Gee, Thanks, Norman.

Outspoken critic Norman Lebrecht defended Gerard Schwarz during his contentious tenure with his other orchestra, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic (see his August 2004 article here). But today’s post on his blog, La Scena Musicale, shows Schwarz is clearly yesterday’s bangers and mash; Lebrecht is “all googly-goo” (in my plus-one’s colorful phrase) over the orchestra’s current conductor (since November 2006), Vasily Petrenko.

Not undeservedly, of course. “Russian to the rescue,” reads Lebrecht's headline, and Petrenko’s certainly revived the orchestra: “Then Liverpool, as its footballers do when all seems lost, threw caution to the winds and struck lucky. Two years ago it took on a Russian conductor of 29 years old and no prior form. Since then Vasily Petrenko has set the town alight. His concerts are electrifying, the audience age has dropped by two decades and some of the new string players look barely out of school. Attendances are up 40 percent since he arrived.”

Of course, there’s also a thinly-veiled—well, not veiled at all, really—dig at Schwarz: “The Phil are . . . out to erase a miserable period in which the country’s second-oldest concert society (est. 1840) seemed to be fading out on a sigh of weary programmes and dull conductors.” (I can’t vouch for Schwarz’s concerts, but his recent recordings, at least, with the RLPO of Mahler and Strauss, two specialties of his, are anything but dull. Chacun a son gout. On Avie Records, the CDs continue to be available via the RLPO Web site.)

Lebrecht continues: “What the players saw in Petrenko was a conductor who was prepared to stand up and take responsibility. When one of them said ‘we gave a rubbish concert in Preston last week,’ his reply was ‘even if it didn’t click with the conductor, think of the audience who came – you need to give yourselves completely.’ Six months into his appointment, the orchestra renewed him to 2012. He has replaced 15 players – one-sixth of the ensemble – without ructions or dissent, discussing everything he does in a warm, inclusive manner.”

It’s not quite widespread enough yet to be a trend, but the hiring of the peach-fuzzed Petrenko naturally recalls the L.A. Philharmonic’s recent appointment of Venezuelan boy wonder Gustavo Dudamel, whose ascent has been the biggest story in classical music since, roughly, the invention of music notation. (He got the job last April, when he was 26.) All well and good, but there is, to say the least, a finite number of 20-something conductors capable of being a major orchestra’s music director. So far, American orchestras seem to be exercising caution: there’s no rush to clamber onto the young-conductor lifeboat as a miraculous cure-all for a struggling industry, no reports of the world’s conservatories being ransacked for the next Zac Efron of the podium. The successful debut of Petrenko, though, might suggest a path to the Seattle Symphony’s current board about where to take the organization after Schwarz, whose current contract runs through 2011.

ADDENDUM: Some better Schwarz news: CD label Naxos of America has announced a partnership with the Delos label, which should mean increased distribution for recordings Schwarz made earlier in his career with the Seattle Symphony, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and others. And in today's New York Times, Allan Kozinn reviewed the opening concert in the annual Mostly Mozart festival without alluding to Schwarz's oft-criticized term at the festival's helm—which had seemed to be de rigueur for the Times' M.M. coverage since Schwarz's 2001 departure.

Topics: Classical Music

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