The conductor who reformed the Bolshoi Theater
Musical critic Dmitry RENANSKY recounts the whole Russian musical culture changing as a result.
On October 30, conductor Alexander Vedernikov passed away by coronavirus in Moscow at the age of 56. From 2001 to 2009, he was the music director of the Bolshoi Theater, and after his resignation he had a brilliant international career. For the past ten years, he has hardly performed in Russia - even after he became the chief conductor of the Mikhailovsky Theater in 2019. At the request of “Meduza”, musical critic Dmitry Renansky tells why Alexander Vedernikov will enter the latest history of Russian culture as one of its most important and most paradoxical figures.
Alexander Vedernikov consistently and maybe quite consciously broke out of all the traditional social frameworks, desperately refusing to fit into the comme-il-faut behavior. Descendant of a venerable musical dynasty, son of the famous bass Alexander Vedernikov Sr. keeper of the Bolshoi Theater of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics traditions, in the 2000s, on the main opera stage of the country, Vedernikov Jr. carried out almost the most daring reform in its history. In 2009 feeling that he had done everything he could for the Bolshoi, he resigned - making a gesture unprecedented for the Russian cultural scene, where the problem of irremovability of power in recent years is as acute as in politics.
Having left the Bolshoi and almost completely switching to the foreign music market, Vedernikov deceived expectations one more time - instead of resting on the laurels of a patented specialist in the Russian repertoire, he easily settled into the European artistic context: all his key successes in the 2010s are associated with Western music of the ХХth century, which remains terra incognita for the vast majority of Russian conductors.
At every moment of his rapid and sometimes dramatic career, Vedernikov acted and looked completely different from what one might expect from an artist of his background and his status. With his stage image and human habits, he did not resemble the inhabitant of the musical Olympus at all: he was a demonstratively non-public person, rarely gave interviews, was not engaged either in near-political games or in social activity, synonymous today with the life of a head of any large cultural corporation in Russia as well as in the West. Vedernikov, native of Moscou, preferred solitary leisure in the forests of Finland, where he had a small house near Savonlinna. Intellectual, phlegmatic, ironic, speaking an emphatically quiet voice, for a quarter of a century of his career, Alexander Vedernikov managed to refute the common axiom that conducting was a profession of the second half of a person’s life.
Before coming to the Bolshoi Theater:
musical reorganization (perestroika)
Vedernikov was lucky enough to take the stage during the years of the cultural process tectonic shifts, the change of generations in the late 1980s - early 1990s. The crisis of the "grand style" which determined the appearance of the late Soviet music and opera industry, marked the unenviable fate of its key institutions - from the Tchaikovsky competition to large symphony orchestras and large philharmonic halls, which were gradually orphaned with the departure of their long-term owners, opinion leaders, dictators and tyrants, who died one after another or faded away during the last years of the XXth century.
The new time needed new cultural heroes who could spread the ashes they inherited and rethink the structure of the post-Soviet art market. In this sense, Alexander Vedernikov looks like a direct heir to his senior colleagues Valery Gergiev and Mikhail Pletnev: while one in the early 1990s was engaged in reforging the decrepit and clumsy Kirov Opera and Ballet Theater into a dynamic Mariinka, the other founded the country's first private orchestra — the Russian National Orchestra.
In 1995, Vedernikov keenly felt this request for institutional restructuring, for the creation of new flexible cultural platforms that would have nothing to do with the Soviet past. The 31-year-old conductor becomes the musical director of the Russian Philharmonic, a symphony orchestra founded by TV-6. By the way, the Russian National Orchestra under the guidance of Mikhail Pletnev had already quite successfully existed for five years.
Indeed, in the 1990s independent musical groups in Russia popped up like mushrooms after a spring rain - but an orchestra without a permanent residence permit on the capital's stage, who independently determined the repertoire policy and did not obey any of the cultural corporations that existed at that time, still looked like something out of the ordinary, challenging the decades-old order of things. In 1998, the Russian Philharmonic collapsed after default, but in the spring of 2001 Vedernikov would be able to revive his first orchestra. This time, according to the state policy to strengthen the power hierarchy, the Moscow government would include it in the asset list.
