This week’s BSO subscription concerts (Hannah Kendall’s O flower of fire (American premiere), Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2, and Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra) welcome back pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet and the British-Italian-American conductor Sir Anthony Pappano. In his previous BSO stint, Sir Antonio led a critically acclaimed reading of Britten’s War Requiem [our review HERE]. Having retired from the directorship of The Royal Opera, Covent Garden after 22 glorious years, the maestro has recently assumed the directorship of the London Symphony Orchestra. We talked on Monday.

FLE: Your 2009 Marriage of Figaro at Covent Garden with Irwin Schrott and Miah Persson is actually one of my favorite opera videos of all time. It’s the perfect production of the perfect opera. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched it and shown it to friends. From the from the get-go, it was something different because you had lively action during the overture before the curtain normally goes up.

AP: It’s a wonderful, wonderful production.

I also enjoyed your recording of some Beethoven Songs including the Scottish ones with the piano trio (and of course, and An die ferne Geliebte) that you did with Ian Bostridge. Your pellucid pianism and sensitive give and take are extraordinary. You’re great with singers, of course.

I grew up in the opera house. My father was a voice teacher. So, I’ve been playing for singers since I was ten, and, as a pianist, I’ve regularly done recitals with Ian Bostridge, soprano Diana Damrau, and Gerald Finley because the song repertoire is so special. I’ve done several recordings with Bostridge: Britten, Wolff, a Shakespeare album, and Schwanengesang.

Even when you were so busy as the head of the Royal Opera you found time for recitals?

That’s exactly right. I would have it no other way in the sense that I didn’t want to miss out on the opportunities. I was very lucky that Ian chose me to record with him. That’s a very big deal because you know that a conductor is telling everybody day all day long, how to play, how to organize the sound, how to organize the dynamics and the rhythm… and you better have this kind of exposure to keep you humble. Making and organizing sound requires attention to detail; it’s not only balance, but also the phrasing, the drama aspect, the sensitivity to words, and the poetry. You know when the singer is the protagonist… It is so important to be a part of that so when you get back in front of an orchestra, you’ve seen it from their side of things. I take the opportunities to play chamber music whenever I can.

It was interesting to hear you say that your work with singers actually informs your work as a symphonic conductor.

Of course I have been around singers for a long time. I’ve been a music director of one opera house or another for 34 years. I just finished 22 years with the Royal Opera House, and before that, I was ten years in Brussels at La Monnaie. Before that I served in Oslo for two years as music director. Singers and theater have always been my life, but I did conduct symphony orchestras, and I had my own for 18 years; I just gave up my own Santa Cecilia Orchestra in Rome in ‘23 after having made many recordings with them.

I was an assistant to Daniel Barenboim for six years, mainly in Bayreuth for the Wagner Festival. All kinds of repertoires have passed under my eye from Wagner to Mozart, to Verdi and Puccini, of course. Then there’s the 20^th-century stuff, the Berg’s Lulu and Wozzeck and of course Britten’s, Peter Grimes and Turn of the Screw, Prokofiev’s The Gambler, Szymanowski’s King Roger.

That kind of stuff has been very, very important. To not only be around singers, but also around different types of theater. I love the French repertoire, did a lot of that, the Trojans, of course, Carmen, Werther of Massenet; it gives you a wider horizon. Your memory defines you, and you can call upon that information in so many different circumstances.

In front of the orchestra, you’re supposed to know everything. In earlier times there was a prevailing notion of the maestro as all-knowing. Now you have to constantly be learning to keep up the muscle. Maestro means teacher, right? It’s so important to keep doing new repertoire to keep doing things that out of your comfort zone if you’re going to earn the right to stand in front of the great orchestras.

So, what do you expect to be doing with the LSO as Music Director that you hadn’t done over the years as their guest?

Well, it’s funny. I’ve been conducting the LSO since 1996. I met them in Abbey Road Studios to make a recording of Puccini’s La Rondine, which I adore, and since then I’ve been conducting them regularly. So there was a time when I went through my entire repertoire with them and let me do many things for the first time: The two Elgar Symphonies, the Walton One…all those the big affairs.

