The maestro’s son is also rising
OrchestrasFrom my latest monthly essay in The Critic magazine. a survey of the many sons of conductors who dream of inheriting the berth:
… There is half a football team of son-ofs who are presently skinning up the slippery pole. To name a few of the likelier lads: Taavi Oramo, son of BBC conductor Sakari; Ken-David Masur, chip off the late Kurt; Min Chung, born of Myung-whun; Masato Suzuki, heir to the Bach Collegium Japan. Maxime Tortelier is the son of Yan Pascal. All have agency contracts and good jobs in prospect.
Some go in disguise. François López-Ferrer conducted in Cincinnati, where his father Jesús López-Cobos was formerly in charge. The son of a knighted British baton conducts around the world under an assumed name.
Two Swiss orphans scaled Mont Blanc: Philippe (Armin) Jordan is music director of the Vienna State Opera and Lorenzo (Marcello) Viotti of Netherlands Opera. Both lost their fathers at a formative age…
What we are seeing here is not a conspiracy of podium nepotism but a diverse and largely hidden transmission of a musical function by means of informal tuition, ethical example and commercial manipulation. Do I still have your full attention?…
Read on here.
Philippe Jordan was 31 when his father died.
Norman, you wrote that “Mozart’s son was a minor civil servant” and seem to have forgotten that Mozart’s son was in fact Wolfgang Amadeus. His father was Leopold, and this is perhaps the most prominent example in all history of a father grooming his son to be a successful musician.
Ludwig van Beethoven’s alcoholic, deadbeat father similarly tried to “groom” him but as is well-known he was awful and cruel at it. Teen-aged LvB was the family’s breadwinner as a court musician while his father had become incapacitated by alcoholism. Ludwig succeeded despite, not because, of his father’s efforts. In my perhaps not humble opinion, given the tremendous adversity he faced, Beethoven’s success was more impressive than Mozart’s.
If we all had Leopold Mozart as a father, perhaps only a few would have become Wolfgang Amadeus, but all, or nearly all, could have been excellent mudicians and, possibly, composers.
That sentence gave me a brain cramp.
I would so love to be an excellent mudician.
In actual fact, one of W A Mozart’s sons was a fine musician, a minor composer, whose piano concertos can still be heard. Having done some composition he realised his talent could not match his father and spent the rest of his life as a pianist.
Ken-David Masur has recently announced his departure time from the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. He will have spent 7 seasons in Milwaukee but it seems shorter because of course two of them were during Covid.
I remember an interview with Paavo Järvi where he said he benefited from being a famous conductor’s son, because he learned at home about orchestra politics.
“The son of a knighted British baton conducts around the world under an assumed name” Who on earth?
I suspect he’s studied in Germany and the UK and worked with many of the UK’s leading orchestras including the London Symphony, London Philharmonic (particularly of Schubert and Sibelius), City of Birmingham Symphony and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and many many others.
I heard him conduct the LSO in June 2013.
I assume this is a reference to Sir Colin Davis’s son Joseph Wolfe.
Talent runs in families. Hardly news. Marissa Jason’s dad Arvids was a terrific conductor. So was Rozhdestvensky’s dad, Anusov.
Odd, I’ve never heard of Marissa Jason. Or of Arvid Jason [sic, in all cases].
Ah, autocorrect: the embodiment of Artificial Incompetence…
I’d love to see a foto of Marissa Jason- she sounds lovely; i’m sure i’d be an Arvid fann….! But i’m not so sure about Nikolai Anosov being plose at the Anusov spelling!
Do we know that LopezFerrer id an ‘assumed name?’ With the Spanish naming traditions, is it possibly that Ferrer is his mother’s family name? I tried to look it up online and couldn’t find anything, I’m legitimately asking the question, not catechizing.
As someone who’s met him several times, Lopez-Ferrer is NOT an assumed name.
It is definitely true that Cobos was the father’s maternal name and therefore would not have been passed down to his son.
