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Teodor Currentzis: Music is tragedy and it must make a “split“

 

The concert in his Athens. The double program that he is about to bring to Salzburg. Then two dates in Italy in November. All with the new Utopia Orchestra. “La Lettura” meets the Greek conductor: “The sense of drama matters, it’s the secret, nature, life.”

He’s like the Meltemi, the north wind that blows over the Aegean Sea. Elusive and tireless. Greek conductor Teodor Currentzis (1972) has finished his long and highly acclaimed European tour with the new Utopia Orchestra in his hometown, beloved Athens. Sold out months before. Five thousand tickets disappeared for the performance of Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, an (open-air) theater on the southern slope of the Acropolis. An enchanted place, built between 161 and 174 AD, with steps arranged in 32 rows, which on the night of the concert appeared suspended under a threatening stormy sky.

The meeting with the maestro is scheduled for the next day at the hotel. It’s raining, Currentzis arrives with his assistant and Ilya Shakhov, CEO and General Manager of the Utopia Orchestra. Black and white shoes, rebellious tuft of hair, dark tight-fitting shirt and pants, the Greek conductor appears serene and, as he sits down, he sinks back into the large cushions of a couch. His voice is deep, firm. It has a hypnotic rhythm.

Maestro, we are in your city and you conducted in a magical place…

“When I was 4 years old, my mother took me to the Herodes Atticus for the first concert of my life. Since then, I have always dreamed of conducting here, one day. It happened (raises both arms, editor’s note), and I imagined it just as it was: a homecoming, with a sky slightly rainy and partly sunny, friends, family, music, the podium, my mother sitting in the front row…”

How did you feel walking through the orchestra to then ascend to the podium?

“It was the last concert of the tour, after Berlin, Vienna… I told myself, ‘Come on, you conduct at home, it will be relaxing.'”

And instead?

“And instead, I felt tense, full of responsibility. I wanted to shower the world with love… It was as if I said to the child inside me: ‘Your moment has come, now it’s your turn.’ It may seem surreal, but it’s as if the true Teodor Currentzis was among the audience watching the young Teodor Currentzis conducting.”

The choice of Mahler’s “Third” Symphony?

“In the 1980s, it was the symphony I loved the most, the one that seduced my soul. I wanted to become a composer, and Mahler was my hero. As a young boy, I listened to his music with my first love; she and I always listened to the Third Symphony.”

Let’s talk about the new orchestra, Utopia, which made its debut in October 2022.

“In every orchestra, you can find people lacking enthusiasm, but also special individuals, full of eagerness to do things, and those are the ones who make a difference. With Utopia, I wanted to create an orchestra with a special energy, formed only by people of that kind, who come from the best orchestras in the world and bring their enthusiasm with them.”

There are many different nationalities…

“One of the purposes is also to bring together different cultures. Just in the viola section, for example, we have 14 nationalities. In total, the musicians, who are about 160, come from 31 countries. Let me add, and it’s crucial, that these musicians, besides being highly prepared like those in many other orchestras, also have spiritual motivations. Within the ranks of Utopia, there is an incredible atmosphere of a youth orchestra: they love and respect each other. It is a new vision of democracy in an orchestra.”

What is the most beautiful sensation you feel when conducting them?

“The sensation of being able to reach truly far, farther than what the crescendos and diminuendos suggest… I’m talking about things that go beyond skill and technical preparation. Here, there is also love, which represents 50% of the whole matter. I want to understand who the musicians really are, their identity, why they are doing this, what their deepest motivations are. And how willing they are to set aside their ego to connect with others.”

When you started studying Mahler, in addition to the aforementioned “Third,” which other symphonies attracted you?

“Also the Second, which I conducted only once. Then the Fifth, the Sixth, but less so the First and the Fourth. My dream is the Eighth, which I have never done yet.”

Speaking of conductors and performances, which were your reference recordings?

“For each symphony, I have a preferred conductor. For the Third, the best recording for me was by Jascha Horenstein (1898-1973), a kind of Celibidache, but before Sergiu Celibidache.”

And for the other symphonies?

“The First conducted by Bruno Walter, the Second by Otto Klemperer live in 1951 with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam and the voices of Kathleen Ferrier (her Urlicht gives you chills) and Jo Vincent. The Fourth conducted by George Szell, the Fifth by John Barbirolli with the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Sixth with Dimitris Mitropoulos and the New York Philharmonic. But now I prefer my own recording of the Sixth.”

You haven’t mentioned Leonard Bernstein, who is also considered a reference for Mahler in the eyes of the next generation.

“Bernstein was a conductor capable of conveying an ecstatic and powerful musical message, but live. Not on record. He had such energy on the podium that after the concert, you didn’t remember anything: whether he did it slow, fast… You would leave the concert dazed and overwhelmed by the beauty of the performance. His recordings are just a shadow of what he was live. To talk about the next generation, I’d mention Claudio Abbado’s Mahler, but the latest one, the one with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra is better for me than the one with the Berlin Philharmonic.”

Live and on record: an example to the contrary, compared to Bernstein, instead?

“Pierre Boulez. He didn’t have much energy on the podium, but if you listen to his recordings…”

How do you work in rehearsals?

