It is a lifetime since the Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan was dubbed “the general music director of Europe” as he piloted his private jet between engagements in Berlin, Vienna, Salzburg, Milan and London in the 1950s and 60s. That was another world, and no conductor since Karajan’s time, thank goodness, has either sought or acquired such a classical music empire. But if, in its much changed and more devolved musical landscape, Europe does have anything like a general music director today, then there’s a case for saying that the job is about to belong to Philippe Jordan.
The 42-year-old Swiss, who learned his trade at the feet of his conductor father Armin Jordan in Zurich and then of Daniel Barenboim in Berlin, does not conduct much in the UK. That’s not because he is an Anglophobe – on the contrary, English was his first language at home and he has conducted at Glyndebourne and with the Philharmonia. The fact that Jordan’s name is not nearly as familiar here as it ought to be says more about British insularity than about Jordan’s talents. Perhaps significantly, the same unfamiliarity for British audiences also applies to the conductor of his generation to whom Jordan can most obviously be compared, the Russian-born Kirill Petrenko, who is about to succeed Simon Rattle in Berlin.
Jordan’s last appearance in the UK was a Prom with the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra in 2016. But Jordan is not primarily a symphony orchestra conductor. First and foremost he is an opera man. Since 2009 he has been music director of the Paris Opera, which he has taken to its highest levels of all-round excellence in many years. And from 2020, he will take over the Vienna State Opera, where even Mahler and Karajan struggled to survive in charge, a post where job security and public backbiting make managing Real Madrid or leading the Conservative party look like a cakewalk.
This week Jordan was at the centre of one of European music’s most significant first nights of the decade. On Tuesday he conducted Verdi’s Don Carlos at Paris’s Opéra Bastille, with an exceptional cast including tenor Jonas Kaufmann in the title role and the three outstanding performers of the evening, Sonya Yoncheva as Elizabeth, Elina Garanca as Eboli and Ludovic Tézier as Posa.
Though the radical staging by Krzysztof Warlikowski was booed by the normally cutting-edge Paris audience, this was beyond question a musical event of the highest importance. More than anything that was because, to mark the 150th anniversary of the opera’s premiere, also in Paris, Jordan was conducting probably the most complete version of the original French-language version of the work ever heard in a major opera house. In doing so, Jordan established more persuasively and idiomatically than ever before that Don Carlos truly is, as he called it in a programme essay, “un opéra français”.
Yet this is not Jordan’s only major premiere of the year. In July he conducted Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at the Bayreuth festival in a notable new production by Barrie Kosky. One of the most striking things about that Meistersinger, as it was in this week’s Paris Don Carlos, was the fluent but unobtrusive way Jordan’s conducting worked to enhance the production. There was no sense on either occasion, as there undoubtedly would have been under Karajan, of the conductor doing everything his own predetermined way.
Jordan has made a point of describing himself in interviews as a kapellmeister. In some circles the German designation is seen rather patronisingly, suggesting a workaday competence but little flair. Jordan points out that the more glamorous designation of a conductor as a “maestro”, routinely used in the US for instance, comes from exactly the same root – a maestro di cappella. He argues that good conductors come out of the opera pit and that you learn the job by doing it. He cites greats such as Karl Böhm and Carlos Kleiber as proof of that approach. To his dying day, the composer Richard Strauss always described himself as a kapellmeister.
When I talked to Jordan in Paris last month, he made it clear that he sees the job of music director as one that extends to the whole of the theatre and to the full span of its work. Not for him a music directorship that is in reality a chief guest conductorship. Jordan works prodigiously hard: on the day we met he rehearsed the Paris orchestra in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande in the morning, the chorus for Don Carlos in the afternoon and took a full-stage rehearsal of Mozart’s Così fan tutte in the evening. He has been closely involved in hiring many of the 174 players of whom he is in charge at the Bastille and the older Palais Garnier. It is part of an approach he grew up with, which he has developed in Paris, and which he clearly intends to take to Vienna.
- Don Carlos is in rep at Paris Opéra Bastille until 11 November.
