With the final performance (today) of the 2013 festival, Vladimir
Jurowski has now completed his last season as musical director at Glyndebourne,
the wonderful country house opera in the Sussex downs.
His thirteen seasons there started when he was in his early
30s, and he has personally conducted eighteen different operas over that period,
introducing two major Wagner works to their repertoire (Tristan und Isolde and
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg),
two of the Verdi/Shakespeare operas (Macbeth and Falstaff), operetta (Die
Fledermaus), two Russians (Prokofiev’s Betrothal in the Monastery and
Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin), and a world première in the form of Eötvös’s
Love and Other Demons.
I was lucky enough to be introduced to him seven or eight
years ago and, discovering a mutual interest in original performing styles, I
offered to send him from time to time some of the earliest recordings of great singers
performing arias from operas which he was to conduct. He took me up on this,
and so for several seasons I would send him a bespoke CD – Wagner, Verdi and
Tchaikovsky are the ones I most recall. And, perhaps from other sources, he
was also listening to the earliest recordings of orchestral works.
I was thrilled. My previous experience of conductors (and
singers) is that they rely principally on the score, on their own judgement, and
on their training at conservatoire as to how music should be performed, not
bothering with ancient, sometimes murky recordings.
Jurowski, however, is quite different. He is a true lifelong
learner, endlessly trying to understand how it was done then in order to help
him appreciate how to do it now. In an interview in 2008 he talked about how he
had known Tchaikovsky’s music intimately since he was a small child, watching
his father rehearse and conduct at the Bolshoi in Moscow.
And yet, he wrote: “In the last year, I started listening
with different ears and much more attention to detail to the very old
recordings of Tchaikovsky’s music.” He concluded that “… they sounded less
flashy and less showy, but there was something else in the performance of the
music. There was this fragility which is missing in almost all of the
performances today.”
In the meantime, the massive growth of YouTube, and the fact
that so many of the finest early performers who recorded are now much more easily
accessed, means that this experience is available to all musicians and singers.
I wonder how many of them take up that opportunity in an open-minded way?
So, listen to Lilli Lehmann (born in 1848, she was in the
first performances of Wagner’s Ring cycle at Bayreuth in 1876) singing the
Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde in 1907 from the only surviving test pressing.
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