“I am absolutely free. I talk a lot, explain, do individual passages, until the musicians reach my idea. But it’s not so important to have an idea, it’s more important to share it with the orchestra. I never say, ‘You must do it this way.’ And I always respond to questions with another question. So that they can turn the questions back to themselves. If you give answers, the energy diminishes. Socrates answered with questions to give value to his truth. Of course, if I say, ‘Do it this way,’ they would do it correctly, but that wouldn’t be music as I understand it.”

How do you understand it?

“What I do is the search for the purpose, the motivation of the music. I have to reach its core. Inside there is all my devotion. My utopia…”

And what meaning do you give to the word utopia?

“Let’s take Carmen (referring to Georges Bizet’s opera, editor’s note) when she tells Don José, ‘You demand the impossible!’ I like the idea of going in the direction where you see there are no exits.”

What is the function of music?

“Music is what connects people. We musicians are like Doctors Without Borders. Music can offer love, compassion, energy, humanity at any moment, it can heal. We don’t ask the people who come to our concerts about their nationality, beliefs, or thoughts. The same goes for a doctor when they encounter someone in the operating theater whom they need to treat. Our mission is to bring people together, make them meet, even if they have different opinions. We must also love people who have different opinions from ours. This is the message we convey through music. Not only in the current period, but always. Music is something sacred, and inside the temple of music, we are all equal, no matter what happens.”

When you choose compositions to perform, you certainly do it because you like them, but there must be something else. Something that unites, a unifying thread that traverses centuries and vastly different styles, such as the 20th century of Luciano Berio’s “Coro” and the 17th-century works of Henry Purcell. What is the spark for you?

“All the music I choose gives me a little ‘split,’ a small break in the crystal of the spirit, tied to something tragic. We are in Greece, and I am Greek. For us, the sense of tragedy has always mattered. Tragedy not as a situation in life, but in a philosophical sense. The tragic is the secret, the nature of life, but it is not something negative.”

Did you perceive the same “split” when meeting people with whom you have created beautiful performances, such as directors Peter Sellars or Romeo Castellucci?

“All the people I work with have it. The ‘split’ is also beauty.”

Give us an example.

“You can’t talk about beauty from a safe position. You can’t predict beauty, perceive it from a distance. You only realize it when you’re inside it. And it’s always your risk to go and seek it.”

You are an avid reader. What are you currently focused on?

“I am focused on the hymns of John of Damascus (around 670–749), an ascetic and one of the fathers of the Church.”

And contemporary authors?

“I read a lot of Nikos Panayotopoulos (1945), for me the best poet of our time, the Greek Ezra Pound. His Sissimon (not translated) is marvelous. With him and other friends, we go to the same church in Athens, the Church of the Virgin Mary Chrysokastriotissa in Plaka. There is a priest who performs a beautiful mass.”

You have a great passion for sacred music. Let me ask you about Arvo Pärt.

“I really like him. He has found an angelic language through simple forms. Many try to reach the essence and secret of things through complexity. Not him. And doing it in a simple way is naturally more difficult. We are the generation that considers him a hero. In the 1980s, all the alternative, gothic music-loving youth listened to him. The ECM label has done great work with his music.”

What is your favorite composition of his?

“Arbos”.

And what do you think of his contemporary, the Georgian composer Giya Kancheli, who unfortunately passed away?

“We were friends. I have performed his pieces several times with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. I like people like him and Pärt. On their own, they are in a separate category, following only what they have inside, without imitating anyone. This should be an example for all composers. Every new piece by Pärt and Kancheli feels like the ideal continuation of the previous one, even if the music is completely different. There is an eternal return. Their deep coherence and sincerity with themselves is what matters.”

What about American composers?

“Morton Feldman, a great composer.”

And Greek music?

“I’m interested in the work on electronic music by Lena Platonos (1951).”

Now let’s talk about Italy.

“There is a talented young composer, Francesco Filidei (1973). Then, of course, we have to mention Salvatore Sciarrino, and recently I have conducted music by Giacinto Scelsi. He is unique and extraordinary as well.”

There are even those who don’t want to consider Scelsi a composer…

“Even better! Let’s destroy the icons of composers,” he laughs.

Did these composers also have and still have the “split” you’ve talked about earlier?

“Do we want to talk about Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-1736), the genius who died at the age of 26 and composed a masterpiece like the Stabat Mater, which even Mozart drew inspiration from?”

You often come back to sacred music. But what does the church mean to you?

“It’s the feeling of transcendence you have inside. The idea of the church has always evoked a sensation in me that is halfway between reality and dream, perhaps because when we went there as children early in the morning, we were always tired from having slept too little. Even today, it’s a bit like that. You can move from dream to reality without being 100% inside either one. It’s a beautiful feeling.”

Speaking of dreams. Do you dream a lot?

“It’s my job. I’m a dreamer of dreams.”

Do you ever dream of music?

“Yes. Recently, I dreamed of an existing pop song that I liked very much, but only in my sleep. In a dream, you can fall in love with someone who might not interest you in real life. It happened to me many years ago.”

And what did you do?