The resume of 37-years-old Alexander Vedernikov will now include not only purely creative achievements, but also the experience of anti-crisis management. This aspect of his qualification will come into play in the summer of the same 2001, when the Minister of Culture Mikhail Shvydkoy will offer the conductor to head the Bolshoi Theater. The impressive appointment of the youngest musical director in the theater history was repeatedly strengthened by the political acoustics in which this decision was made: shortly before that, his predecessor Gennady Rozhdestvensky, the patriarch-conductor, the first to appear at the stand of the Bolshoi in 1951, had left the Bolshoi in a scandal.
Bolshoi Theater: Reset
In 2001, the arrival of Alexander Vedernikov meant for the Bolshoi tormented by personnel reshuffle, the onset of a real new century, and not only of the calendar one.
Together with the general director Anatoly Iksanov and the head of the advanced planning office Vadim Zhuravlev, Vedernikov had to find the artistic content that could fill the ideological voids that formed at the Theater Square after the fall of the USSR depriving the Bolshoi the status of the theatrical facade of the empire. Being decidedly pro-West, Vedernikov played an almost key role in this process: without the creative will of the chief conductor, all the progressive plans of his associates could remain castles in the air.
In the 2000s, the Bolshoi created the usual matrix in which the Russian opera existed until the beginning of the pandemic: there were integration into the global music and theater market, co-productions created in partnership with foreign co-production theaters, rental productions and exchange tours. And most importantly, there was a consistent assimilation on Russian soil of the artistic experience of European opera: the Vedernikov era in the Bolshoi is a triumphant march of Western directing grandees from Peter Convichny (2004) and Robert Wilson (2005) to Graham Vick (2005) and David Pountney (2008).
Renewal is the key word that determined Vedernikov's policy in the Bolshoi Theater.
It is he who will conduct the world premiere of a new opera, written for the first time in almost three decades by a contemporary composer commissioned by the theater — the sensational "Children of Rosenthal" by Leonid Desyatnikov, Vladimir Sorokin and Eimuntas Nekrošius (2005). It is he who will release the first high-profile premieres on the New Stage of the Bolshoi — a space for research and experimentation free of the history and ideology burden. Vedernikov knew firsthand how toxic this burden could be: all the time he spent in the Bolshoi, he was dominated by a subconscious comparison with the "great conductors of the Bolshoi Theater" — with Yevgeny Svetlanov, Alexander Lazarev and other adherents of the performing aesthetics he did not want at all to restore.
Critics often blamed Vedernikov for the imperfection of the artistic finish of his readings, but the conductor's ideas were much ahead of their time — and would be appreciated only many years later. Indeed, long before the experiments of Theodore Currentzis, Vedernikov was the first to instill the ideas of historically informed performance on the domestic opera stage. We should estimate the courage of Vedernikov, who performed in 2004 on the Bolshoi historical stage “Ruslan and Lyudmila”, trying to get as close as possible to how Glinka's score could sound at the 1842 world premiere.
By this radical, musical as well as political gesture, Vedernikov have abandoned the whole twentieth century performing experience that was not so easy. Moreover, he seemed to cancel the previous hundred years of Bolshoi's history, to zero out its Soviet biography.
Vedernikov had plenty of courage. None but a very daring person could decide in the early 2000s to openly compete with Valery Gergiev, who released productions of Richard Wagner's operas one after another at the time. Being a vague object of the Russian theater dreams and a sign of achieving the highest opera league, the Wagner repertoire had remained the monopoly of the Mariinsky Theater until 2004. The monopoly was broken with Vedernikov conducting at the Bolshoi "Flying Dutchman", creating his lean, intellectual interpretation in adherence to the HIP canons indirectly debating with the hyper-romantic interpretation of Valery Gergiev.
