Gustavo Who?: Four Young(ish) Conductors On The Rise

A gathering of the world’s top conductors would resemble a vintage portrait of the Supreme Court: a small club of elderly men looking sober and perpetual. In recent years, though, orchestras have been cultivating the next generation of leaders, who look much like the last one, only younger. (For multiple and elusive reasons, few women and even fewer people of color make it to the upper middle slice of the profession, let alone the peak.) And a conductor’s career is still a long, slow slog of lonely hotel rooms and dawn flights, so “young” is a relative term. The occasional prodigy becomes famous in his early twenties, notably the Venezuelan phenomenon Gustavo Dudamel, who was recently designated music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. But most major maestros are just hitting their stride about the time baseball players retire. What follows is a non-exhaustive, idiosyncratic roundup of conductors with (hopefully) a longer future than a past.

With his wavy black locks and intense good looks, Vladimir Jurowski might be considered Moscow’s answer to Dudamel, if he had not actually preceded the Venezuelan onto the platinum-podium circuit. A gifted interpreter of Slavic opera who has become a mainstay at the Met, Jurowski now regularly leads the Russian National Orchestra, his country’s primary private, post-Communist organization. In his recording of Tchaikovsky’s Suite No. 3, he captures the mercurial mixture of Mozartian elegance, breezy charm and Russian melancholy, the shimmering brightness from 100-candle chandeliers and the encroaching shadows on the heart. It’s a seductive performance of seductive music, the flexible tempos and changes of direction all executed with precisely calibrated urgency.

Mikko Franck was a boy maestro at seventeen, and by the time he was in his mid-twenties he was circling the world’s choicest podiums. Baby-faced, squat, and hobbled by a back injury that forces him to sit during most rehearsals, he doesn’t seem particularly prepossessing — until he raises his baton, at which point he projects an unassailable natural authority. I once watched him quickly assemble a complicated contemporary piece, briskly persuading the players of its worth not with praise or lectures but simply by waving the stick so clearly that the music snapped into focus. He does the same for the music of Einojuhani Rautavaara, whose evening-length phrases and relentless earnestness can produce a glutinous effect, but whose Symphony No. 1 Franck conducts like a true believer. I’m more excited by his Sibelius, an obligatory specialty for Finnish conductors, who seem to absorb his music in childhood, along with a taste for pickled beets. With its elves-in-the-woods brass chords, depressive melodies and rhapsodic crescendos, En Saga is difficult to get right, but Franck is a master at managing the flow of molten energy, and the Swedish Radio Symphony sounds eager to be managed. The final minutes, in which a clarinet solo wafts over a misty pool of trembling strings, has the aching vividness of a romantic landscape.

Finland grows conductors as prodigally as Florida grows oranges, and most of them seem to have shared a sandbox with the country’s two principal composers: Magnus Lindberg and Kajia Saariaho. Sakari Oramo is younger than either, but his recording of Lindberg’s Clarinet Concerto with the Finnish Radio Symphony and the astonishing soloist Kari Kriikku is more than just a boosterish project to promote the country’s musical exports; it’s the product of a genuine community of musicians. Finnish conductors and composers have developed complementary styles and Oramo handles the manic demands of Lindberg’s skittish, scurrying, colorful and busy music with the aplomb of a musician who thrives on executing complex musical maneuvers at breakneck speeds.

Gianandrea Noseda’s performance of Liszt’s symphonic poem Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne (“What You Hear on the Mountain”) opens with a rustle of strings that grazes audibility until the horns come in quietly but unmistakably in ripples of glorious danger. You can hear the hand of a marvelous conductor in the spacious breath of those first sounds, the reined-in pianissimos hinting at reverberant climaxes to come. Noseda knows how to draw a great long line, and there is something of Herbert Von Karajan in his deep breath and flexible beat. Even more remarkable is Noseda’s feel for Liszt’s expansive but eccentric rhetorical style. When the tune finally blooms, it appears to have sprung just that moment into the listener’s imagination, a gaseous idea rushing in to take its material form. Another tone poem, Tasso: Lamento e Trionfo “Lament and Triumph,” based on the poetry of the Renaissance Italian poet Torquato Tasso) sounds as if it were being exhaled slowly and deliberately, a fragrant breath escaping some cosmic lung.