“I woke up, called the girl in question, and invited her to dinner.”

And then?

“And then we became friends.”

You are a regular guest at the Salzburg Festival. What will you bring for the upcoming concerts between July 31st and August 8th?

“I will be performing two of my favorite pieces, The Indian Queen, the last composition by Henry Purcell, and the Mass in C minor K 427 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. I will be conducting the Mass in the same place where its first performance was held on August 25, 1783, in the Stiftskirche Sankt Peter in Salzburg.”

How important are the concert venues for you?

“More than one might think, especially when it comes to sacred music. Performing it in a concert hall makes it lose much of its sacredness, it becomes more operatic music.”

Where would you like to conduct?

“One of my dreams is to hold a concert here in Greece at the ancient Theater of Epidaurus and then at the Theater of Dionysus. My grandmother had a house in front of that theater (we are on the Acropolis, editor’s note), and there were no barriers, everything was open. We children used to play acting, and one day I imagined Isadora Duncan dancing on the Acropolis in the 1920s.”

Are you proud to be Greek?

“No, you can’t be proud if you don’t do anything to be proud of. The ancient Greeks did things for Greece, but what have we done?”

What does it mean to be Greek?

“Greekness is an identity that you can find anywhere, even among non-Greeks, always among people who have moral values, philosophy, beauty within them… Greece is not just a country, it’s a way of seeing things, the world: as Odysseas Elytis said. I always try to do something beautiful and right to belong to that way of thinking.”

Is there anything you are afraid of?

“Yes, and I try to exorcise this fear every day. It’s ugliness, not physical ugliness, but the ugliness of situations and human relationships. But sometimes I tell myself: this is your purpose, you have to make music to fight ugliness. It’s like a homeopathic treatment. If you put me in the dark, I will delve deeper until I find the light. Music and art, without a motivation towards beauty, have no meaning. Charles Baudelaire said something like: if you suffer, I suffer with you. That’s how ugliness transforms into beauty.”

In November, you will return to Italy for concerts in Brescia on the 20th and at the Parco della Musica in Rome on the 22nd.

“Speaking of beauty… I love Italy. You are similar to us. We have more or less the same problems, except that in your history, there has never been a period where music, art, theater, or literature did not shine. You have always been full of beauty.

The first time on the podium in Rome?

“Yes, and it’s one of my favorite cities, by the way. I will debut there with the same program as in Brescia, Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony and Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D major. And then my dream is to conduct in Naples, I adore it. My father lived there and in Venice when he was studying engineering. I traveled often to Italy with my mother when I was a child.”

Returning to composers for a moment, we must say that you also write music. There are two pieces of yours based on poems by Paul Celan, “So schlafe” and “Blume.”

“I also write poetry, but for these compositions, I used the poems of Paul Celan (1920-1970), for me, the greatest poet of the 20th century. He opens up a hermetic world with a thousand meanings, he works on the potential of words. Each word possesses its own secret splendor.”

You use common words with new strength.

“Those same words, when they move from everyday language to poetry, take on a different meaning. This is the magic that happens before your eyes when you read it. Poetry doesn’t discover new words, it breaks them and connects them to other worlds. The same thing happens with music: in the midst of city traffic, you can hear all the sounds of a symphony, but it’s not music, it’s noise. Why is that sound noise when heard on the street and becomes music when combined in a certain way in a concert hall? The same can be said for words.”

It seems that for you, music and poetry are one organism.

“For me, finding poetry in music is the same as finding music in poetry. If I had to advise something to young musicians, I would tell them to read poetry, to discover its meaning and its magical attitude. If you discover it and are able to understand and use it, then you can do the same with music.”

—

The conductor

Teodor Currentzis (Athens, February 24, 1972; pictured during rehearsals with the Utopia Orchestra, photo by Alfonso Salgueiro; in the photo on the other page by Michalis Kloukinas, in Athens where he was a guest at the Athens Epidaurus Festival) began his musical studies at a very young age and in 1994 went to further his studies at the St. Petersburg Conservatory with Ilya Musin. From 2004 to 2011, he was the director of the Opera in Novosibirsk, Siberia, where he founded the musicAeterna Orchestra and Choir, and from 2011 to 2019, he served as the Artistic Director of the Perm Opera, also in Russia. In 2018, he was appointed Principal Conductor of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra in Germany. His name has gained prominence in the music scene since 2016. In the same year, the magazine “Opernwelt” named him “best conductor.” He has performed on the podium at prestigious festivals and theaters, collaborating with directors such as Robert Wilson, Peter Sellars, Theodoros Terzopoulos, Romeo Castellucci, and Dmitri Tcherniakov. Currentzis records for the Sony Classical record label (teodor-currentzis.com).

The new orchestra

Utopia was formed in October 2022 and consists of approximately 160 musicians from 31 countries. The project is managed by a non-profit organization based in Berlin.

The tour

Currentzis will be leading Utopia on tour in Salzburg (July 31, August 2, 7, and 8), Berlin (November 14), Antwerp, Belgium (November 18), Brescia (November 20), and Rome (November 22).

 

LA LETTURA | CORRIERE DELLA SERA

July 16, 2023

by Helmut Failoni