The Russian National Orchestra (RNO), which many consider to be Russia’s finest symphony orchestra, celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. But it is not resting on its laurels. The orchestra continues to perform actively both at home and abroad, to release new recordings, and, in general, to overcome difficulties that might sink a lesser organization.
Last September, the capital’s classical music season began with an unprecedented event by Moscow (and perhaps even international) standards. It was the RNO Festival at the Bolshoi, whose star performer was not a conductor or a soloist, but an orchestra. Over seven nights, one of Russia’s finest orchestras performed seven different programs under the baton of its founder, Mikhail Pletnev. The featured composer was Tchaikovsky, and the festival included a number of his works, but there was also Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute, Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt, and many other composers.
According to renowned music critic Yulia Benderova, “the RNO demonstrated variety, an incomparable subtlety, and the lush essence of orchestral mastery.”
The festival was not merely a prologue to the orchestra’s 20th anniversary in 2010; it was also the RNO’s first performance in its new status: shortly before the festival began, the famously private orchestra had attained institutional status, permitting its players guaranteed salaries as employees of a state body, like every other major orchestra in Russia and Europe. And although the New Stage of the Bolshoi Theater, where the festival was held,* is not acoustically flawless, it is rather symbolic that these concerts took place on the country’s main stage.
“In my opinion, the festival was rather remarkable,” said Mikhail Pletnev in an interview with Russian Life. “I feel the orchestra successfully demonstrated that its stature and its reputation are justified. If I had not come down with a cold toward the end of the festival, everything would have been perfect. The program had plenty of new things for the orchestra… We had never before played Schuman’s Second Symphony or Grieg’s Peer Gynt. There has perhaps never been a festival like this, where the orchestra plays a new and difficult program every day; we will take this into consideration with the next festival.”
the RNO is the singular Moscow orchestra to be included in Gramophone magazine’s listing of the Top 20 Orchestras in the World. It is an unbelievable achievement for an orchestra that was only founded in 1990 – the other orchestras in the Top 20 have been around for many decades or even centuries. The RNO was the first-ever Russian orchestra to visit the Vatican and, later, Israel, and western reviewers heap it with accolades: “a living symbol of the best in Russian art”; “one of the world’s best”; “the Rolls-Royce of orchestras”; “as perfect as one could hope for”; “the most important cultural story of our time.”
In the mid-1990s, when Moscow orchestras stopped traveling to the provinces for lack of state support, the RNO began its annual Volga Tour, performing for the residents of Samara, Ulyanovsk, Volgograd, Nizhny Novgorod, Cheboksary and Yaroslavl. The RNO’s first Volga tour, in 1996, seemed like a gamble, but later it became not merely part of the orchestra’s image, but an ideal way to convey the musical arts to regions far from the capital.
Six years ago, this journalist was fortunate enough to travel with the RNO and Pletnev on one of its Volga tours, floating from Saratov to Kazan on board the Fyodor Shalyapin. Countless colorful episodes flood the memory: the ping-pong tournament of principal musicians, Pletnev practicing on the ship’s piano, outdoor games on the deck that included both orchestra members and guests. Observing the orchestra from the inside allowed one to witness the many unseen threads that bound the musicians one to another, so that when they assembled on stage they formed a deeply integrated ensemble.
Over the course of its 20 years performing, the orchestra has collaborated with the world’s leading performers: Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, Renée Fleming, Kent Nagano, Mstislav Rostropovich, Paavo Berglund, Martha Argerich, Gidon Kremer, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zuckerman, Vadim Repin, Yevgeny Kisin, Maxim Vengerov, James Galway, Dave Brubeck, Nikolaj Znaider, Gil Shaham, Julia Fischer, Joshua Bell, Alexei Lyubimov, Yevgeny Svetlanov, and the list goes on and on. At the recent festival, the RNO performed with clarinetist Michael Collins, soprano Simone Kermes, violinist Sergei Krylov, pianists Stephen Hough and Conrad Tao, and many others.
