For Mariss Jansons - Most

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 seemed to be no interpretation in his performances. He simply played the music, with absolute security, absolute care, absolute detail. In the isolation of recording, this process too often sounds plain; but live, it was magic. But while forever within the bounds of good taste, perhaps sometimes even inhibited by good taste, every Jansons performance was nevertheless, subtly, unmistakably different. Compare any two Jansons recordings of the same work, preferably on live recordings - as you're going through them, you might think you're hearing an interpretation that deliberately keeps itself out of the music, but from one recording to the next, everything is different - the tempos, the phrasing, the colors. Just take this example of three different performances of a Jansons specialty, Shostakovich 10.

Here's the second subject of the first movement on his 90s recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra with which I first learned this piece as a teenager. It seems to gradually get out of bed, give a barbaric yawp, then go back to bed.

Philadelphia (play to 7:03)

And now here's Jansons playing the same passage with the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam nearly fifteen years later. Notice the ever so slightly slower tempo, those heavy vibrato-laden accents in the first violins on the offbeats, notice the extremely gruff 'staccato' or short notes in the lower strings. And just listen to the sheer singing velour of the Concertgebouw that Jansons lets off the leash all the way through. The differences are subtle, but the performances are completely different.

Amsterdam (to 7:17)

And now listen to the same passage a third time with Jansons conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony of Munich. This time the tempo's a little quicker, the dynamics are more contrasted without quite as many frills in the phrasing, the strings are clearly more prominent than the winds but the brass also cuts through the texture a bit more, and the dissonances of the inner voices peak through more.

Munich (up to 7:42)

You might hear these differences, you might not. They're very very subtle, and yet for a certain kind of music nut this is exactly what we live for. Nobody but the best of the best can make performances that sound so similar yet so different. Jansons may have begun from the exact same conception each time. But however an artist outlines the work they later do, in the moment of creation, you have to respond to whatever realities make themselves manifest, and if it suddenly occurs to you that a different idea than your outline will work better at that moment, the work dictates that you have to change what you do.

This is no mechanical musician. Other conductors who deliberately effaced their interventions from of the music could sound incredibly calculated, as though their lack of personality was in itself an imposition of personality and they'd drilled the orchestra to the point that no detail was left to chance. Some of them were Jansons's mentors and musical legends in their own right like Herbert von Karajan and Yevgeny Mravinsky, both of whose music making was so oriented in precision and refinement that it seemed more the music making of awesome machines than humans. But Mariss Jansons's music making rarely felt anything but human, music made from the heart to go straight to the heart. I will never forget any detail of Stravinsky's 1919 Firebird Suite I heard from Jansons and the Pittsburgh Symphony at the Kennedy Center in 2004. Knowing that it would probably be great, I moved up to the front row, right behind Jansons to see exactly how a master would do it. But it was a fruitless pursuit. On the one hand, 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 and able to elicit it in the moment. On the other hand, no matter how great I thought it was going to be, it was infinitely greater. The Firebird Suite is not a particularly great piece of music unless it's played the way the Pittsburgh Symphony played it that Saturday afternoon. Other maestros I regularly heard when I was living in DC like Valery Gergiev and Yuri Temirkanov 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. Temirkanov has an intimacy closer to the Jansons way, but while to have heard Temirkanov at his best was to have nights in the concert hall of uncanny poetry and magic, but 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.

To those few of us who care about these things, the names Temirkanov and Jansons will forever be linked in unfortunate ways. To us conductor nuts, the Leningrad Philharmonic will always be associated with Yevgeny Mravinsky, who inherited the orchestra during Stalin's Great Terror and lead it for a full fifty years until the USSR was at the point of collapse. Mariss Jansons was Yevgeny Mravinsky's longtime second conductor, and by many accounts should have been his successor. For whatever reason, be it anti-Latvian bigotry in Russia or that Temirkanov had the right friends in high places, Temirkanov, already a celebrity maestro with a magnificent perch at the Kirov Opera, inherited Russia's greatest orchestra upon Mravinsky's death, which he's now lead with distinction for an admirable more than thirty years. But Temirkanov thought little of Mravinsky, and while the orchestra is of course still excellent, the special Mravinsky sound of the now St. Petersburg Philharmonic is almost completely vanished