The Leningrad’s Architect : Conductor Yuri Temirkanov Rebuilds a Legendary Orchestra

Music is the art of time. And it usually takes time for any conductor, even an eccentric one, to establish an interpretation. A downbeat must be given, a tempo suggested, momentum established, guidelines set, so that the players get off together. It always takes a few bars.

But not for Yuri Temirkanov.

Conducting batonless in Carnegie Hall last week, he simply lifted his right hand over his head, palm open and facing toward the ceiling, and like a magician pulling a sound unexpectedly out of a hat, he brought in the trumpet solo that begins Prokofiev’s “Lieutenant Kije” suite.

The hand remained raised throughout the solo, undulating slightly to shape the phrase and seeming to encourage supple expression out of it. But there never was a beat, a tempo, even a real cue.

When asked about his extraordinary podium technique, the conductor, relaxing in a borrowed Upper West Side apartment, put down his cigarette, got up from his sofa and began conducting the interviewer. First he beat out the “Kije” trumpet solo exactly, demonstrating how up-tight that can make a player and how it will likely constrict his sound. Then he showed the advantage of simply encouraging him to play and letting the music sing forth.

“If you give him an order to play, he tightens up,” Temirkanov said through his interpreter. “But if you invite him, he is free. We’ve decided how it will be in rehearsal. So it is my job in performance to create the right mood.”

Temirkanov said that he is sometimes accused of theatricality for such methods. But he rebutted that accusation by describing the conductor’s job during performance as being akin to an actor’s. He must create the atmosphere for both audience and the players. If there is humor, as there is in “Kije,” then he finds it not just appropriate but necessary to clown around on the podium. In Tchaikovsky’s stormy “Manfred” Symphony, however, Temirkanov becomes the demented poet, egging the orchestra on to give its most Angst -ridden response.

How the orchestra responds to such a style is another matter. It is a musical approach that presupposes absolute orchestral discipline along with a willingness to take emotional chances. And orchestras are generally comfortable with one or the other of those approaches, but the Leningrad players seem unusual by excelling in both at the same time.

The 51-year-old conductor from the Caucasus region has been music director of the Leningrad Philharmonic, the Soviet Union’s most celebrated orchestra, for only two years. And the conductor, claimed that it was in shoddy condition when he took it over. He said that the legendary Yevgeny Mravinsky, who headed the orchestra for half a century, until his death in 1988, had, in his last years, become too old to sustain discipline yet too authoritarian to share any of his control.

Temirkanov recounted that his first task was to rebuild the ensemble, which meant replacing a number of players. And that has meant that Temirkanov has had to fight to improve living conditions for musicians, since his orchestra, like all Soviet orchestras, must contend with the continuous drain of its best players to the West.

But then, Temirkanov, the bad boy of Russian conductors whose irrepressible outspokenness often got him in trouble during more repressive times in the Soviet Union, has never accepted conditions he didn’t think proper. He said that he is now free to conduct whatever he wants. “The old system has collapsed. There is no new system and there is complete freedom.” But the old system never stopped him anyway.

“I am proud to say that I never obeyed when something that I wanted to do was forbidden,” he said. “It was a risk for my career, but I always conducted what I wanted to.

“For example, once I wanted to conduct Shostakovich’s ‘Jewish’ cycle, and the performance was to be on the ninth of May, which is the day we celebrate victory over Germany in the Second World War. I was advised not to do it, and particularly not on that day. But I still did it and got away with it.”

Now, however, Temirkanov’s challenge is more for continuing tradition than breaking with it. He has sought to maintain the famous Leningrad sound, Leningrad being long noted for the string players its conservatory produced, with their full, rich tone. The conductor complained that international uniformity is creeping into the Russian musical soil just as it is everywhere else.

Yet, Temirkanov also said that it doesn’t matter nearly as much where the players come from as what the conductor requires of them. Although the Leningrad Philharmonic may well be one of the last great orchestras that plays with real national personality, Temirkanov claimed that his performances with it differ from those with Western orchestras he regularly guest-conducts only in that he and the players have come to know each other so well.

That may be, but Los Angeles audiences will have a rare opportunity to judge for themselves. Not only is Temirkanov dividing four Leningrad Philharmonic programs, all devoted to Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev, with the orchestra’s associate conductor, Mariss Jansons, but he is scheduled to return to the Music Center next month for two programs with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.