The RNO Festival opened, not accidentally, with Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony. It was the first piece the orchestra recorded back in 1991, and the respected journal Gramophone called this recording the best Tchaikovsky’s Sixth in history. To date, the RNO has released some 60 recordings and many of them have received prestigious awards. In 2004, the RNO became the first (and still only) Russian orchestra to win a Grammy, the recording industry’s highest honor. Just in the past half-year, two RNO discs (Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, conducted by Vladimir Jurowski, and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 15, conducted by Mikhail Pletnev) were deemed “Best Recording of the Month” by Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine, respectively.
The orchestra continues to record, even though Pletnev says he doesn’t need any more recordings: “The people who need them are those who want to hear the orchestra play in person, but are not able to. Today, even as orchestral recordings are being done less and less, we have several big recording projects. Three years ago, we recorded all of Beethoven’s symphonies and piano concertos [for Deutsche Grammophon]. Christian Gansch [conductor of the piano concertos] is a very fine musician, even though he is not a big name in conducting. But I didn’t need a conductor who would bring his own conceptions to this; I needed a conductor who would seek to do what I wanted, both in concert and in the recordings. This summer [2009] we recorded Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake [for Ondine Records]. We are continuing to record Shostakovich’s symphonies [for PentaTone Classics]. And we are being asked to once again record all of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies. In 1996 we recorded them for Deutsche Grammophon; this is a different company [PentaTone] and the orchestra sounds different, so it will be a different recording.”
Among Russian orchestras, the RNO is one of the more active touring ensembles, with a major international tour every year. It is through such touring that it has gained the impressive international following that has set it apart from other Russian orchestras. Indeed, the RNO has come to be called nothing less than “the calling card for modern Russian classical music.”
the RNO’s founder, artistic director and principal conductor, Mikhail Pletnev, spends most of his time with the orchestra, thanks to which he has all but abandoned his career as a pianist, which began after he was Gold Medal and First Prize winner of the 1978 Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition, when he was only 21. Needless to say, this has been a loss to lovers of piano music.* At present, Pletnev shows no immediate signs of returning to the piano concert circuit.
“How can one play on bad pianos?” Pletnev asked. “You walk up to a piano and merely touch the keyboard and instantly all you want to do is leave. Perhaps there are good pianos to be found somewhere, but it is difficult… It’s difficult to simply play the piano now; you have to tour, which means you have to ferry your piano to every new city… And the main thing is that there is no such piano [to survive such transport], it can’t be found.”
But, of course, there is more to it than this. Pletnev is committed to spending much of the year with the RNO. And this is counter to the modern norm, where the head of the orchestra usually spends no more than two to four months a year with his ensemble. Pletnev conducts most of the RNO’s concerts, and does not hide the fact that he is standing on principle by doing so.
“There have arisen new sorts of relationships between conductors and orchestras,” Pletnev said. “But here [in Russia] we are a bit old fashioned, and I feel that it is better. When there was the NBC Orchestra, you could hear the hand of Toscanini in it; when Mravinsky led the Leningrad Philharmonic, you could hear in the orchestra’s sound who was in charge. When conductors appear rarely on the podium, when they switch out every four years, there will not be any such identification of conductor and orchestra. But of course there are orchestras, like the Vienna Philharmonic, which have decided to go their own way, to exist without a principal conductor…”
Such a strategy is clearly not for Russia. It may be that the names of Europe’s most famous orchestras — the Vienna Philharmonic, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw or the Leipzig Gewandhaus — speak for themselves. But within Russia the best orchestras are signified primarily by the last name of their principal conductor. The Bolshoi Symphonic is known as the orchestra of Vladimir Fedoseyev; the Petersburg Philharmonic is the province of Yuri Temirkanov; and the Russian National is the orchestra of Mikhail Pletnev.