The performance staged by the living classic of the German theater Peter Convichny, revealed another important ingredient of Vedernikov's character - as few conductors were, was open to dialogue with directing, to collectively work for the performance theatrical wholeness. Vedernikov was a great team player who responded heatedly to the boldest decisions that the stage offered music.
This Vedernikov’s talent would mostly manifest in “Eugene Onegin” (2006), a performance that has become not just a milestone in the theatrical biography of Tchaikovsky's opera, but perhaps the central event in the Russian theater recent history. The stage decisions were suggested to Dmitry Chernyakov by the drama of the score - and Vedernikov proved to be a perfect co-author. The first sounds of Tchaikovsky's music grow out of glossing dishes, creaking chairs and other dinner noises coming from the stage – this director’s find has already entered the encyclopedia of modern opera as an exemplary example of a dialogue between music and theater. After the premiere in 2006, “Eugene Onegin” staged by Chernyakov and Vedernikov opened the season of the Opéra in Paris, toured in La Scala (Milan ) and Teatro Real (Madrid) and managed to become a perfect classic. These days, the premiere of the new version of the staging by Chernyakov takes place at the Vienna Opera. Revising “Eugene Onegin” today, many people will correlate the new readings with the Alexander Vedernikov reading at the Bolshoi.
After the Bolshoi Theater
In the eight years that Alexander Vedernikov has worked at the Bolshoi Theater, a whole era fit. Over these years, a new conductors generation has grown up in Russia, led by Theodor Currentzis and Vladimir Yurovsky. Having transferred the Bolshoi from the post-Soviet turmoil to the 21st century, in the summer of 2009 Vedernikov resigned, yielding the orchestra pit to the young colleagues. He left the Theater square, having already accepted the post of chief conductor of the Odense orchestra. For any other ex-music director of the Bolshoi Theatre, accustomed for many years to being at the top of the cultural hierarchy, this would mean going nowhere — but not for Vedernikov.
Far from devoid of ambition, he knew that even in the not-so-great-status collective of the world symphony table of ranks he could achieve a lot. In Odense, Denmark's third most important city, he immediately began to forge his first "Ring of the Nibelung". Indeed, after the Wagnerian tetralogy premiere (2018), the same year he received an invitation to move to Copenhagen to become the Danish Royal Opera artistic director.
Vedernikov had also had foreign engagements being the Bolshoi Theater musical director, but he really began his international career in 2010 — just approaching his 50th anniversary, being still very young by the standards of the conducting profession. In 2013, he debuted at the legendary New York Metropolitan Opera with the becoming mascot “Eugene Onegin”. Next, Vedernikov quickly and radically changed his repertoire profile from Russian romanticism to Western XXth century music.
At the Komische Oper in Berlin, he conducted “Salome” by Richard Strauss and “The Cunning Little Vixen” by Leos Janacek, in Copenhagen, “Nixon in China” by an American minimalist composer John Adams. Being musical cosmopolitan and polyglot, Vedernikov promptly turned from a Russian conductor mastering the world stage to becoming part of the European opera context.
In the 2010s, Vedernikov performed in Russia once in a while — and mostly on the concert stage than in the orchestra pit. In 2011, he returned to the Bolshoi Theater to conduct the world premiere of “Lost Illusions” ballet by Leonid Desyatnikov. However, both then and in later years, he seemed to have avoided the Russian scene. MAMT CEO Anton Getman wanted the Danish “Nixon in China” to set up house in Moscow, the production being planned as a cooperation one — but something went wrong. In February 2019, Vedernikov became the chief conductor of the St. Petersburg Mikhailovsky Theater, where he managed to release only one performance, "Aida", without getting significant public response.
In January 2021, Alexander Vedernikov was supposed to conduct a new production of “Parsifal” by Wagner in Copenhagen.
Vedernikov did a lot for the modern Russian opera landscape, but it was quite obvious that the semantic heart of his life and career was in the Western countries, where he probably felt more creatively free than in Russia. Abroad he at least did not need to meet anyone's expectations.
Photo: Alexander Kurov / TASS
Source.
On October 30, conductor Alexander Vedernikov passed away by coronavirus in Moscow at the age of 56. From 2001 to 2009, he was the music director of the Bolshoi Theater, and after his resignation he had a brilliant international career. For the past ten years, he has hardly performed in Russia - even after he became the chief conductor of the Mikhailovsky Theater in 2019. At the request of “Meduza”, musical critic Dmitry Renansky tells why Alexander Vedernikov will enter the latest history of Russian culture as one of its most important and most paradoxical figures.
Alexander Vedernikov consistently and maybe quite consciously broke out of all the traditional social frameworks, desperately refusing to fit into the comme-il-faut behavior. Descendant of a venerable musical dynasty, son of the famous bass Alexander Vedernikov Sr. keeper of the Bolshoi Theater of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics traditions, in the 2000s, on the main opera stage of the country, Vedernikov Jr. carried out almost the most daring reform in its history. In 2009 feeling that he had done everything he could for the Bolshoi, he resigned - making a gesture unprecedented for the Russian cultural scene, where the problem of irremovability of power in recent years is as acute as in politics.
Having left the Bolshoi and almost completely switching to the foreign music market, Vedernikov deceived expectations one more time - instead of resting on the laurels of a patented specialist in the Russian repertoire, he easily settled into the European artistic context: all his key successes in the 2010s are associated with Western music of the ХХth century, which remains terra incognita for the vast majority of Russian conductors.
At every moment of his rapid and sometimes dramatic career, Vedernikov acted and looked completely different from what one might expect from an artist of his background and his status. With his stage image and human habits, he did not resemble the inhabitant of the musical Olympus at all: he was a demonstratively non-public person, rarely gave interviews, was not engaged either in near-political games or in social activity, synonymous today with the life of a head of any large cultural corporation in Russia as well as in the West. Vedernikov, native of Moscou, preferred solitary leisure in the forests of Finland, where he had a small house near Savonlinna. Intellectual, phlegmatic, ironic, speaking an emphatically quiet voice, for a quarter of a century of his career, Alexander Vedernikov managed to refute the common axiom that conducting was a profession of the second half of a person’s life.
Before coming to the Bolshoi Theater:
musical reorganization (perestroika)
Vedernikov was lucky enough to take the stage during the years of the cultural process tectonic shifts, the change of generations in the late 1980s - early 1990s. The crisis of the "grand style" which determined the appearance of the late Soviet music and opera industry, marked the unenviable fate of its key institutions - from the Tchaikovsky competition to large symphony orchestras and large philharmonic halls, which were gradually orphaned with the departure of their long-term owners, opinion leaders, dictators and tyrants, who died one after another or faded away during the last years of the XXth century.
The new time needed new cultural heroes who could spread the ashes they inherited and rethink the structure of the post-Soviet art market. In this sense, Alexander Vedernikov looks like a direct heir to his senior colleagues Valery Gergiev and Mikhail Pletnev: while one in the early 1990s was engaged in reforging the decrepit and clumsy Kirov Opera and Ballet Theater into a dynamic Mariinka, the other founded the country's first private orchestra — the Russian National Orchestra.
In 1995, Vedernikov keenly felt this request for institutional restructuring, for the creation of new flexible cultural platforms that would have nothing to do with the Soviet past. The 31-year-old conductor becomes the musical director of the Russian Philharmonic, a symphony orchestra founded by TV-6. By the way, the Russian National Orchestra under the guidance of Mikhail Pletnev had already quite successfully existed for five years.
Indeed, in the 1990s independent musical groups in Russia popped up like mushrooms after a spring rain - but an orchestra without a permanent residence permit on the capital's stage, who independently determined the repertoire policy and did not obey any of the cultural corporations that existed at that time, still looked like something out of the ordinary, challenging the decades-old order of things. In 1998, the Russian Philharmonic collapsed after default, but in the spring of 2001 Vedernikov would be able to revive his first orchestra. This time, according to the state policy to strengthen the power hierarchy, the Moscow government would include it in the asset list.
The resume of 37-years-old Alexander Vedernikov will now include not only purely creative achievements, but also the experience of anti-crisis management. This aspect of his qualification will come into play in the summer of the same 2001, when the Minister of Culture Mikhail Shvydkoy will offer the conductor to head the Bolshoi Theater. The impressive appointment of the youngest musical director in the theater history was repeatedly strengthened by the political acoustics in which this decision was made: shortly before that, his predecessor Gennady Rozhdestvensky, the patriarch-conductor, the first to appear at the stand of the Bolshoi in 1951, had left the Bolshoi in a scandal.
Bolshoi Theater: Reset
In 2001, the arrival of Alexander Vedernikov meant for the Bolshoi tormented by personnel reshuffle, the onset of a real new century, and not only of the calendar one.
Together with the general director Anatoly Iksanov and the head of the advanced planning office Vadim Zhuravlev, Vedernikov had to find the artistic content that could fill the ideological voids that formed at the Theater Square after the fall of the USSR depriving the Bolshoi the status of the theatrical facade of the empire. Being decidedly pro-West, Vedernikov played an almost key role in this process: without the creative will of the chief conductor, all the progressive plans of his associates could remain castles in the air.
In the 2000s, the Bolshoi created the usual matrix in which the Russian opera existed until the beginning of the pandemic: there were integration into the global music and theater market, co-productions created in partnership with foreign co-production theaters, rental productions and exchange tours. And most importantly, there was a consistent assimilation on Russian soil of the artistic experience of European opera: the Vedernikov era in the Bolshoi is a triumphant march of Western directing grandees from Peter Convichny (2004) and Robert Wilson (2005) to Graham Vick (2005) and David Pountney (2008).
Renewal is the key word that determined Vedernikov's policy in the Bolshoi Theater.
It is he who will conduct the world premiere of a new opera, written for the first time in almost three decades by a contemporary composer commissioned by the theater — the sensational "Children of Rosenthal" by Leonid Desyatnikov, Vladimir Sorokin and Eimuntas Nekrošius (2005). It is he who will release the first high-profile premieres on the New Stage of the Bolshoi — a space for research and experimentation free of the history and ideology burden. Vedernikov knew firsthand how toxic this burden could be: all the time he spent in the Bolshoi, he was dominated by a subconscious comparison with the "great conductors of the Bolshoi Theater" — with Yevgeny Svetlanov, Alexander Lazarev and other adherents of the performing aesthetics he did not want at all to restore.
Critics often blamed Vedernikov for the imperfection of the artistic finish of his readings, but the conductor's ideas were much ahead of their time — and would be appreciated only many years later. Indeed, long before the experiments of Theodore Currentzis, Vedernikov was the first to instill the ideas of historically informed performance on the domestic opera stage. We should estimate the courage of Vedernikov, who performed in 2004 on the Bolshoi historical stage “Ruslan and Lyudmila”, trying to get as close as possible to how Glinka's score could sound at the 1842 world premiere.
By this radical, musical as well as political gesture, Vedernikov have abandoned the whole twentieth century performing experience that was not so easy. Moreover, he seemed to cancel the previous hundred years of Bolshoi's history, to zero out its Soviet biography.
Vedernikov had plenty of courage. None but a very daring person could decide in the early 2000s to openly compete with Valery Gergiev, who released productions of Richard Wagner's operas one after another at the time. Being a vague object of the Russian theater dreams and a sign of achieving the highest opera league, the Wagner repertoire had remained the monopoly of the Mariinsky Theater until 2004. The monopoly was broken with Vedernikov conducting at the Bolshoi "Flying Dutchman", creating his lean, intellectual interpretation in adherence to the HIP canons indirectly debating with the hyper-romantic interpretation of Valery Gergiev.
The performance staged by the living classic of the German theater Peter Convichny, revealed another important ingredient of Vedernikov's character - as few conductors were, was open to dialogue with directing, to collectively work for the performance theatrical wholeness. Vedernikov was a great team player who responded heatedly to the boldest decisions that the stage offered music.
