INTERVIEW | Paavo Järvi | "we get too carried away in comparing the things we know or taking certain things as truths"

In conversation with Paavo Järvi
Interview on 14 June 2024

Paavo Järvi, © Kaupo Kikkas

Magic may no longer be a valid currency in explaining the everyday, yet the quality of magic - that sensation of undeniable wonder that defies logic or words - is present in the very tapestry of life. For conductor Paavo Järvi, magic is essential to music-making and is what brings life to a performance. Especially key is the ability to let go, allowing the mysticism of intuition to take over the brain's inherent will to control, predict, and explain. 

These were some of the things discussed in a thought-provoking interview with the conductor. While the interview was initially aimed at discussing the music and reception of Anton Bruckner to commemorate the composer's anniversary year, the conversation soon expanded (for the better) into new territories. These included topics such as imperfections during live performances, following a composer's intentions, how to listen, and the nature of musical appreciation.

Below is a transcript of our conversation. Minor edits have been made for readability.

[Note. All interviews on the website are approved by the interviewee/manager prior to publication.]

I.

Young-Jin Hur (YH): Welcome to the interview. How are you today?

Paavo Järvi (PJ): I am very well. We've just finished recording Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade. 

YH: That's good to hear. I understand you are playing that piece in concerts these days. 

PJ: Yes, we always take the programme we plan to record, play three or four concerts, and then record it live. Plus we do a couple of patch sessions as well. 

YH: I see. It's exciting that you have the live concert element in your recordings. If you record a piece like this, do you feel that your recording reflects an accumulation of all your ideas and preparations?

PJ: Yes. I like to record music in concerts... but concerts always have some miscalculations and audience noise. So it's important to have the patch session as a form of backup. 

YH: Is there much pressure to try to minimise the miscalculations? 

PJ: Yes, sometimes. But it's difficult to marry the two sides: the perfection of planning and the feeling of a live concert. But I still prefer the feeling of live concerts. That's why we have the patch sessions - they are aimed at fixing little issues without changing the bigger picture of the performance. 

YH: That makes sense to me. Generally speaking, would you say you are a perfectionist?

PJ: Yes, in some ways. I don't want to be this way but I can't help it. I want things to be right. There are a lot of things that are not in our control. If you're in a live performance, there are a lot of people sitting there and everybody is breathing and making noise. And sometimes, in a very quiet section, you just hear too much audience noise. 

YH: I see. How bothered are you about these things you cannot control? 

PJ: In general, you prepare a piece in the way you want it to be heard. But a live performance never really goes according to the initial plan. In a way, that's the magic of live performances. You don't want it to be a perfect dress rehearsal. You want it to be live, spontaneous, and of that moment. And the more risk people take, the more there is the possibility of miscalculations. This is something I don't mind in live performances - but in recordings when you have something that is set in stone, of course, you want to fix some obvious mistakes. 

YH: Were there cases where the concert went, more or less, in the complete opposite direction of what you had in mind - and you ended up liking it?

PJ: It happens all the time. For example, in concertos, all musicians take initiative in their solos and timings, and no two solos are alike. All this makes live performances very exciting, and I prefer this. I don't want to have a blueprint in the back of my mind exactly how things should go but at the same time, there needs to be a general understanding between all musicians regarding which direction things are going. It's easy to make plans but very often things don't go the way you planned - in a way, that's kind of nice. 

YH: I see. Based on what you've said, live music-making is a collaborative effort. Does this mean your interpretations could drastically change depending on which orchestra you work with?

PJ: You always have to take into account the orchestra's personality, ability, reaction time, and general level of execution. This means that even two great orchestras can react differently to the same piece of music. So you have to take into consideration the humanity and the human aspect of the orchestra. Orchestral members are not soldiers and an orchestra is not artificial intelligence. Musicians are humans who need to react and feel according to what is happening in the music. Their reactions are based on some kind of feeling they are experiencing at that moment. And that experience can be very different from day to day. So I need to be flexible and not set things in stone. 

YH: That makes sense to me. Critics often talk about performing in the way a composer originally intended. But by the sounds of it, so much is beyond control and there are so many opportunities for variations and on-the-moment accidents. 

PJ: Whenever somebody says this or that is what a composer intended, they actually do not know what the composer truly intended. A performance is always an interpretation. Every text can be interpreted in a million different ways. If a composer writes an accent, the accent has to be interpreted within the context in which the accent is written. An accent in a scherzando is very different from an accent in an adagio. Everything is an interpretation and it's always a question of understanding the bigger picture. 

