Like clockwork once a year, an observer or musician chimes in with the observation that orchestras don’t really need conductors — that good counting and concentration are sufficient to bring music to life. Then along comes someone like young Latvian conductor Ainars Rubikis to prove how and why this is not the best way to make music.
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Rubikis is the latest in a string of excellent classical musicians to come from Latvia, a Prince Edward Island-sized country across the Baltic sea from Sweden. And he has chosen the Toronto Symphony Orchestra as collaborators in his North American début this week.
They present an all-Tchaikovsky programme Wednesday and Thursday nights at Roy Thomson Hall: Symphony No. 1, subtitled Winter Dreams, a substantial, evocative piece that hasn’t been heard here in seven or eight seasons; the Piano Concerto No. 2 with soloist Alon Goldstein; and, as a smile-inducing treat, three movements from the score of Swan Lake with musicians of both the Toronto Symphony and Toronto Symphony Youth Orchestra on stage.
A 25-year-old Tchaikovsky is said to have agonized mightily over his first symphony. But whatever nervous agonies the 34-year-old Latvian conductor might have experienced before stepping onto the podium for the first Toronto Symphony rehearsal on Monday morning disappeared the moment he steadied his baton for the first upbeat. He started with the fourth movement, which contains some complex contrapuntal writing.
The orchestra played through it nicely, earning several on-the-fly thumbs-up from the conductor along the way. “That was very nice playing,” he beamed at the conclusion. “Now let’s go back to the beginning…”
And so started the painstaking work, to be spread over three days, of turning something nice into more highly coloured, exciting playing that will hopefully keep the week’s audiences on the edge of their nicely padded seats.
At one point, the violins play a melodic figure with a bit of dramatic emphasis on one of the notes. Rubikis stops the music and requests that each note be played exactly the same.
“The genius of Tchaikovsky is in the simplicity,” he explains.”If you try to make something complicated out of it, it doesn’t work anymore. Play it like simple singing — you give the expression not with the bow, but with vibrato.”
Rubikis sings the melody for the violins — his clear, lyric baritone voice echoing in the empty hall for the first of many times during the 2-hour morning rehearsal.
Unlike the vast majority of conductors, Rubikis began his musical life as a singer — a foundation that appears to be serving him well.
Singing is in the bones of this former choirboy from Riga’s medieval Dom Cathedral choir school. Among his many formative experiences was working as the associate conductor of the Latvian Radio Choir, which was in Toronto earlier this fall to show why it is one of the world’s finest professional vocal ensembles.
Since January 1, Rubikis has been toiling away as the music director of the opera and ballet house in Novosibirsk. The neoclassical, Stalin-era domed structure is (physically) the largest opera house in Russia, a beacon of high culture in Siberia not too far from the desolate point where the borders of Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia and Russian meet.
At one point during the Toronto rehearsal, Rubikis points out how Tchaikovsky’s music needs to stop, coldbitten and snowblinded in the way of a person emerging from warm indoors into a clear minus-30 January landscape. We all know of what he speaks.
Rubikis is making his début in Toronto — as well as with a number of significant orchestras in Europe and Australia — thanks to winning a major conducting award in Salzburg in 2011. This came on the heels of a significant conducting competition win in Bamberg, Germany the previous year.
Prior to this, Rubikis was unknown outside Latvia, population 2 million yet birthplace of great conductors Mariss Jansons, Andris Nelsons and opera star Elina Garanca. Latvian musicians can be found in many of Europe’s best orchestras.
“Sometimes we think Latvia has been chosen by God,” smiles Rubikis after Monday’s rehearsal. “Unfortunately, we have to become successful outside Latvia before we are really recognized at home.”
I point out to him that it’s the same story in Canada.
“It’s not this country or that one; it’s like that everywhere, it’s human nature,” the conductor corrects. “Simon Rattle, an Englishman, heads the Berlin Philharmonic. English orchestras have a lot of Russian conductors …” he elaborates.
Although Rubikis has known since teenagehood that he wanted to be a conductor, the path has been anything but predetermined.
The job in Novosibirsk is a case in point.
“When I was young, I hated opera,” he laughs. Now he’s the music director of an opera house — one with a gruelling repertory schedule: Next Tuesday, he conducts Carmen, Wednesday it’s La Traviata, Friday, it’s Eugene Onegin. On Dec. 21, he leads three performances of Siberia’s first live contact with Leonard Benstein’s Mass, fully staged.
“When I was young, I said I would never teach,” he laughs again. But he then discovered how much he could learn by having to explain how he does what he does to conducting students.
Rubikis says his most useful experience came at the Lyric Theatre in Riga, where he coached actors in song.
“It’s incredible how you can have these incredible actors who have incredible dramatic presence, but when they have to sing –” he freezes with a terror-struck face. “So I spent a lot of time discovering how to open them up so they could express drama while singing. This helped me develop dramatic language for the symphony.”
He says the elements of what we perceive as drama are common to any sort of music. And one of the keys to making it work is to not focus on moments, but on the larger narrative arc. For a symphony concert, this means having a cohesive programme presented like an evening of theatre.
“Listeners should leave the concert hall knowing why they were there for the whole concert, not just for one symphony or concerto.”
And while Rubikis believes in bringing opera and musical theatre insights to the symphony, he has also been doing the opposite in Novosibirsk, pulling the orchestra out of the pit and onto the stage for concerts. His employers asked him to do four such concerts a year, but, in the first six months of 2012, he had already presented nine.
“The new repertoire is like a blood transfusion,” he says of the change of energy among the musicians.
The general director of the opera house in Novosibirsk offered Rubikis the job sight unseen last year following his Salzburg prize win. The young conductor balked, saying he really should see the city, the house and work with the musicians before signing a three-year contract.
“I needed to touch the orchestra,” he says. “Working with an orchestra is something you can feel, and shape. There is an exchange of energy.”
It’s a dynamic that was clearly palpable in Toronto on Monday morning.
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For details of Wendesday and Thursday’s Toronto Symphony concerts, click here.
And here are two very different clips: A 10-minute clip from Der Taktstock, a documentary about the Bamberg Symphony’s International Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition, followed by Rubikis singing a cappella with a Latvian sextet at a song festival in 2008 (note how, although they are conductorless, Rubikis, second from left, appears to be itching to lead):
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
