Soviet Conductor Temirkanov to Open Hollywood Bowl Season

NEW YORK — On Tuesday night, when Yuri Temirkanov makes his West Coast debut conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he will be, at least for part of the evening, the center of attention for one of the summer’s most fashionable society events--opening night of the Hollywood Bowl season.

But fashion seemed the last thing on the Soviet conductor’s mind one recent afternoon, the day after his arrival here to conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.

Greeting a visitor to the apartment where he is staying, Temirkanov wears jeans, a work shirt and slippers. There is a filterless cigarette in his mouth; it is the first of those that will eventually overflow an ashtray during the interview. His voice sounds raw.

Temirkanov, a small and wiry man, sits down on the couch and braces himself to field questions, via an interpreter, like a boxer ready to respond to a punch. He is, amazingly for a Soviet and amazingly for a conductor, unguarded in what he says.

An uncompromising quality comes across, in fact, in almost everything Temirkanov says; and when he says something really tough, there is a big, hoarse laugh and a disarming sparkle in his eye.

For instance, when Temirkanov became the artistic director and chief conductor of the Kirov Opera in 1977, one of the first things he did was to stage his own version of Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin,” because he “just couldn’t stand modern productions.”

In nearly all aspects of music and music making, Temirkanov is an unapologetic--indeed, practically a belligerent--traditionalist. But modernist opera directors come in for particular criticism.

“I hate all these modern directors who think they are more intelligent than the composers who wrote the opera,” Temirkanov says.

“They don’t even try to understand what the composer wanted to say. They don’t even ask. They want to show off themselves with the help of the composer. Direction is the heart of the performance, and when the heart is healthy you are not aware of it.”

But that is just the first of Temirkanov’s complaints about modern musical life. Beginning in the fall, Temirkanov will become music director of the Leningrad Philharmonic, succeeding the legendary Yevgeny Mravinsky, who died earlier this year.

Temirkanov is concerned about the orchestra’s quality of playing because he says Mravinsky was so “sick or old” for the last decade or so that he “hardly worked with the orchestra.” Making improvements, however, will not be easy.

“Unfortunately, too many good musicians have left the Soviet Union. Fewer leave now, but now our orchestras have reached the point where they really feel they haven’t got the good musicians.”

Heading the Leningrad Philharmonic and the Kirov Opera makes Temirkanov the most important musician in Leningrad, a city he has lived in since his teens, when he moved there from the Caucasus, where he was born in 1938.

But Temirkanov is also one of the most widely traveled modern Soviet conductors. For the past nine years he has been principal guest conductor of the Royal Philharmonic (Andre Previn’s London orchestra), and he has recorded and toured with it extensively.

Temirkanov is also becoming increasingly known in the United States. In 1986, he appeared with the New York Philharmonic as the first Soviet conductor invited to the country since the renewal of the Soviet-American Cultural Exchange Agreement. And this summer he is appearing with many American orchestras, including Boston and Chicago, besides Philadelphia and Los Angeles.

As for American orchestras, Temirkanov has much praise for them. The language barrier means that he must communicate to foreign musicians mainly with his hands, but he says, “the less talk the better.” And Temirkanov says that he finds that American orchestras have a stylistic feel for Russian music, music he will feature in his two-week stint at the Bowl.

Ultimately, however, nationality means little to Temirkanov. “For me, there is no Russian music, Italian, German or French music. And the same goes for orchestras. There is only good music and not very good music. Good orchestras and bad orchestras.

“The Canadian pianist Glenn Gould was the best performer of Bach in the world. I think the Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter plays the best Beethoven. So you shouldn’t divide musicians by their nationality. You divide them by the measure of talent God gave them.”

One wonders, though, how the Soviet conductor’s high standards will fare at an outdoor arena such as Hollywood Bowl, where sonic and even artistic compromises must be made.

“In principle, a place like Hollywood Bowl is a good thing, because it brings lots of the public,” he says. But that doesn’t mean that Temirkanov has any intention of catering to the masses.

“I think that now the standard of culture and art in general is lower or is going down as it is being intended to reach more and more people,” he says, as he describes his abhorrence at most popular culture.

“I think that the new generation has too easily cast away the old values, the old culture, for the sake of this new, modern fashion, and it’s very dangerous. I think it’s dangerous for the future of the culture, because our culture is thousands of years old, and you can’t create it again if you destroy it.

“We have a proverb in (the) Caucasus: If you fire a pistol into your past, then the future will fire a cannon into you.”