The formula: “when we say RNO, we mean Pletnev; when we say Pletnev, we mean the RNO” is as true for this orchestra as for any other. But it was not always thus. Ten years ago, in 1999, on the eve of the RNO’s 10th anniversary, Pletnev said he wanted to spend more time composing and return to his piano career. He handed the post of principal conductor to Vladimir Spivakov, while remaining with the RNO as an honorary conductor. But then, three years later, the RNO announced they would not renew Spivakov’s contract, and he abruptly quit. Pletnev returned, yet not as the singular principal conductor, but as the head of a “Conductor’s Collegium,” which included Kent Nagano, Paavo Berglund, and a handful of others.
The ideological foundation of the Collegium was explained by the orchestra’s general director at the time, Sergei Markov: “In Russia to this point orchestras have been known by the names of their principal conductors. In other countries, they parted ways with this custom after Karajan.* It is time for us to dispense with this as well. The time of lone titans has passed into history… An orchestra is a reflection of society, a voice of its era. Today, attempts to ‘play like Karajan’ come across as a farce… Pletnev does not suffer from the ‘professional illness’ of the principal conductor – jealousy of others’ authority or success, or others’ creative style or interpretations.”
The idea of a Collegium seemed to be as visionary as the RNO’s founding in 1990, and the model was subsequently adopted by other orchestras around the world. (Kent Nagano, one of the brightest foreign stars in the Collegium, only conducted twice in Moscow during this period, yet he did conduct the orchestra on tour and led three powerful RNO recordings, one of which won the Grammy). Yet the creation of the Collegium also coincided with one of the most dramatic moments in the orchestra’s history. When Spivakov left the RNO, he took with him 30 musicians to form the National Philharmonic of Russia (NPR). History was repeating itself. Back when the RNO got its start, Pletnev invited into the orchestra musicians from other Moscow orchestras. And before that, in the early 1970s, Evgeny Svetlanov lured away musicians from the Moscow Philharmonic to his State Academic Symphony Orchestra.
In fact, Pletnev said the defection worked to the betterment of the orchestra: overnight it became younger by half, yet sounded better than ever. “I am very satisfied,” Pletnev said last fall. “The orchestra’s potential is vast. Truly fantastic young people have joined us; they play superbly and have a huge appetite for work. The orchestra is playing wonderfully; the young musicians work very hard.”
along with a younger profile, the orchestra made another important acquisition a few years later, in 2003: Vladimir Jurowski began to regularly conduct the RNO. Born in Moscow and educated in Europe, Jurowski is principal conductor (since 2007) of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Music Director of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera, and leads orchestras on the finest stages around the world. His work with the RNO has been highly praised, and he has introduced more 20th century music into the orchestra’s repertoire, including Zemlinsky, Debussy, Adams and others. None of the RNO concerts in Moscow that he conducted in recent years was forgettable. Jurowski has also led the orchestra on several tours, and was appointed the RNO’s first ever Principal Guest Conductor in 2006.
Meanwhile, the first few years of the new century were a difficult time for Russian orchestras to gain funding. The state was slowly becoming more solvent and had begun to hand out presidential grants to musical organizations, but selectively so. Seven such grants were handed out in 2002, including to the Moscow and St. Petersburg Conservatories, the Bolshoi and Mariinsky Theaters, the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, the Bolshoi Symphonic Orchestra and Evgeny Svetlanov’s State Orchestra.
The RNO was in a strange situation. Recognized as one of Russia’s leading cultural ambassadors, it was not receiving domestic support on a par with relatively unknown orchestras. In such a situation, one ought to expect at least some state support for the orchestra. (In the United States nearly all leading orchestras receive government grants at the federal, state and local level.) In fact, the Ministry of Culture officially pledged financial support to the RNO in 2003, yet, over the next three years, delivered but a third of what it had promised. Interviewed in 2007, Pletnev did not hide his resentment:
“Having arisen 15 years ago, at a time when the state was incapable of offering anything in the cultural sphere, we demonstrated how an orchestra can perform in Russia. At that most difficult time, we stayed afloat, thinking that at least they would thank us and encourage us. Instead, I began to read in the press that a non-state orchestra had no right to be called ‘national,’ that this was a private racket, supported by American spies. That was the accepted journalistic approach 15 years ago. I lead the orchestra, but I cannot support it financially. And the question of my employment could become an issue this year. I am not inclined to force myself on anyone, to go begging; if that becomes necessary, I would rather work outside Russia. It is especially absurd against this background to consider accepting any sort of prize: why do I need that sort of thing, if they don’t let me work and if they express no interest?”
