The latest guest on Zsolt Bognar’s Living the Classical Life is the Helsinki Philharmonic music director, Jukka-Pekka Saraste.
He doesn’t seem to make much eye contact. Zsolt asks him if shyness is an inhibitor in a conductor.
There were tears in the aisles as the…
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Goodall was painfully shy. It probably worked against him at the ROH, but what a spectacular final act his career enjoyed.
You mean that Nazi-loving Oswald Mosley-supporting bastard who pretended that painfully tedious slowness was the same as “Momentum”?…
One of the very best…..Love playing under him.Always putting the music first, very often his performances reveal something new others simply have overlooked in the score…and behind the shyness,he is avery profound,spiritual human being with a wry sense of humour.
He looks quite like the late Tchaikovsky. (If he only had his beard a bit longer…)
Unpopular opinion here, but people these days overstate the necessity of eye contact – it should be when the conductor actually has something important to indicate or say, not just because the conductor is simply ‘trying to make contact’ with the players. And as an orchestral player, it is in fact more uncomfortable and distracting to have the conductor staring down at you and making faces all the time and trying to catch your own eyes. Im watching their hands anyway. A new fad that all young conductors are being taught (in part thanks to the youtube-audition age) is to look up all the time and just stare at the players endlessly with ‘meaningful’ glances – even if it means not even reading the score to check what is going on, or even if it shows or does nothing to the players at all to enhance their performance.
There’s this saying about Finns that they will look at their shoes when you’re talking to them and that an extrovert Finn will look at *your* shoes instead.
That said, maybe that is why they make such good conductors: there is a non-verbal (non-oral, let’s be correct, ok? Verbal is ‘written’) connection between the conductor and the orchestra, where one’s opinion can be communicated in gestures rather than speech. Orchestras do not appreciate sticks who talk too much…
What do you think?
Saraste was a member of the original Jorma Panula conducting class 1977 along with e.g. Osmo Vänskä and Esa-Pekka Salonen. Panula has always emphasized keeping talking to a minimum, minimising foot movements when on the podium, not visibly reacting to wrong notes during rehearsals etc. and has summarised his philosophy as “help, but don’t get in the way”.
At Saraste’s first rehearsal in Houston last week, he said “Finnish conductors don’t talk too much” and began conducting. Some thought he already had.
I went to the Saturday performance It was an awesome concert. Didn’t hold back. Would love to see him come back.
Great interview, lovely conductor. Bognar really is a classy fellow, it has to be said!!
Sue: How does it feel to have eight upticks? I’m with you.
Played several concerts with JPS in The Oslo and Bergen Phil.
Outstanding musician. His Mahler and Sibelius is among the very best.
Also a wonderful human beeing.
His LPO Silvestrov 4 concert 2022 was stunning, and a brief but powerful spoken introduction to Sibelius 1, explaining the parallel with the Russian invasion prefaced a performance unlike any I have heard in 50 years.