There is no absolute truth in music. For example, there is no such thing as an absolute forte or piano. Nobody can really tell what piano is unless you relate it to forte, mezzo forte, or mezzo piano - so you have a relative relationship between two dynamics. In this sense, there is no such thing as a piano. Are we currently speaking in piano or forte? We don't know. It depends very much on what is around us - if there was a fighter plane flying over our heads, our conversation would be pianissimo. Whenever someone says "That's what the composer intended", they should always put in parenthesis, "in my opinion."

YH: I agree with you. I never actually understood the phrase "this is the composer's intention", but I think what you've said clarifies a lot of things.  

II.

YH: This year is the 200th anniversary of the composer Anton Bruckner's birth. For many years, you've been championing the composer's works. Before we talk about your performances of Bruckner, I'd like to ask you a rather personal question: How did Bruckner come into your life?

PJ: As a young boy, I grew up listening to the Third Symphony of Bruckner, based on the George Szell recording. My father happened to have that recording - I loved it and I thought it was an amazing piece. At the same time, I grew up with prejudices that commonly existed against Bruckner. Depending on which country you live in, of course, there are various degrees of preconceived ideas about the composer. Some people think Bruckner's symphonies are long and boring while others think they are repetitive. Some people love his symphonies but some think the works are overrated. In the end, there are as many opinions as there are people. 

I decided to conduct my first Bruckner symphony when I was in Malmö, Sweden, as a principal conductor. This was a long time ago, and this was my first orchestra where I was a principal conductor. I played the Third Symphony and loved it. And from that point on, I've been conducting Bruckner every year and I've conducted all of the symphonies many, many, many times - Bruckner has become a kind of part of the core repertoire for me. 

Way before I conducted all the Tchaikovsky symphonies, I conducted all the Bruckner symphonies. The task of creating a giant architecture that can sometimes go on for 85 or 90 minutes, is something that always attracted me somehow. I always thought it was an interesting challenge to be able to create a long line with one climatic centre of the piece. 

There is really no place to hide in Bruckner's symphonies because his music is the most honest music... and it is the most sincere music almost to a fault. The sincerity is there to the point where all the whistles, bells, and extra stuff that other composers employ to make their music interesting don't exist in Bruckner's music. You are lucky if you get one cymbal crash and even then people might not be convinced that it is a good idea to add it. It's all about building long-term architecture and that's a very, very interesting process. I really enjoy it when I feel that a performance is reaching this organic development and climax. 

For me, Bruckner's music is an absolutely essential repertoire for a symphony orchestra. This is something that a lot of musicians and conductors don't think about these days anymore, but an orchestra that cannot play Bruckner with authority is not a good orchestra. They're missing something very fundamental. Any orchestra can play Tchaikovsky - of course, not everybody can play Tchaikovsky well; that's a different issue because there is nothing to take away from Tchaikovsky; he's a fantastic composer and also has his own particular traits that need to be observed and understood. But if an orchestra finds Bruckner somehow repetitive and uninteresting, this means that they don't have enough inner fantasy, inner life, and inner understanding of architecture. 

YH: You talked about architecture and long lines a number of times. What do you exactly mean by that? Do you mean, for example, that if there is an orchestral unison in the first five minutes of an 80-minute work, we want to make sure to control the intensity of this unison in order to create a more sustainable drama across 80 minutes?

PJ: Yes. This means that there is a four-movement piece where the symphony gradually builds to its peak. The structure should be built into a sort of one climatic long line. In a Mahler symphony, sometimes there is a most climatic moment in the 20th bar. Then he starts building down from there - looking, searching, and telling the story. It's a very different architecture.

I'm not taking away from any other composers. I'm just saying that since we are talking about Bruckner, the symphonies are built in a very traditional form - but since they are very long, there are a lot of sequences of harmonic changes, and because the building blocks are moving rather slowly, one needs to know how to organise the material. So you want to build a feeling that things are constantly intense and are not losing the sense of direction. The goal of Bruckner is to create this kind of totally logical and microcosmic universe that does not go from one sound effect to another.

III.

YH: Based on what you've said, it sounds like Bruckner is not about superficiality or effects, but something more deep and sincere. Do you think there is a certain type of listener or musician who gets attracted to Bruckner's music? 

