A CONVERSATION WITH: TORONTO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA DIRECTOR PETER OUNDJIAN
By PlaybillArts Staff
PlaybillArts
Sept 4 2008
NY
As Peter Oundjian prepares to open his fifth season as music director
of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra on Sept. 16, ticket sales are at
an all-time high, with record numbers below the age of 30. The TSO
will play Carnegie Hall Oct. 4 for the first time in a decade.
While this upcoming New York concert marks Oundjian’s conducting
debut at the storied venue, he is no stranger to the Hall, having
performed there many times over the years as a solo violinist and a
member of the Tokyo String Quartet.
Peter Oundjian has become a frequent guest conductor with many of
America’s great orchestras, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra,
the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the
San Francisco Symphony, among others. In Europe, Oundjian has ongoing
relationships with the Tonhalle-Orchester Zurich and L’Orchestre
Philharmonique de Radio France. He is currently Music Director of
the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Principal Conductor of the Detroit
Symphony Orchestra, and Visiting Professor at Yale University.
With attendance and contributions going strong, the maestro took
a moment to talk about the reasons for and the forces behind the
Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s phenomenal recent success, and his plans
for the orchestra’s future.
Question: You just finished an incredibly successful season with
the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Revenues are up, audiences are
enthusiastic, and you’re about to begin the second four-year contract
with the organization. Given that the orchestra was facing some very
dire circumstances when you first joined it, your successes in Toronto
must be extremely gratifying.
Peter Oundjian: Everything has changed so much. When I first arrived,
we had the production company Rhombus waiting to make a film, which
became the enormously successful Five Days in September, but we didn’t
have any money. The orchestra’s finances were a mess then, but we’ve
just now received a 3.5 million dollar gift for a concertmaster chair,
our third multi-million-dollar gift in two years. We now have the
resources for the coming season to do massive pieces like Mahler’s
Third Symphony and a weeklong residency with Lang Lang. We’re bringing
a big piece, Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony, to Carnegie Hall in
October. And all of this is happening within the first three weeks of
the season. So yes, I’m feeling very happy about what we’ve achieved.
Q: What have been the principal drivers of this success?
PO: Somehow, we’ve woken up a sleeping giant. Toronto is a giant
city, and that city’s orchestra is developing a real confidence
now. Our Tsoundcheck program reaches 37,000 young listeners; it’s
internet-based, and – like Obama’s campaign – it brings a new and
much younger audience to the hall. And our New Creations Festival,
which focuses on contemporary music, has gone from being a tough sell
to being one of the hardest tickets to get. During the bad years of
the TSO, the Toronto Opera was highly successful. They raised money
for a new building and heightened their international stature. In the
late 1980s the TSO was a major orchestra with a 50-week season. During
the ’90s things changed and declined rapidly. The orchestra had seven
different CEOs during this time. But that’s all different today and
the city is now getting the orchestra that it really deserves.
Q: The success of the orchestra seems to have really galvanized
the community.
PO: Well, momentum is very important in an organization. It reminds
me of that Woody Allen line about relationships: they’re like sharks,
and they have to keep moving forward or they die. For us that means
going to Carnegie Hall, introducing new programs, finding new ways
to raise money. And these have an impact on the city and make the
organization relevant. You can’t just be all about history: reinvention
is critical. When you have a group of musicians actually interested
in this forward momentum, many great things are possible. Having
come from a difficult situation, the musicians of the TSO fully
realize that we have to be on board with new ideas. In my experience,
musicians have a healthy attitude towards new ideas, but the Toronto
players have shown an exceptional openness.
Q: And it seems like the audience has come right along with you and
the musicians?
PO: A key to that has been removing some of the imaginary boundaries
between the orchestra and the audience. I think our new listeners
are less intimidated. I speak with the audience frequently during
our concerts because I want to set things up a bit for the new
listeners. But the "old" – or perhaps I should say "more experienced"
– listeners don’t mind. Audiences want to be taken on a journey and
sharing with them the context of a work can create an atmosphere in
the hall that greatly enhances the experience.
Q: Besides showing their approval for what you’re doing by buying
tickets, in what ways do you find audiences communicating their
experiences with you?
PO: We have a strong line of communication between our organization
and our listeners. We get lots of feedback through surveys and
the internet. That’s how we learnt that our afternoon concerts –
our matinees – should have no intermissions. People don’t want
to sit in traffic after a full-length afternoon concert. The
baby boom generation wants to leave the office early and hear a
compact pre-dinner concert. Our rush-hour programs are based on this
feedback. Overall, we’re trying to understand what each constituency
might need and to provide enough products (if you don’t mind using
a crass sales and marketing term!) for those various segments. We
can’t always offer the same product; we have to be very eclectic and
attract many new constituents. For all of this, feedback is very
important. As a result, we’re getting out into the community in a
big way. Every year, 110,000 schoolchildren hear the orchestra!
Q: Let’s talk a bit about your Carnegie Hall concert in October. This
will be the first time the orchestra has played there in a decade! Did
you do a lot of agonizing about what you should program?
PO: This is a hugely important concert for the orchestra and for me,
and everyone has been extremely thoughtful about the program. Ute
Lemper will join us for Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins, and our
big orchestral piece will be a Shostakovich symphony. There was some
interest in doing his Tenth, but we opted to perform his Eleventh
instead and I’m very excited about this decision. It’s a very powerful
work that has a huge impact on the audience.
