“It seems like the way I breathe music and feel music is something which naturally feels very close to what they are expecting.” In September 2015, when it was announced that Jakub Hrůša was to be the next Chief Conductor of the Bamberg Symphony, he was just 34 – surprisingly young, you might think, to take on the top job at a major German orchestra. But after just two seasons in the job, it’s obviously an appointment that has delighted both parties, since the contract has been extended to run until 2026. “There’s a combination of factors behind this decision”, he tells me, “and also the plain thing that I'm happy there as a human being. I feel by instinct, by intuition, not only rationally, that it's a place that does good to me. I need and like busy cities, but being at a calmer place such as Bamberg, you reach something which is typical for festival activities, that people focus in a different way than during the season. Yet in Bamberg, this is the season – this is the place where you can really focus on a daily basis. And it’s a very beautiful place.”
The relationship is founded on a mutual desire to explore and to build, with the orchestra “open personally to explore all possible details of music, all possible kinds of repertoire, all possible approaches, all possible layouts, all possible types of project.” But it’s also predicated on clocking in generous quantities of time together. When I point out that Hrůša is conducting an unusually large number of concerts with the Bambergers next year, he is clear that this is essential for him to achieve his goals. “Honestly, if there is a mutual conviction that the role of the Chief Conductor is not only to appear occasionally and squeeze out as much as possible from one week here and one week there, if the conviction is that the Chief Conductor is there to influence the orchestra profoundly, and if the orchestra is really convinced that their Chief Conductor is worth spending time with, then the only way to make the whole thing meaningful is to spend enough time. It means losing the time for other activities, that's the nature of things.”
I remind Hrůša that when we interviewed him in 2015, in between the announcement and the official start date of his Chief Conductor role, he praised the Bamberg sound as “disarmingly beautiful” and that he needed “to be careful not to damage anything”. That’s still valid, he says. “Actually, I have since forgotten that I said that, but I'm proud, because it's really what's needed. At the same time, it doesn't mean a strategy of ‘hands off’. Like every passionate conductor, I have an inclination to influence and to take the sound in my own direction, but at the back of my head there's always this respect to what exists already. My role is to influence and yet to preserve what's already a quality, and in Bamberg, there's so much of that quality that I wanted to be careful. Yet we found out that our aesthetic feelings and our inclinations in sound are very close, so the things I'm influencing are, it seems to me, considered right by the orchestra.”
I ask for an example. “If you want a phrase to have more of a Lieder or cantabile character, and yet not lose the structural vertical feeling in the string section, that takes much longer in other orchestras than in Bamberg, where there's a natural inclination to present the linear beautiful melodies like that. It's as if, when I am expressing what I want, I am materialising what they instinctively want themselves.”
The commitment of time, he repeats, is key. “We prepare things very beautifully in the rehearsals, but in the concerts, we can really feel free to react on the situation at the moment. There's something that can really grow beautiful only when you spend enough time together and where there is a trust. One of the nicest gifts and rewards to me coming from my work in Bamberg is that pure joy of orchestral musicians: it's not so often the case that orchestral musicians live through every concert with this kind of joy. So I'm trying to be as scrupulous, as clear, precise, even pedantic in the rehearsal process. I try, honestly put, to train the orchestra. But then in the concert, I cannot be a trainer any more, or someone who controls. I'm not judging, then: the concerts for me, are a different category of experience than rehearsals, very free, open to what's happening, fit to react. This is something which seems to me works very well in Bamberg, and something which they like to explore together.”
“It's a very different culture in Germany. The orchestras are willing to work on things in terms of days, not hours. And that's a very precious thing, because more and more, in the West, everything is faster and faster, and people are used to putting programmes together in one or two days. In Britain, orchestras are actually amazing in how well they can do that, but I think there are different realms of quality which can be only reached if one spends enough time.”
The trust and ability to react are also essential for an orchestra that tours extensively and plays in different halls, which can sound very different from each other, but where you might get as little as half an hour to do a sound check. He’s still trying to figure out ways of managing the fact that the sound on the rostrum can be very different from the sound in the hall. In rehearsal, he has taken to choosing a passage which the orchestra can play without a conductor and going to listen from various places in the hall. “It's unnerving, because sometimes, it's shocking what you find out. You are very confidently saying something to the orchestra and then you go and you realise that actually, it’s not like that… There's this witty comment that the worst place to listen to the orchestra is on the conductor's rostrum. In the opera as well, in the pit, what a horrible sound! At least there, in 99% of cases, you can guarantee that it's better over there behind you, so if you're getting happy, it means it can be really beautiful for the audience…”