PJ: I think people who are drawn to long, introspective kinds of musical experiences or similar experiences, find Bruckner's music attractive. People who are looking for a quick fix or quick excitement - which is also part of music sometimes in different genres and different types of music - where you find much more instant gratification, a lot of joy, and a variety of emotions, might not be as drawn to Bruckner's music. So, I think people who have this predisposition for meditation or who like to read long, difficult books are the people who are attracted to Bruckner's music.

(YH laughs)

YH: I immediately understood what you meant by long books. Indeed, listening to Bruckner is a bit like reading a long and difficult book. Would you consider yourself to be someone who reads big books?

PJ: Yes, I do - and I read all the time. But the thing is, it's not even about a book's length itself - it's about the process. It doesn't even have to be a very long book - but it needs to be something that's difficult to read, takes time to digest, and needs concentration. You don't do other things while you are listening to Bruckner because you absolutely need to zero in, concentrate, and listen. Of course, all great music benefits from listening seriously rather than playing in the background. But Bruckner in the background just doesn't work - it's not designed to be a background. 

YH: Talking of listening, do you have a recommended way for actively listening? For example, would reading the score while listening to music help to elevate a musical experience?

PJ: No, I would very much discourage anybody from reading the score while listening to music. That's for professionals. People who read the score while listening are not listening - they are comparing what's in the score to what's going on. Listening is when you listen, not when you are reading and then making mental notes like "Well, the crescendo started one bar earlier" or "This action wasn't big enough." That's not listening - that's a kind of analysis that professional people do. And if professional people want to do that, that's their privilege - they can do it. But that's not listening. 

You are really listening to what is actually going on when you are not listening in comparison to what you know. Of course, this is hard to do because if you know something, then you know it. And so when people make judgments about a certain performance, what they are doing is comparing the performance to a recording they grew up listening to. We all do that, and it's inevitable and there is nothing wrong with it per se. But active listening is being prejudice-free, being totally in the moment, and accepting a particular performance. 

Then later, you can, of course, say, "Okay, this wasn't so convincing", "This was even more convincing", or "I love this." What I am saying is that while knowing, comparing, and judging are unavoidable, they are not the ultimate forms of listening. When you listen to a piece of music that is newly written for a world premiere and hear it for the first time, that's real listening. You encounter a piece of music on a blank page and then you form your impression of it. 

Sometimes we get too carried away in comparing the things we know or taking certain things as truths. I hear people talking about how Furtwängler performed a certain piece in a certain way. It means absolutely nothing. Furtwängler didn't write the Bruckner symphonies and neither did Karajan nor Harnoncourt - we should all be approaching the music with a blank page. 

I'm not denying that I'm talking about an ideal world. This form of pure listening is difficult to achieve because you always have your favourite performances and you always have a kind of preference. The minute you start comparing performances, saying things like "This performance wasn't as good as this other performance", "This performance was faster"... " or even more absurdly, "This performance was three minutes faster... 40 seconds slower", that's a joke. The person was not listening - the person was comparing. 

YH: As you say, these pure musical experiences are so hard to achieve, and knowledge can be an enemy. But you also talked about preferences. Do you think preference purely comes from past experiences, such as the recording you've grown up with, or do you think there are natural preferences that one is born with?

PJ: I don't think anybody is born with any preferences. In music, I think preferences come from listening and knowing the repertoire from different angles or sometimes knowing it from only one angle. Sometimes, preferences can be derived from a single recording. My father often tells me, "I saved up and bought my first Mahler's Fourth Symphony, and I listened to it a million times and I loved it." And I asked, "Which recording?" He said, "Oh, an old Czech Supraphon recording. I bought whatever was available." That's the whole point. Whatever you have becomes "the performance" and will forever be the representative version of the piece. There's nothing wrong with that per se. But it's not going to make you more open to various views of the same piece. 

YH: I see. So the process of appreciating seems much to do with memory than the perception of a stimulus in front of you.

PJ: Don't get me wrong. Memories are very powerful. Certain music can evoke memories of having both parents at home or having a family holiday. But all this is extra-musical, which has nothing to do with the particular piece - it's the surrounding circumstances you are appreciating. So, yes, it's all good - there's also nothing wrong with that. I'm just saying that ideal listening, or the kind of listening where one is able to duplicate a listening experience detached from memory, would give that particular performance a chance. 

YH: Since you mentioned your childhood admiration for Szell's recording of Bruckner's Third Symphony and the fact that the first Bruckner symphony you performed was the Third Symphony, I wonder whether you made a conscious effort to perform the Third Symphony differently from Szell's performance.