Q: Tell us a bit about this piece, which has a reputation for being
a harrowing emotional ride…
PO: Shostakovich wrote his Eleventh Symphony after the Hungarian
uprising and massacre in 1956, and clearly that event was on his
mind. The works bears the subtitle "The Year 1905", which is the
year that the Russian Tsar’s troops shot at a large gathering
of unarmed peasants who were appealing to him for help. It’s a
phenomenal depiction of much more than just the event that inspired
it. Shostakovich captures the human action, the anger, the tragedy,
and above all, the defiance. I feel that this piece reflects human
strength in the face of adversity.
Q: Is there a special connection between the Toronto Symphony and
the works of Shostakovich?
Peter Oundjian
photo by Cylla von Tiedemann PO: Actually, there is a large Russian
population in Toronto and there are a lot of Russian musicians in the
orchestra. Shostakovich has been an important voice in the orchestra
for decades. For me personally, the whole history between Armenia and
Russia comes to play. I’m from an Armenian background, and our country
was part of the Soviet system and exposed to the similarly dark forces
that Shostakovich himself experienced. A lot of his music finds its
power in its depiction of human suffering. Just think of the Seventh
Symphony, and its description of the siege of Leningrad. Beyond that,
I played Shostakovich quartets when I was a member of the Tokyo String
Quartet. His, along with Bartók’s, are the greatest quartet sets
of the 20th century. We didn’t play all the Shostakovich quartets,
but enough for me to be deeply drawn in to its very powerful language.
Q: How would you describe that language?
PO: It’s extremely intense, but it’s also very accessible and very
direct. In 1994 we played a Beethoven cycle in Vienna while the
Borodin Quartet played a Shostakovich cycle. Hearing his music
alongside Beethoven’s left a very powerful impression on me.
Q: Are there plans for you to record any Shostakovich works with
the TSO?
PO: We’ve made a recording of Shostakovich’s Seventh for TSO-Live,
the label we launched just four months ago, and we will record his
Eleventh Symphony in the week leading up to our October 4 concert at
Carnegie Hall.
Q: You’ve already released Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony with the TSO and
a Mussorgsky/Elgar disc. What do you have planned for future releases?
PO: We can make up to five CDs a year from live concerts. This
is a very invigorating experience for the orchestra as it enables
them to have their voice heard outside Toronto. It’s challenging
too. Knowing that a recording is being made can change the atmosphere
for the musicians. (The way we do it, though, they often don’t even
know when the microphones are on.) It’s brought a new energy to the
orchestra. We’re focusing on big works. We’re going to do Mahler’s
Third and Bruckner’s Eighth, Shostakovich’s Seventh and Eleventh
Symphonies, and The Planets and Rite of Spring.
Q: You’re a busy guest conductor. Tell us a bit about what you’ll be
doing with other orchestras in the upcoming season.
PO: One thing I’m particularly excited about is to be working with
young musicians. I’m thrilled to be conducting the Curtis Orchestra
in Verizon Hall (Philadelphia), the Yale Philharmonia, the New World
Symphony, and also the Conservatory Orchestra in Toronto. That’s four
weeks of time – more of a commitment than I’ve done in the past. But
as Leonard Bernstein taught us all so well, working with young people
provides a great deal of stimulation, so I’m happy to be spending more
time doing this. I’m going to the San Francisco Symphony for the fourth
time. This will be my last year opening the Detroit Symphony season
(Leonard Slatkin will be taking over the orchestra in mid-season); my
title as artistic advisor will end, but I’ll maintain principal guest
and director of the 8 Days in June Festival. It’s a very cutting-edge
festival. Every season has a theme such as "Conflict and Creativity"
or "Power of Change." I’m also going back to the Baltimore Symphony,
which is a very fine orchestra; the Houston Symphony, with whom I’ve
had a long and treasured relationship; and back to Paris.
Q: Earlier in this conversation you mentioned the importance of making
the orchestra – and I assume, by extension, classical music itself –
relevant to the community. Is it accurate to say that this is one of
the primary inspirations for your approach to making music?
PO: I want to embrace as many people as I can and ignite their passion
for discovering music. We value health and happiness in our society. We
focus on making a good living – material security – and I don’t blame
people for wanting these things. But amidst this quest for security
we lose sight of and don’t really understand what nourishes the human
psyche. I’m amazed by how emotionally involved people get about sports
teams. With the iPod bringing music more into people’s lives, I think
it’s an exciting time to make music more relevant to a broader spectrum
of the community. Making good music more affordable is an important
part of the equation, which is why this issue is so important to our
strategic plan in Toronto. We want the concert experience to better
suit how people live today.
Q: Your confidence in the power of music to transform lives and enrich
a community is very inspiring.
PO: That’s exactly why all of the arts are so important. I recently
saw Ralph Fiennes and Liam Neeson doing two Beckett plays at Lincoln
Center. It was a hugely "tuned-in" New York audience, but there
were just mildly curious people there too. It was such a powerful
experience just to be there in that audience, in that atmosphere of
people discovering something, where their minds are being forced to
respond. The arts are so much more than a distraction, so much more
than entertainment. None of us should ever lose sight of that.
–Boundary_(ID_AgoFGBhHV8du9ih68374gg)–
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress