The man most likely to succeed James Levine as music director of the Ravinia Festival says he is proud not to be in the ranks of those jet-setting conductors who hop from podium to podium, parading their party-pieces and reaping whatever dubious career glory they can from spreading themselves all over the musical map.
“I have always believed one’s career comes by itself,” says Christoph Eschenbach, who will preside over the first two weeks of Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts at the 59th Ravinia Festival, beginning Friday night.
“If you execute music as profoundly and sincerely as you know how, people will realize it, and the career will follow from there. Those flashy career phenomena,” he says, frowning in distaste, “I doubt their powers of endurance.” Today’s audiences “actually are very intelligent and perceptive” enough to appreciate the difference between a genuine musician and a podium acrobat, he insists.
At 53, Eschenbach is one of several prominent German conductors who are significantly shaping the orchestral life of this country. He recently completed his sixth season as music director of the Houston Symphony, an orchestra he is widely credited with having pulled up from regional mediocrity to a major-league respectability just below the so-called Big Five (Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Boston and Philadelphia).
If you consider Cleveland’s Christoph von Dohnanyi, New York’s Kurt Masur, Philadelphia’s Wolfgang Sawallisch and Chicago’s Daniel Barenboim (an Israeli born in Argentina, but thoroughly Germanic in taste, training and technique), you realize how widely entrenched is the musical aesthetic Eschenbach represents.
His dark, penetrating eyes suggest the intensities of feeling Eschenbach naturally brings to music, as both conductor and one of today’s most accomplished pianists. Face to face, he comes across as serious, soft-spoken, rather guarded, thoroughly northern Germanic by temperament. On the podium he exhibits much the same precision with which he chooses his words, combining a remarkable fluidity of gesture with a dexterous energy that can excite musicians and audiences alike.
Certainly the combination has made him one of the CSO’s most admired guest conductors and explains why at least five European orchestras and one American ensemble, the National Symphony, have offered him positions in recent years.
While Eschenbach hints that he would be available if the right German radio orchestra made him the right offer, he remains fiercely loyal to his Houston Symphony, which he praises as a “sleeping beauty” among U.S. orchestras. Under his direction the Texas ensemble finished its 80th season last month with a dramatically upgraded image, a balanced budget of $14.9 million, plenty of warm bodies in Jones Symphony Hall and, best of all, healthy artistic prospects.
One measure of management’s faith in Eschenbach is the open-ended contract they have given him. Still, his five-months-a-season commitment leaves his summers open to travel the summer festival circuit. And the conspicuous success he has enjoyed with the CSO at Ravinia since his debut there as a pinch-hitting maestro in 1990 has fueled speculation he will take over from Levine next year when the festival celebrates its 60th anniversary.
If a contract between Eschenbach and Ravinia already has been signed, nobody is saying so, at least not on the record. For his part, the conductor is keeping mum. What he doesn’t say, however, is revealing.
“I love this orchestra and I love Ravinia,” he says. “It’s a lovely place that I have known since the beginning of my American debut (in the mid-1970s). I love the collaboration with (executive director) Zarin Mehta. We have a wonderful relationship. Beyond that, I have no comment.” Have the two men discussed his accepting a permanent post at Ravinia? Again, “no comment.”
Eschenbach clearly is more comfortable discussing how he and the Houston Symphony have deepened their relationship, both musically and personally.
“I wouldn’t want to give up Houston, especially now that we are beginning to taste the fruits of our work together. It would be a pity to end that experience at this moment,” he says. Eschenbach feels the Houston Symphony is his orchestra now, a true reflection of his musical tastes and personality. “I have the feeling they understand me completely. When I raise an eyebrow or my little finger, they know exactly what I wish to say musically. At those moments I know all our hard work has paid off.
“Maybe the Houston Symphony is not as perfect or polished as the Chicago Symphony, but it now has a quality which many other orchestras don’t have. The musicians listen to each other; they are always totally aware of what’s going on around them; they experience all aspects of the score. That’s what I have instilled in them.”
With recordings on the Virgin Classics label and several international tours to certify its coming of artistic age, the Houston Symphony is experiencing the first blush of national and international attention-and there is no doubt who is primarily responsible.
“It’s all due to Christoph,” David Wax, the orchestra’s executive director, recently told Houston Press magazine. “He’s got a certain charisma, and when you’re with him, you have a sense of his commitment to what’s going on. He’s a real leader, in every sense of the word. He can bring about change, and people have confidence in him-I have seen trustees swayed by that.”
But sorrow came more readily to the young Eschenbach than music. His father, a famous German musicologist married to a Jewish woman, was an outspoken anti-Nazi who perished at the Russian front during World War II. His mother died giving birth to him. His grandmother died while trying to move the boy to safety just after the war. One of his earliest memories is of spending Christmas of 1945 in a barn near Mecklenburg in northeastern Germany, where he was quarantined with other ailing young war refugees.
As luck would have it, he was adopted by relatives of his mother, a married couple named Eschenbach, both of whom were musicians. It was during the family’s home chamber music soirees that the boy’s musical gifts first became known.
His adoptive parents started him on piano and violin but he dropped the latter to concentrate on his piano studies. In Hamburg he studied piano with Elisa Hansen, a Schnabel pupil, and conducting with Wilhelm Bruckner-Ruggeberg.
First-prize winner in the 1965 Clara Haskil Competition, Eschenbach soon came to the attention of that legendary podium tyrant George Szell.
“He heard me play Mozart in Salzburg and invited me to make my American debut with him and the Cleveland Orchestra. He said he had listened to one of my Mozart sonata recordings. `It’s very bad,’ Szell said. `You have a lot to learn. When can you see me again?’ That was his initial move to open his door for me!”
Eschenbach went on to make his American debut with Szell and the Cleveland in 1969. His debut as a conductor came three years later, with a performance of Bruckner’s Third Symphony (a Szell speciality) in Hamburg. Since then he has gone on to direct most of the world’s major orchestras. He is the latest in a long, proud line of pianist-conductors that extends back to Beethoven, Schumann and Liszt.
Do pianists, one wonders, make better conductors than other instrumentalists? Are there any other advantages beyond being able to think harmonically?
“Probably that’s the only advantage,” Eschenbach exclaims with a laugh. “The piano has so many colors to offer that you can orchestrate well at the keyboard; in fact, as a pianist, you should always orchestrate. The pianist’s central aim is to overcome the sound materials of the instrument, creating a beautiful sound and letting the piano sing.
“So that probably is an advantage when you conduct, yes.”
Eschenbach is a man of ferocious energies, a man of multiple musical interests whose versatility certainly would make him the logical successor to Levine (that other prodigally gifted pianist-conductor) at Ravinia. Like Levine, he never seems to slow down. There are so many projects, and there is only so much time.
Once he has satisfied his desire to create an elite orchestra in Houston, Eschenbach suggests, then perhaps another dream will come along. A modern-day Romantic with charisma to burn: Not bad qualities for any conductor, especially one who is rapidly assuming an ever more crucial role in the musical life of Chicago.
RAVINIA FARE SHOWS ESCHENBACH’S SKILL
Shades of Jimmy Levine: Christoph Eschenbach’s programs for the opening weeks of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s eight-week residency at the Ravinia Festival are designed to show off his versatility as conductor, pianist and chamber music guru.
Two choral masterpieces, Bruckner’s “Te Deum” and the Beethoven Ninth Symphony, will occupy the CSO’s festival opener at 8 p.m. Friday. Joining the CSO and Chicago Symphony Chorus (prepared by its new director, Duain Wolfe) will be vocal soloists Margaret Jane Wray, soprano; Nancy Maultsby, mezzo-soprano; John Keyes, tenor; and Richard Cowan, bass-baritone.
Eschenbach turns up as piano soloist and conductor at 8 p.m. Saturday, on a program that holds Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9. He will assume the same dual capacity for an all-Mozart wind chamber music program, 8 p.m. June 28 in the Ravinia (formerly Murray) Theatre, featuring the Wind Quintet, K.452, and Serenade, K.361.
More Mozart, including concertos for violin and piano, will occupy him at 8 p.m. June 29. Soloists will be the father-and-daughter team of Pamela Frank, violin, and Claude Frank, piano. Johann Strauss overtures, waltzes and polkas will fill the second half of the program.
Eschenbach’s final Ravinia weekend will begin at 8 p.m. June 30 with a rare performance of Max Reger’s F-minor Piano Concerto (Peter Serkin, soloist) on a program of Dvorak, Liadov and Tchaikovsky. The program at 8 p.m. July 1 holds Schumann’s Symphony No. 4 and Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde” (The Song of the Earth). Soloists for this first Ravinia performance of the tenor/baritone version of the Mahler are Francisco Araiza, tenor; and Thomas Hampson, baritone.
