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The Times (UK)
6 May 2002
Obituaries
Yevgeny Svetlanov
Fiery and well-travelled Russian conductor from whom limited dissent was
tolerated by the Soviet authorities
One of the most demonstrative conductors of his generation, Yevgeny Svetlanov was at the helm of the Russian State Symphony Orchestra for 35 years. He was also a regular visitor to the West during the Cold War years, his concerts with the main London orchestras — latterly the Philharmonia — being powerful, spirited and often highly charged bravura affairs that left the audience on the edge of their seats, even if the critics were occasionally less enthusiastic. Sometimes an awkward figure to deal with, Svetlanov was neither nurse nor father figure. He was simply the artistic director and conductor of what for many years was the Soviet Union’s foremost orchestra.
But more than a musical ambassador for his country, Svetlanov was also a wily political mover, an independent thinker from whom the authorities tolerated more dissent than most. Despite never having joined the Communist Party or taken an oath, he was allowed to become one of the world’s most renowned conductors. Even in the Soviet Union’s most paranoid days he appeared throughout the world and recorded an anthology of Russian symphonic music that stretched from Glinka to Myaskovsky, including three complete cycles — Tchaikovsky, Rakhmaninov and Scriabin.
The Bolshoi Theatre was Svetlanov’s lifeblood, his cradle from his earliest days. His childhood was spent in the dressing rooms, and after his studies he became assistant, then conductor and eventually chief conductor. He spent his whole life as part of the Soviet system, but in many respects he never took root; he was too independent, always rubbing against the grain of the system. A distinguished artist had committed the unpardonable? Svetlanov would take him in. It was Svetlanov who brought Oleg Kagan, Natalia Gutman and Nikolai Petrov to the ears of Western audiences. A colleague had been sacked? Svetlanov would give him shelter: he took in the disgraced conductors Kirill Kondrashin and Veronica Dudarova, and pushed Dmitri Kitayenko to the leadership of the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra. Anti-Semitic persecution? In 1978 Svetlanov opened the Russian Winter Festival with an all-Jewish programme.
Nevertheless, he was at home within the Soviet structure. The State paid his orchestra for up to 12 hours of rehearsal for a familiar programme; six more for a complex one. This, he felt, was the only way to do justice to the music. European orchestras, he said, were overworked. “Three hours, lunch, and three more hours puts music on a conveyor belt,” he said. “Yes, musicians in the West are quick learners, but by necessity. They have a hard life.”
Although his fame as a conductor spread far and wide, Svetlanov was frequently irritated that his work as a composer counted for little. He was also quick to criticise audiences and promoters who stuck to the well-trodden paths of familiar works. On a tour with the State Symphony Orchestra to the US in 1986 he offered a selection of programmes that included Scriabin’s Second Symphony, but noted with contempt that not a single venue chose to hear the work: “They must not have known this music or believed in its success,” he told The New York Times.
The explosion of Russian democracy little over a decade ago brought Svetlanov far greater freedom to travel. But that freedom was at the expense of his responsibilities back home, where money was tight and becoming tighter. His orchestra was poorly paid; he was increasingly pursuing lucrative overseas opportunities. So crowded was his diary with orchestral commitments — London, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Tokyo — that in one recent year he spent only 16 days with the State Symphony Orchestra. In frustration the musicians walked out on strike. Finally, in April 2000, he was sacked by Mikhail Shvydkoi, the Minister of Culture, after 35 years in post. At the time many feared that his dismissal from the orchestra, which was known simply as “Svetlanov’s Orchestra”, would mark the death of perhaps the last major Soviet-era musical institution, all of which have faced enormous difficulties since the collapse of the system of generous state funding and patronage.
Unbowed, Svetlanov continued to work harder than his health would allow. At the end of last month he was at the Barbican conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in the Russian Nights Festival in a rare performance of Rachmaninov’s choral symphony, The Bells.
Yevgeny Fyodorovich Svetlanov was born in Moscow and studied at the Gnesin Institute and the Moscow Conservatoire. While still a student he conducted the All-Union Radio Orchestra before graduating to the Bolshoi Opera where his father had been a soloist. His mother was a member of the mime ensemble. As a child he sang with the children’s chorus. He made his name conducting the music of his compatriots, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and Tchaikovsky, and also introduced foreign operas such as Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle to Russian audiences. In 1964 he took the Bolshoi to La Scala, Milan. He joined what was then the USSR State Symphony Orchestra as principal conductor in 1965, where his reputation as a sympathetic symphonic conductor blossomed thanks to his unerringly spirited and discriminating supervision.
One of his first tours to Britain with the orchestra came in 1968, not long after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. At the start of their concert at the Royal Albert Hall, just after Svetlanov had mounted the podium, he was greeted with shouts from the audience of “Freedom for Czechoslovakia” and “Hands off the Czechs”, which lasted for several minutes.
His famed directness, which he often turned on orchestras during rehearsal, could also be applied to audiences. On one occasion in 1985 while conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Festival Hall, he turned to the audience at the end of Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture to show them — a few beats after they had begun to do so — exactly when to applaud.
During his 35 years at the helm of the State Symphony Orchestra Svetlanov made numerous recordings for the Melodyia label, many of which remain uncatalogued, unreleased and unheard. He was also a singer, poet and composer, following closely in the path of Myaskovsky, whose music he championed from the podium. “I love sweeping and beautiful melody that is touching,” was his response to criticism that his compositions were too conservative. He also had an extensive knowledge of football: who was up, who was down and who had scored where, in a number of countries.
During the 1980s his relative conservatism was tinged with occasional dissent, most of which was ignored by the authorities. On one occasion he published a hilarously poisonous account of how Goskoncert, the state management agency, mismanaged the domestic touring arrangements of his orchestra. The catalogue of disasters included being stranded in Siberia without a bed or a bite to eat, tickets on non-existent trains and instruments being shipped to the wrong town. There was the occasional reprimand: in 1984 he was refused an exit visa for a visit to the Royal Opera House to conduct Boris Godunov and had to be replaced at the last minute.
His music making went well beyond the great Russian warhorses and the standard European repertoire. In 1981, for example, he conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in a full-blooded rendition of Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius. In 1998 he was fêted with a 70th birthday concert at the Bolshoi Theatre.
Svetlanov was a household name in Russia, and his life and work were the subject of a film, Dirizhor (The Conductor). He also featured in The Phil, a Channel 4 fly-on-the-wall documentary about life in the Philharmonia that was broadcast in 1999. He was named a People’s Artist of the Soviet Union in 1968 and was awarded the Lenin Prize four years later. He was appointed to the Order of Lenin in 1978.
Yevgeny Svetlanov is survived by his wife, the pianist Nina Svetlanova.
Yevgeny Svetlanov, music director of the Russian State Symphony Orchestra, 1965-2000, was born on September 6, 1928. He died on May 3, 2002, aged 73.
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