This Vedernikov’s talent would mostly manifest in “Eugene Onegin” (2006), a performance that has become not just a milestone in the theatrical biography of Tchaikovsky's opera, but perhaps the central event in the Russian theater recent history. The stage decisions were suggested to Dmitry Chernyakov by the drama of the score - and Vedernikov proved to be a perfect co-author. The first sounds of Tchaikovsky's music grow out of glossing dishes, creaking chairs and other dinner noises coming from the stage – this director’s find has already entered the encyclopedia of modern opera as an exemplary example of a dialogue between music and theater. After the premiere in 2006, “Eugene Onegin” staged by Chernyakov and Vedernikov opened the season of the Opéra in Paris, toured in La Scala (Milan ) and Teatro Real (Madrid) and managed to become a perfect classic. These days, the premiere of the new version of the staging by Chernyakov takes place at the Vienna Opera. Revising “Eugene Onegin” today, many people will correlate the new readings with the Alexander Vedernikov reading at the Bolshoi.
After the Bolshoi Theater
In the eight years that Alexander Vedernikov has worked at the Bolshoi Theater, a whole era fit. Over these years, a new conductors generation has grown up in Russia, led by Theodor Currentzis and Vladimir Yurovsky. Having transferred the Bolshoi from the post-Soviet turmoil to the 21st century, in the summer of 2009 Vedernikov resigned, yielding the orchestra pit to the young colleagues. He left the Theater square, having already accepted the post of chief conductor of the Odense orchestra. For any other ex-music director of the Bolshoi Theatre, accustomed for many years to being at the top of the cultural hierarchy, this would mean going nowhere — but not for Vedernikov.
Far from devoid of ambition, he knew that even in the not-so-great-status collective of the world symphony table of ranks he could achieve a lot. In Odense, Denmark's third most important city, he immediately began to forge his first "Ring of the Nibelung". Indeed, after the Wagnerian tetralogy premiere (2018), the same year he received an invitation to move to Copenhagen to become the Danish Royal Opera artistic director.
Vedernikov had also had foreign engagements being the Bolshoi Theater musical director, but he really began his international career in 2010 — just approaching his 50th anniversary, being still very young by the standards of the conducting profession. In 2013, he debuted at the legendary New York Metropolitan Opera with the becoming mascot “Eugene Onegin”. Next, Vedernikov quickly and radically changed his repertoire profile from Russian romanticism to Western XXth century music.
At the Komische Oper in Berlin, he conducted “Salome” by Richard Strauss and “The Cunning Little Vixen” by Leos Janacek, in Copenhagen, “Nixon in China” by an American minimalist composer John Adams. Being musical cosmopolitan and polyglot, Vedernikov promptly turned from a Russian conductor mastering the world stage to becoming part of the European opera context.
In the 2010s, Vedernikov performed in Russia once in a while — and mostly on the concert stage than in the orchestra pit. In 2011, he returned to the Bolshoi Theater to conduct the world premiere of “Lost Illusions” ballet by Leonid Desyatnikov. However, both then and in later years, he seemed to have avoided the Russian scene. MAMT CEO Anton Getman wanted the Danish “Nixon in China” to set up house in Moscow, the production being planned as a cooperation one — but something went wrong. In February 2019, Vedernikov became the chief conductor of the St. Petersburg Mikhailovsky Theater, where he managed to release only one performance, "Aida", without getting significant public response.
In January 2021, Alexander Vedernikov was supposed to conduct a new production of “Parsifal” by Wagner in Copenhagen.
Vedernikov did a lot for the modern Russian opera landscape, but it was quite obvious that the semantic heart of his life and career was in the Western countries, where he probably felt more creatively free than in Russia. Abroad he at least did not need to meet anyone's expectations.
Photo: Alexander Kurov / TASS
Source.
Dmitry RENANSKY,
MEDUZA., October 31, 2020
MEDUZA., October 31, 2020
