For Mariss Jansons - Beginning

Firebird Finale

A recording is a moment in time, as much music in its natural habitat as a caged animal. Recordings cannot help but exaggerate interpretive mannerisms that in a live performance you forget as quickly as you notice them. But if a musician whose interpretation deliberately overstates the music will come across as mannered on a recording, a musician who deliberately under-interprets will come across as empty, generic, dull. The extraordinary qualities of Mariss Jansons, roughly as prone to exaggerate musically as a mountain to noticeably move, could never come through in recordings. Sometimes to a fault, there was no interpretation in his performances. He simply played the music, with absolute security, absolute care, absolute detail. On recording, it too often sounded plain; live, it was magic. Other conductors who deliberately kept themselves out of the music could sound incredibly calculated, some of them were Jansons's mentors and legends in their own right like Herbert von Karajan and Yevgeny Mravinsky, both of whose music making was so precision oriented that it seemed music made more like titans than humans. But Mariss Jansons's music making was never anything but human, music made from the heart to go straight to the heart. I will never forget any detail of those final few minutes of the Firebird I heard from Jansons and the Pittsburgh Symphony at the Kennedy Center in 2004. I moved up to the front row, right behind Jansons to see exactly how a master would do it. Nothing was out of the ordinary, just a masterful conductor with a masterful technique who knew exactly what dynamic and color he wanted from every one fo the hundred musicians on stage. Other maestros I regularly heard when I was in DC like Valery Gergiev would leave everything to chance and counted on= the mad scramble to inspire players through adrenalin. The gambit usually paid off, but Gergiev is the kind of conductor who so electrifies you that you think you're at a sporting event. Jansons is the kind of conductor that makes you think you're somewhere as intimate as a dinner with a close friend you haven't seen in ten years. To have heard Mariss Jansons at his best was to hear the kind of music making you hear only a very few times over the course of your lifetime. At the end, you are a different person than you were at the beginning.