later symphonies.
There are other, later performances worthy of mention - some of the Concertgebouw live radio recordings are quite wonderful: the Symphonie Fantastique and Brahms 1 (Jansons was a wonderful and underated Brahmsian and particularly in the first symphony) stand out in my memory. Along with (unexpectedly) their recording of Mozart's Requiem and their Strauss Metamorphosen - Jansons performed so much Strauss but his guileless heart generally went to waste in this most insincere of all composers, and his musical makeup only truly found a home in the late Strauss masterworks when the old master no longer had neither the time nor desire for merry pranks.
It was not in later music that Jansons shone, it was in the earnest straightforwardness of the most traditional repertoire, for which he gave very traditional performances. The more familiar the repertoire, the more he rose to it and made you think you could hear it another 10,000 times without ever getting tired of it. if you go through his BRSO Beethoven recordings, either cycle ,some of them like the Eroica, Pastoral, and Seventh really are extraordinary, and the same goes for the BRSO Brahms, or Firebird and Petrushka, or any of his 4000 performances of the Symphonie Fantastique or Dvorak 9 or Shostakovich 7 and 10.
Jansons was the last giant to die before the advent of COVID, and in retrospect it felt a bit like the end of an era - classical music itself as we've always understood it may have died with him. Jansons was born in hiding, a baby with a Jewish mother and a conductor for a father, born at the end of classical music's world dominance, and he may have died at the end of classical music's very existence as a reckoned with force upon the world's cultural scene, but if anybody wants to understand how powerful these experiences of live orchestral concerts were, sit them in front of a Jansons television broadcast. If their reaction is anything like the live audiences, they just might weep.
Note from 2025: Now that we can't hear him anymore, I've warmed to many Jansons recordings over time. Any list of his best has to include:
Mozart Requiem Concertgebouw
Beethoven 3,6,7 BRSO, preferably live in Tokyo but either
Schubert 9 BRSO video
Symphonie Fantastique Concertgebouw broadcast or Europa Konzert 2000
Bruckner 6 and 9
Brahms 1 and 4 with the BRSO
Tchaikovsky cycle with BBCNOW, Tchaikovsky 5 with the BRSO
Dvorak 5 Oslo
Dvorak 9 Concertgebouw (his last concert with them)
Mahler 1 Oslo, Mahler 6 Concertgebouw, Mahler 7 Oslo
Strauss Metamorphosen Concertgebouw
Sibelius 1 Oslo
Stravinsky Firebird Suite and Petrushka BRSO
Shostakovich 7 St Petersburg, 10 and 11 Philadelphia