PJ: No, I didn't make an effort. I wanted to perform exactly the same way that Szell performed the symphony because I thought Szell's recording was so wonderful. Later on, when I started performing Bruckner symphonies more and more, and with different versions from what Szell used, I slowly left Szell's influence and found my own way. But in the beginning, Szell's influence was so strong that I thought there was only one way to perform Bruckner. But this is normal. In the beginning, you emulate your favourite performances and later, you find your own. 

YH: That makes sense. All artists start by emulating their heroes before they develop their own personal artistry. 

PJ: Absolutely - absolutely. That's how it works. That is a totally logical process. 

IV.

YH: As a performer, you have recently performed and recorded the last three symphonies of Bruckner with the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich. Considering that you had already recorded these works with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony before, what was your mindset going into the recording sessions? Did you want to do something different this time around?

PJ: It's not that I wanted to do something different. But I thought now was the right time to re-record this music because the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich is a very, very fine orchestra. And I have lived longer and gained more experience with Bruckner's music since I last recorded them. The last three symphonies by Bruckner are the height of Bruckner's creations. I thought that the right moment had arrived and that I could do it better and find a deeper view of these works. 

YH: Was it a plan or a coincidence that you are releasing these new recordings in the Bruckner anniversary year?

PJ: It was a coincidence. It was an artistic idea that I wanted to perform Bruckner and it so happened that the performances coincided with the Bruckner anniversary year. 

YH: How do record companies react when you say, "I want to record Bruckner?" Maybe it still is, but for a long time, Bruckner wasn't exactly a sell-out, income-generating composer. 

PJ: Well, I'm very very lucky because, with Alpha (the record company), we have an understanding and they are very supportive of my ideas. So we didn't have any real issues. If anything, I was very well-supported. 

YH: That's good to hear. Although we talked about the dangers of comparing music earlier, I would still love to hear how you see your new Bruckner recordings compared to the previous recordings of the same symphonies. I did notice, for example, some differences in the orchestral balance - the strings were thinner and more agile. 

PJ: Well, the acoustics are a little bit different - the general sound picture is different in every hall. My impression is that there is a warmth in the strings that we didn't have before, but it depends also on how you listen and what equipment you listen on. But I try not to compare my performance with anything. I try to just perform the way it happens in the moment. It's not that I wanted to compare things and see how differently we can perform this time. It doesn't really work like that. 
 
YH: Okay. What are your thoughts on non-musicians like me who come to you and ask you questions about your music-making? I'm just an enthusiast and, surely, some questions must sound a bit musically naive and they must frustrate you.

PJ: I think it's very nice. It's good to have enthusiasts and it's important to ask these questions because a lot of people want to know what happens behind music-making. It's just that with music-making, it's sometimes very hard to really explain things in words. Ultimately, it's very important to talk about music and how it is made. At the same time, words are really some sort of an approximation at best - very often, even musicians don't know how music is made. 

The real magic happens in performances when intuition takes over. In rehearsals prior to performances, your brain does the work. You have to be very well-prepared in rehearsals, you have to fix all the things that have to do with structure and text and so on. But in a concert hall, nobody wants to have a kind of academic, classroom lecture where they sit there and listen. They want to have some intuitive music-making and intuition can always bring you so much further in a different place than where the brain can take you. The brain is limited because we always want to have logic and answers. But this is not where the magic of music is. If you trust your intuition, you are taken to a place where you never even imagined you'd be only with your brain. And that's why intuition is actually the ultimate magician. This is what every performer needs to strive for. You have to let go of things during a performance. Of course, this is very hard to achieve because you have technical issues and you also have to make sure that everything works - so it's very risky to let your intuition totally take over. But the people who manage to do that can occasionally find something they would otherwise have never found. 

YH: I agree with you! After what you've just said, I don't think there is any place this conversation can go - you've given a perfect sense of ending. I should also mention that I went a bit off-script today in my questions, but I guess this is intuition and this is how things are meant to be. 

PJ: Yes.

YH: This was a very good conversation. Thank you very much for your time today. 

PJ: Thank you and I look forward to reading the interview.

YH: Okay, great. Have a lovely afternoon. 

PJ: You too. Bye-bye.

Paavo Järvi, © Alberto Venzago

Young-Jin Hur

@yjhur1885

© Where Cherries Ripen / Young-Jin Hur