A concert he conducted with the Rochester Symphony Orchestra a few seasons ago was distinctly underwhelming.
Spot on, Jay Sacca: López Ferrer is his official name, López from his father and Ferrer from his cuban singer mother Alicia, as legal in Spain.
No disguise here.
A generation removed, but what about William (Wilhelm) Steinberg and Pinchas? While we’re about it, why don’t we impishly mention Ulf Schirmer?
Pinchas is not Williams’ son. Williams’ sons’ name is Arthur, and he was an archeologist.
The old bugger led us on, then.
Of course Pinchas is WS’s son, by the way it seems the existing William Steinberg bios are not extensive about his family. Following 1966 documentary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MGAJqj4ghQ
shows him at 41′ with 3 young sons, none of which seems to be Pinchas btw…
Always, always, always SONS?
Well, yes.
I think Norman- indicative of the fact that conductors are born & not made. If dad’s a conductor- very likely the son will gravitate to it. I sincerely hope Kurt Masur’s son is not so rude to orchestras as his late old man was (despite being a formidable conductor). I think you refer also to Colin Davis’ son by his second marriage, Joseph Wolfe who looks so like his great old man & conducts like him to boot!
No mention of the excellent Adam Hickox, son of the late lamented Richard who is doing well, cf current Traviata at Glyndebourne.
If Herr Mahler came by and listened to this lot, he would have asked
Where is the interpretation?
Especially the absolutely awful Viotti. What a charlatan.
In the full essay, N.L. writes “Yet, despite rare successes, the idea that musical talent passes from Gen-1 to Gen-Z is fallacious to the point of absurdity. … [there are] isolated exceptions in a general drift to mediocrity. … Genius in music does not strike twice in the same gene pool.”
Well I can think of more than a few examples, most of which do raise the old nurture versus nature discussion. What of the Slatkins — excellent conductor Leonard and highly respected cellist Frederick Zlotkin , sons of two great quartet players and string players? Lynn Harrell, superstar cellist, son of Mack Harrell, celebrated baritone, and Marjorie Fulton, very respected violinist and teacher. Igor Kipnis, famed harpsichordist, son of the marvelous bass singer, Alexander Kipnis, and grandson of concert pianist and composer Heniot Lévy, with whom he studied piano. The marvelous violinist Dmitry Sitkovetsky is the son of marvelous violinist Julian (or Yulian) Sitkovetsky, as well as of respected pianist Bella Davidovich, herself from a long line of musicians. David Oistrakh’s son Igor may not have reached quite the same heights as his father (the old “King David and Prince Igor” joke) but Igor made marvelous recordings and had a fine career. Leonid Kogan’s violinist son Pavel and pianist daughter have both enjoyed very respectable careers (OK they don’t equal Leonid but … who does?).
In his comment above Paul mentions Leopold Mozart and Wolfgang (and could have mentioned Nannerl) and I think most would agree that Wolfgang and Leopold were hardly equals, something Leopold himself would surely agree with. My list tried to limit itself to truly comparable reputations and talents between generations. If we want to talk about leaps forward in the succeeding generation the list becomes much longer besides the Mozarts: Rossini, Paganini, Schubert, and on and on.
And gene pools can go sideways too, of course. Consider Joseph Joachim the famed violinist and friend of Schumann, Mendelssohn and Brahms. He was cousins with the redoubtable Wittgenstein clan!
I have heard from a classmate of FL-F that he normally was addressed by his middle name while in school (or maybe François is his middle name and he formerly used his first name). But yes, the double-barreled surname is just the normal Spanish-language surname pattern.
I still relish the comment Harnoncourt made in a radio interview (one can imagine a cheeky grin as he said it) when talking about the big names he played under in the Vienna Symphony orchestra. He talked of perhaps the greatest being Erich Kleiber, “the real Kleiber”. Of course Carlos was a genius but some forget just how great Erich was and with a somewhat wider repertoire.