Did you retire from Covent Garden because you wanted to do different repertoire? It sounds like even as a guest conductor, you’ve been able to choose what you want to conduct.

Yes, but the LSO was always really close to my heart. I never thought that the directorship would come my way, but it did, and I felt that it was the right time to leave Covent Garden. Twenty-two years is a long time, and I was a very present in those 22 years. I never phoned it in. I was always there. I was there a lot and did many, many productions and took care of the institution and looked after so many things… but I needed a change; I wasn’t pushed out, so I I’m very grateful for that.

But I felt that it was a good time to go, to think about my own development and to try something―not new exactly but something that was really challenging, and at a very, very high level. I’ve always had a terrific chemistry with the LSO since day one. So, let’s see what can I do with them!

I can certainly deepen my relationship with the British repertoire, so, I’m going to be doing a cycle of the Vaughen William Symphonies and recording them, as well as Walton, Elgar, Britten, Holst, Bax…

Choral works as well as symphonies?

That’s the plan with Elgar. I’m dying to do the Dream of Gerontius but also there the other oratorios he wrote. And then the Vaughan Williams, Flos campi. Suite for solo viola, small chorus, and small orchestra. I’ll be doing a variety of that kind of stuff.

But that has to be balanced with contemporary music. Boston is about to hear Hannah Kendal’s Flower of Fire which I premiered in London last season when I was designated LSO Chief designate, and in London,I just premiered James McMillan’s, big Concerto for Orchestra.

However, I’m certainly not planning to neglect the classics. A recording has just come out of a live performance of Elijah. It’s streaming, I think, on Marquee TV. And we’ve recorded Holst’s The Planets and the complete Daphne’s and Chloe.

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I was born of immigrant Italian parents in England. Then we emigrated here. I studied French, I speak German… that American, English, French, German immersions define me. Thus I will go back and forth in this repertoire, but the strong accent will, at least at the beginning, be on British music, and of course, collaborating with the great soloists.

As a guest conductor, are you trying to bring some of this British music to skeptical American audiences?

[Laughs] I would love to. Hannah Kendall is kind of a mix of cultures, so I wouldn’t call it exactly English per se, but listen, I’m up for it all! I was on tour with the London Symphony in Europe and one of the pieces we brought was Vaughan Williams Fifth. He is hardly performed in Germany, but the piece struck a real note; its emotion really got through. I was so surprised, as was the orchestra, but it made me very, very happy indeed. So you know there’s hope there.

While we’re talking about Hannah Kendall’s Flower of Fire., can you tell us what she means by “Creolizing?” I’ve never quite understood what kind of an amalgamation Creole implies.

Well, you won’t hear Calypso Tunes. She uses a pair of harps almost as Concertante instruments. She also prepares the instruments with afro hair clips and has the musicians play glissandos with combs of different sizes. It’s something that’s very subtle and not in your face. The piece sounds extremely contemporary, but not only because of the Harps. She also assigns harmonicas to several of the wind players and percussion players. They are sometimes playing two at the time and create kind of very subtle walls of sound that sound homespun ethereal at the same time. It’s a wonderful effect.

Are the harmonicas playing tunes?

They only play block chords, but they use exhalation and the inhalation of breath to create different harmonies. You have to hear it.

And she uses 15 music boxes.

They’re randomly wound up and then they’re left to play out. Now, they happen to be playing very well-known Tunes, which you cannot discern from the audience. But It creates a never-before-heard atmosphere.

Is there any discernible structure?

There are very dramatic and very static sections that alternate and this provides the structure—the breathing space, if you like―for the next onslaught of activity.

Is there a larger dramatic arc?

Yes, but that’s provided by me. I’m trying to create line and intensity, and yes, theater.

Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2 will follow the Kendall. Will you and the BSO be able to match Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s glitter?