This interview took place just four months before Pletnev was awarded a Presidential Prize — one of the highest honors bestowed on public figures.* As Pletnev related it, he learned just one day before the prize ceremony that the RNO had been stricken from the list of organizations to receive state grants (smaller and less prestigious than presidential grants), and so he asked Putin what sense there was in awarding him such a prize, given this situation. The gambit paid off, and the state grant came through, but it was far from sufficient to sustain the work of the orchestra. And when, three months later, Pletnev gave his final performance as a pianist in Russia, many worried that he might emigrate, as he certainly had plenty of offers from abroad.
thankfully, pletnev did not emigrate and has no plans to do so. During just the first four months of the present concert season, he led nearly 15 concerts in Moscow. Yet he does not hide his criticism of Russian reality: “In Russia, whenever people do something seriously, it is always ‘fate’ or their ‘mission.’ Everything good that is done here, as a rule, is done despite circumstances. That’s just the kind of place it is… it is always difficult in Russia, there is always a hindrance, in every era. In the Soviet era, it was impossible to be creative — Shostakovich and Prokofiev both had difficulties… Now our problems are different, but they still exist. Everything has been commercialized, including classical music. It does not have huge significance in proportion to society as a whole, yet there are people who live here who need this breath of fresh air, this comfort, as it were. Since we are here, we try to provide them with that.”
The orchestra can now be more certain about its future. At the end of last summer, it was announced that the RNO had been given the status of a Federal Cultural Institution (the Russian abbreviation is GUK), a designation that is largely ceremonial and which allows the RNO to receive state support while maintaining its independence. Part of this is salaries for musicians. Not that new positions and salaries were created for the RNO’s musicians. Instead, the RNO has taken the place of the Symphonic Orchestra of Russia, whose positions on the state rolls have been given to the RNO. The Symphonic Orchestra was founded and led by Veronika Dudarova until her recent death. Her Moscow orchestra was a clear “outsider” and its passing will scarcely be noticed, except by those musicians who were in its employ. Originally, there was some talk about an open competition between musicians from the two orchestras for the positions, but it never took place; last fall, Pletnev indicated that just one Dudarova musician had been invited to join the RNO.
Thus did one orchestra survive at the expense of another, but in this “winner take all” instance, it was entirely justified, insofar as the RNO truly is one of Russia’s finest. Back when the change of status was only first being discussed, Pletnev was concerned: “The orchestra has received the status of a state organization, and that will impose upon us certain conditions.”
Later, in his interview with Russian Life, Pletnev was surprised to hear he had voiced these words. “Did I really say that? I have no idea what I meant; I don’t recall. The orchestra plays just the same as it did before. I don’t hear any difference in its sound.”
What has changed for the orchestra, Pletnev said, is the world in which it must exist. “Russia is a rather specific country,” Pletnev said. “It is impossible for an orchestra to exist in Russia the way orchestras exist in the rest of the world. We have to work within the boundaries that exist here. It is a miracle that we ignored them for so long. The more time has gone by, the more significantly the political situation in the country has changed. That which was possible 20 years ago does not work at present. But that is not even the main thing. The main thing is how does the orchestra play, what sort of creative spirit does it have, what are its artistic achievements?”
On that score, Russia’s leading music critic, Pyotr Pospelov, can only agree with Pletnev. Pospelov considers the RNO to be one of the country’s best. “An orchestra’s performance level directly depends on how painstaking has been the preparation of its program,” Pospelov said. “Today, the young musicians have become so well assimilated into the orchestra that Pletnev barely has to say a thing to them; his glance alone is sufficient.”
