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Maestro, now that your contract with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra came to an end at the beginning of 2005, where is your current place of residence?

 

I’m staying in Vienna, so I still have contact with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. I live in Moscow when I’m working with the Tchaikovsky Orchestra, and Zurich – for quite a long time because opera work takes a lot of time – and naturally on the plane …

 

 

 What has Vienna given you these last ten years?

 

Mainly Beethoven. Here in Vienna I’ve managed to sink deeper into, or rather, move “a step closer” to this infinite world. – I’ve understood a lot that is in Mahler’s letters and thus also in his music. I’ve developed such close relationships with some people, so close, that one could call it friendship, which, in our solitary times, is so badly lacking.

 

 

What do you like about Zurich?

 

Zurich is smaller, simpler, by that I mean easier to get a grasp on, and the artistic atmosphere is very strongly represented in its intellectual and cultural life.

 

 

What “attracts” you more now: symphony music or opera?

 

Probably both equally. Opera is, after all, a theatrical symphony and a symphony a coded opera.

 

 

What’s your opinion on the future of opera?

 

The people who love this genre, who have remained loyal to it, have to shout “SOS”! There needs to be a world conference, a symposium of those people who work in opera, who create it: the theatre directors, managers, major singers, directors, stage designers and other designers, personalities involved in the cultural scene, maybe even the sponsors. Otherwise opera will disappear as a musical romantic genre, because most opera productions are tending to move increasingly further away from the music, from the idea of the score, from the writers.

 

 

How do you interpret the term “romantic” in our times?

 

As in all ages, the romantic is the striving towards truth, towards a spiritual harmony, emotional candour, i.e. ultimately towards the world harmony that is confronted with cynicism, the hard, purely practically oriented attitude that is increasingly gaining the upper hand in society.

 

 

Do you have a particular favourite work that you return to again and again?

 

I am always attracted by whatever work I am working on at the moment. Like Don Juan, I fall in love with “the one present”. Well, and Donna Anna – that’s not meant for an interview …

 

 

Who can serve as a role model for you in the art of conducting?

 

Carlos Kleiber. A phenomenal conductor, a wonderful musician – a great man. What “legends” have not been told about him? Everything is so stupid. The key to understanding this personality is his huge amount of responsibility towards the music. And his departure? Quiet, forlorn, because the end of creating something also means the end of one’s life. He wanted to but couldn’t assert himself against the destructive, loud trends. I’m proud of my acquaintance with him, even if it was short – only in the last few years of his life, proud of his honesty in the letters. I’m pleased he lived and that he was actively creative and he will stay in my heart and life forever.

 

 

Have there been any creative failures that have particularly stuck in your mind?

 

What do creative successes or failures matter? There haven’t been failures but very rarely you do get a feeling of something like satisfaction. True music is so great that there is always room for perfection.

 

 

Have you got many friends? And are there also enemies?

 

I think there aren’t many friends in the actual sense of the word, or they are called something else. I’ve got a true friend – my wife, who, it seems to me, knows and understands me very well, but never takes advantage of this. I’ve got a hundred friends, the musicians of the Tchaikovsky Orchestra that I’ve been leading for 30 years; I’ve got others, too …

 

 

The strangest concert from the point of view of the interpretation?

 

The most difficult one was the first Johann Strauss concert in Vienna with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. It’s very difficult to play this truly elegant, charming music. Most of what I had heard until then was either monotonous, without subtleties, or not very tasteful.

 

 

What do you remember about the Viennese reviews?

 

A very funny thought, a facetious one of course, that Johann Strauss is “in my blood”. Probably my grandmother, who lived in Petersburg, had illegitimately got close to the “waltz king” …