Well folks, he's back – not that it has felt for one moment that he's been away.
It's some months since I reported that Estonian conductor Neeme Jarvi had been ordered off the park by the medics: down tools, put the baton away, cancel all concerts and recording arrangements, take a rest and lie down. Mental and physical exhaustion had finally caught up with the big man.
It's 30 years since Jarvi exploded on to the UK music scene, first through a stint with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, then, momentously in 1984, when he took up his position as principal conductor at the now RSNO. There he erupted into the orchestra like a life force. Musicians could only talk about one thing: his incredible spontaneity. He didn't say much (his English was minimal at the time). But clearly he didn't need to. Those big, long arms would extend and raise and the music would pour forth, with nothing ever the same twice.
An enormous voltage and power raced through the band, from the bottom of their boots to their fingertips. Jarvi took incredible risks and was endlessly daring in his diversity. They absolutely loved it, and him. He was tireless and insatiable in his appetite for exploring music, and absolutely obsessed with having it all enshrined on record.
There's a huge back story to that obsession, which he never made a big deal of; but which emerged at our very first, all-evening meeting in a West End flat before he took up and settled into his SNO post. It was rambling, and his English was no good yet, but it was to do with identity, his early days in Estonia, the implicit threat of toeing the party line or, bluntly, "go and pick potatoes with your orchestra". His identity, felt Jarvi, had been airbrushed from Estonian (Soviet) culture.
Life since then seems to have had a subtext: get that identity back and re-established. He has always wanted to move on, from orchestra to orchestra, conquering the world, from repertoire to repertoire: always something new, always something unexpected. He was unstoppable. It was breathless in its pace. And get it all recorded, with his name attached. I remember one RSNO principal recalling, with hilarity, that they were almost tentative about taking a coffee break: "Every time we came back there was yet more new stuff that we hadn't seen on the music stands."
The concerts were electric, and the recordings the same, losing not one iota of that suppleness and spontaneity. Through the cycle of Prokofiev's symphonies, then that ultra-sumptuous and exhilarating Richard Strauss series and the electrifying Shostakovich selection of symphonies, all for Chandos, the man and the music just blew the world away.
And so it continues. Jarvi, as well as guest-conducting all over the world, holds six posts, some of them honorary, which will mean one or two appearances each season. He is music and artistic director of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande (OSR), artistic director of the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra (a highly symbolic post for him), chief conductor emeritus of Residentie Orchestre The Hague, music director emeritus of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, principal conductor emeritus of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and conductor laureate of the RSNO. His list of guest conductorships is almost endless.
He has amassed, through that obsession already mentioned, a colossal CD repertoire of some 450 recordings bearing his name. Month by month this year Chandos have released a new Jarvi recording featuring one or other of his orchestras. A week or two ago, I checked in at the Chandos press office, to hear the following words: "He's off; he's away; he's up and running again!"
Indeed he is, in a new Chandos recording with the RSNO featuring more music by Richard Strauss, including a rarity in the ballet, Joseph's Legend, written for the Ballets Russes. Jarvi's still not going over his own footprints. This stuff is all new. I'll review it asap. Without a doubt, the Big Man is back.
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