The RNO’s multinational support has been steadfast throughout this period of change in Russia. The orchestra counts among its supporters the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation, Gordon Getty, Charles Simonyi, Prince Michael of Kent Foundation, Lord Jacob Rothschild, Tatiana and Gerret Copeland, Athena Blackburn, Mouli and Stacy Cohen, and Marianne Wyman, among others. Now, like orchestras in Europe and the U.S., the RNO qualifies for both state and private philanthropic support.
Though Pletnev continues to conduct the majority of concerts, many guests have been invited to conduct the RNO, and recent and upcoming appearances include Semyon Bychkov, Patrick Summers, Claus Peter Flor, Jose Serebrier, Ingo Metzmacher, Kent Nagano, and the up-and-coming conductors Vasily Petrenko and Carlo Ponti. Ponti will conduct the RNO this May in a historic concert at the Vatican celebrating the meeting of the Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox faiths in the presence of Pope Benedict XVI and Patriarch Kirill the First.
At the same time, Vladimir Jurowski’s increasing international obligations have caused a scaling back of his appearances in Moscow, to the point he no longer has sufficient time to be the RNO’s Principal Guest Conductor. Still, he has announced his intention to continue his work with the RNO.
Jurowski recently conducted the RNO in a brilliant program around the theme of Faust, including fragments from Alfred Schnittke’s opera The History of Doctor Johann Faust. One can hope that, absent regular appearances by Jurowski, the RNO will not become less flexible, for this is one of its finest qualities. Thus, one of its most successful performances last season was its performance of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, under the direction of Mark Elder. It was almost impossible to recognize the orchestra, which played as if they were born to perform Mahler and had forgotten their more delicate style — one more attuned to the works of Schubert or Tchaikovsky.
Pletnev says the RNO will continue to make creative program choices. “We of course take lots of Russian music abroad, but that is not all,” Pletnev said. “We have played the poems of Liszt, the symphonies of Beethoven, as well as Brahms. But tour organizers expect programs that, in their estimation, will bring in sufficiently large crowds. Therefore, all things favor a simplified repertoire, although we sometimes manage to slip into the program something less well-known. In Italy we performed Rachmaninov’s Isle of the Dead and Scriabin’s Poeme d’extase, as well as Tchaikovsky’s Third Suite, and we have frequently performed Glazunov’s Sixth Symphony, which is completely unknown everywhere. So the boundaries of our repertoire are widening. Meanwhile, lots of orchestras travel about and play merely Rachmaninov’s Second Concerto and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. In Moscow, meanwhile, we are our own producers, and we perform whatever we like.”
thus does the RNO greet its 20th anniversary. Started from nothing by Mikhail Pletnev — previously known mostly as a pianist and composer and now acknowledged as one of the leading conductors of our time — the RNO has become one of the world’s most remarkable ensembles. As it demonstrated with its festival last September — in a single concert taking on the mantle of a chamber orchestra to perform Mozart’s Gran Partita, then transforming back into a full orchestra in the Russian style to play Scriabin’s Poeme d’extase and a horn concerto by Gliere — it has amazing range. What is more, the RNO has astounding soloists including Russia’s finest trumpeter, Vladislav Lavrik, the miraculous flutist Maxim Rubtsov, cellist Alexander Gottgelf, concertmaster Alexei Bruni, and concertmistress Tatiana Porshneva.
Bruni, for his part, has been with the RNO since its creation, and may know it better than anyone save Pletnev. “Like a fine ship’s captain,” Bruni said, “Pletnev always has the ability to examine a situation rather coolly and then choose the safest course.”
One can only hope that this ability will help chart the RNO’s course for at least the next 20 years of its remarkable journey. RL
* In Japan, some particularly avid lovers of Pletnev’s piano music have done rigorous scientific testing to show that it has an uncannily positive effect on its listeners: www.mikhailpletnev.net
* Herbert von Karajan, who led the Berlin Philharmonic for 35 years (1955-1989) and became the most famous and most recorded conductor of all time.
* The 2007 award was “For Merits before the Fatherland, Third Degree”; in 2006, he received the State Prize of the Russian Federation.
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