28 GRAMOPHONE SEPTEMBER 2019 gramophone.co.ukKIRILL PETRENKOWho is Kirill
PETRENKO?
As he ocially takes over at the Berliner Philharmoniker, what can we expect from the
media-shy maestro? Hugo Shirley finds out from musicians who have worked with himA
head of Robin Ticciati’s arrival as Chief
Conductor of the Deutsches Symphonie-
Orchester Berlin in spring 2017, posters
popped up around the German capital with
a picture of the young tousled-haired maestro.
‘Wer ist Robin Ticciati?’ (‘Who is Robin
Ticciati?’), they asked, giving curious Berliners a chance to
find out at http://www.wer-ist-robin-ticciati.com. A couple of years
earlier, many, at least outside Germany, could have done with
a similar resource when Kirill Petrenko was announced as
replacement for another tousled-haired Brit as the new
Chief Conductor of Berlin’s best-known orchestra.
Who was this Kirill Petrenko,
the brilliant but reticent young
conductor from Omsk who
leapfrogged past the bookies’
favourites – the controversial
Christian Thielemann and
the media-friendly Andris
Nelsons – to take classical music’s most prestigious post?
Now that he’s finally installed, his new orchestra has pulled out
all the stops to try to tell us: a large banner on the Philharmonie
announces his arrival with the strapline ‘A new energy’;
its website features an interview with its notoriously interview-
averse new boss; its social media is pushing Digital Concert
Hall playlists from the handful of concerts he’s presided over.
There’s also a live recording of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique
Symphony, which has been released on the orchestra’s own
label. It has already garnered an Editor’s Choice in these pages
(7/19), and has been made available for global streaming
as well as in the usual luxury-hardback physical format.
The new recording is a much needed addition to a meagre
discography: John Adams’s The Wound-Dresser on the Berlin
Philharmonic’s label, a lone concerto with the LPO (to date,
the only UK symphony orchestra Petrenko has conducted),
rarely heard Suk tone poems and, from Frankfurt Opera,
a live recording of Pfitzner’s hardly less rarely heard Palestrina.
The wily music lover will have sought out online broadcasts of
shows from the Bavarian State Opera (the latest a wonderfully
crystalline Salome), or a DVD of the house’s Lulu. A filmed
release of its Die Frau ohne Schatten, from his first season as the
Munich house’s Music Director (he took up the appointment in
2013), was pulled shortly before its due date.Before Petrenko came to the BBC Proms last summer with
the Berliners, his few UK appearances had barely registered.
But anyone lucky enough to have seen him live in Munich,
for example, or Bayreuth, where he was chosen to conduct
Frank Castorf’s anniversary-year production of the Ring, will
have recognised particular hallmarks: a rare mix of meticulousness
and spontaneity, allied to a quality that is hardly common in top
conductors – a genuine humility and desire simply to serve the
music. Watching him conduct you notice something else, too:
a palpable pleasure and enjoyment in what he does.
It’s an observation that Gerald Finley, the Iago in Munich’s
recent Otello, echoes when I speak to him about his experiences
of working with Petrenko.
‘This is actually one of the
most extraordinary things
about him,’ he tells me.
‘Rehearsals are demanding,
and if he’s not satisfied with
a passage he will rehearse it
again and again, almost to make the musicians think, “Well,
we’re going to have a straitjacket here.” But when we get to
performances, suddenly there’s this freedom and this spontaneity,
and his joy of being a fellow musician really comes across.’
Franziska von Brück, flautist in the orchestra of the Komische
Oper Berlin, has similar recollections of her earliest encounters
with Petrenko, who was the house’s music director from 2002
to 2007. ‘You noticed very quickly that his special way of
working was something different,’ she recalls; ‘the way he was
going into the smallest details, totally true to the score but with
a friendly manner that was never dictatorial. He didn’t need
much time to convince us. He was demanding of himself and
just as demanding of us. But we were happy to try to fulfil his
demands, even if it was hard work.’
Before his appointment to the Komische Oper, aged just 30,
Petrenko had made a name for himself at the theatre in
Meiningen (whose previous music directors include Hans von
Bülow and Richard Strauss) with the feat of unveiling a new
Ring on four consecutive evenings, with two different sets of
orchestral personnel. Before that he had worked for two years
as a Kapellmeister at Vienna’s Volksoper, which he joined
straight after finishing his studies in Vienna. Not since Karajan
himself, arguably, has a conductor with such an operatic
career path been appointed to the Berlin Philharmonic.‘It was a bold step going for a new and
exciting adventure instead of choosing an
established maestro’ – Olaf Maninger, principal cello