Conductor and pianist Maxim Emelyanychev plays, dreams and lives music: ‘it is the language of everything’

No, he smiles, his parents did not name him after the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, whose surname was his hometown of Nizhny Novgorod when he was born in the late 1980s. There, pianist and conductor Maxim Emelyanychev (37) quickly became a musical phenomenon. At the local choir school, his classmates renamed him Mozart, because he did not hesitate to write out a piece of music by ear and, if necessary, for a different instrumentation than the original instrumentation.

“The Internet was in its infancy, and in cities outside the musical centers of St. Petersburg and Moscow, scores could be difficult to obtain,” he says. “And that required ingenuity. Besides, almost everyone at school had a nickname. I remember ‘Beethoven’, a boy who always hammered on the grand piano with a serious facial expression – almost angry.”

Emelyanychev is approaching forty, but the years do not yet seem to have any effect on his student-like appearance. He sucks on a water bottle and looks from the window of the conductor’s room in the Concertgebouw to the summer terrace further away. It is mid-July and in an hour he will perform works by Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart with the Orchester de Chambre de Paris.

This season, Emelyanychev stands in Amsterdam in the Spotlight series with five performances. This week he conducts the Concertgebouw Orchestra in, among other things Vents et lyres – a world premiere by the Finnish composer Lotta Wennäkoski for recorder player Lucie Horsch – and Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony ‘Pathétique’.

“Yes, Tchaikovsky,” he sighs. “I largely grew up with his music. So much tragedy, so much hope, sometimes against my better judgment. He paints life, navigates between sadness and joy. And in his last works, with the Pathetique as a swan song, Tchaikovsky delves into fate. How man struggles with this. It is his story, his own struggle. Tchaikovsky is the hero of the Sixth Symphony, which does not end with the bonfire of victory as with Beethoven, but with a dying heartbeat.”

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All-encompassing

He plays, lives and dreams music, says Emelyanychev. His mother sang in a choir, his father was a trumpet player in an orchestra, so the earliest memories of childhood are in concert halls. His parents gave him Mozart’s Requiem as his first album. “A performance by the American conductor Leonard Bernstein,” he says, waving his hand slowly. “Slow, but beautiful.”

Emelyanychev embodies another Mozart school: not a large, cumbersome orchestra like Bernstein’s, but a small and agile company. He expresses his ideal image with, among others, the Swiss baroque ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro. A new part of their series of Mozart symphonies, for which they won an Edison two years ago, was recently published.

“In my view, music is the language of everything. Notes came before words in my life, revealing more. In many pieces by Mozart or Bach I hear the universe, something all-encompassing, and sometimes they reach a perfection that I look for in vain in other arts or sciences. Because music moves not only the mind, but also the heart. It has so many layers.”

This view partly stems from the choir school where he spent his youth. “The days revolved around music. And the teachers understood our desire to realize that dream and find a future in it. So they turned a blind eye when we neglected another subject. After all, we didn’t need that anymore later. But the boys who did not become musicians paid a high price. Their level of knowledge was too low for university. So that opportunity went up in smoke or they had to catch up with private teachers for several years. But I experienced a wonderful time, in which I could devote myself entirely to music – my window on the world – and attended concerts almost every day.”

Nizhny Novgorod was traditionally a stage of the avant-garde, the place where composers ‘exiled’ from Moscow and Petersburg during the Soviet period were still allowed to perform their works. Baroque music, with which Emelyanychev has made a name for himself in recent years, only came onto the radar at the age of fourteen, when he was asked to conduct the Russian Youth Orchestra.

“It was a Mozart symphony. A committed teacher from the Moscow Conservatory lent me numerous recordings of Viennese classics, played by the pioneers of the old music style: Trevor Pinnock, Roger Norrington, Frans Brüggen and John Eliot Gardiner. How inspiring I found it to listen to that different approach: gut strings, natural horns, the rhetoric, and all that for me unknown colors. A new language.”

Paradoxes

New worlds opened up in Moscow and Emelyanychev discovered that everything and everyone can be a teacher in life. “Even people you’ve never met,” he agrees. “My main influences were Norrington and Brüggen, whose recordings I had only heard. But both showed me a different perspective than I was familiar with. There are two sides to old music. First it is about historical research: what did Mozart and Bach sound like in their own century? But then you want to give listeners new and fresh notes, you want to create the illusion that these pieces are of our time, that they reflect feelings that people now have. life. And on that path a musician encounters the necessary paradoxes.”

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