Most of the glitter is in the piano part. The orchestra part is quite dark, and harmonically more interesting than it is melodically. Now, you do have moments of chamber music camaraderie between the piano and the solo winds in particular, and with the solo cello, but I wouldn’t say the orchestra provides glitter per se.

Being not only in the same bar with the soloist but also being on the same page metaphorically is a challenge with Jean-Yves; you have to have his dynamism, because he’s full of flair and theater. The Liszt concertos are very showy, but this one uses quite a bit of the lower register of the piano, as well as the high register. Quite different from the other one in the bravura aspects for the orchestra, but similar in how its four movements run attacca.  

Regarding the BSO closer, Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, do Strauss’s tone poems have much in common with opera, and do we need to read our Nietzsche?

Strauss meditates on how the hero, bored with life up in the top of the mountain, experiences sunrise every morning. He realizes at one point that it’s not enough and he goes searching in the hinterlands for wisdom and life experience, and of course is met with all the difficulties of life but also with science and learning, he’s met with many different things.

By the end he achieves a certain spiritual freedom, through experience. But basically, it’s not the fight, but rather matching of nature to man, and accepting that somehow nature will always have the upper hand. Strauss places nature in C major and humanity in B major; the piece does end with this C.

That sounds all very highfalutin, but when you listen to the piece, they’re basically vignettes of different aspects:  learning and experience. And in that way, it’s fascinating because Strauss turns out just incredible pictures. Aside from the famous Space Odyssey opening, Zarathustra is not always audience friendly. It demands a lot of the of the audience and the orchestra. It’s a very technically demanding and very serious piece…which is not to say that it doesn’t have very lyrical moments. I adore the song of the grave, in which Zarathustra is confronted with death.

So you have those kinds of moments, but then you also have the almost narcotic frenzy of the dance. It builds and builds and builds into something really outrageous. Through this purging you get Enlightenment and there you have the most beautiful lyric finale, which ends with a question mark. What are we humans in compared to Nature and can we as be as great as Nature? This philosophy is never really resolved. But it’s such a showpiece for the orchestra and it’s enormous. It comprises also an organ, my goodness, and a big, very tricky violin solo completely different from the one of the Hero’s Life. Every member of the orchestra will be asked to do something incredible.

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Tell us about your involvement with the coronation of Charles III?

I was one of three conductors including the choirmaster. John Elliot Gardner did a 25-minute pre-service with the English Baroque soloists and his choir. I did a pre-service concert with my Orchestra that was upstairs in the organ loft. There were 40 of us plus the organ, but then I also conducted the service itself.

And that was one of the most exciting but toughest gigs in my entire life because it involved coordinating the orchestra with the choir that was in the nave. And I had to follow the chorus master with a television. You had both chorus and orchestra in several big affairs with difficult stuff.

Vaughan Williams, Walton, Parry, Handel… it was a tour deforce, and at the beginning, we had two days of rehearsal. It was really tough going until I figured out how to sync with the chorus. And then we had extra brass ensembles with assistant conductors on the side, but on the day, it went really spectacularly. We were blessed that day.

It was just quite something, but you basically had to be ahead of the beat of the choral conductor.

Not that simple. Yes, sometimes ahead. Sometimes I had to sit on it, anticipating what my chorusmaster colleague was going to do. I learned his tendencies and he learned mine. I had to use my nose as well as my eyes and my arms if you know what I mean? I had to use all my theatrical know-how because, otherwise that job would have been impossible.

Parry’s I was Glad with all those Vivats?

That was the first number of the service. It’s something else.

And Zadoc the Priest isn’t half bad either.

Exactly!

Makes one think about how to stage coronations here.

I wouldn’t say that too loudly.

Any Beecham stories or any singer, tantrum tales that we can end with?

The Beecham stories still go around.

“The harpsichord sounds like skeletons copulating on a tin roof.” And “I drowned the singer as a courtesy to the audience.”

Yeah. Exactly all that stuff.

See related review HERE.