Before he first collaborated with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande as a guest conductor in October 2014, Jonathan Nott had spent nearly all of his professional life working in the German-speaking world. Yet his bond with the Geneva-based orchestra – which he led in Mahler’s Seventh Symphony – became immediately evident. The wheels were soon set in motion to make Nott the OSR’s Music and Artistic Director.
Nott embarked on that role in 2017. His tenure has elevated the orchestra’s profile by expanding its repertoire as well as by increasing its visibility and making it more accessible. In February 2025, he will lead the OSR in performances of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring at their home venue in Geneva and on tour in Spain. This epochal modernist masterwork showcases the deep artistic connection forged between Nott and the OSR.
What attracted him to taking the post in Geneva? “I realised that the OSR is a different beast from the German-type of orchestras I knew,” Nott says in a video call earlier in the season. “To be in charge of a French-speaking orchestra that also has quite a big Russian tradition, in a city with the United Nations around the corner, was an intriguing cocktail for me.”
At the same time, the tradition of playing contemporary music that was championed by Ernest Ansermet – who founded the OSR in 1918 and led it for a half-century – resonated deeply. Nott has worked with many leading composers of our era and was especially aligned with Pierre Boulez, serving for several years as director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the top-flight contemporary music ensemble Boulez established in 1976.
Enriched by this surrounding mix of traditions and different nationalities, Nott points out that the OSR commands an enviable versatility: “They can move on the turn of a button” from one style to another. That the musicians additionally serve as the house orchestra for the city’s opera season at the Garnier-inspired Grand Théâtre de Genève (Switzerland’s largest stage) further enhances this flexibility.
As an example, Nott mentions a rapturously received programme he had conducted a few days before our conversation at Victoria Hall, the OSR’s home in the heart of Geneva. The programme paired Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin with Beethoven, featuring local resident Martha Argerich as the soloist in the First Piano Concerto.
“An orchestra should be able to play beautiful French music and exciting German music in the same programme, to go from one sound world into another. That’s how I see virtuosity amongst orchestras. You’ll always get the roots of an orchestra speaking through the repertoire no matter what you do.”
The type of flexibility Nott has in mind means that “if Martha wants to suddenly go left or right, she should feel free. If she or any soloist feels that the orchestra and conductor can follow every single nuance, they open up like a flower and suddenly great music can take place.”
But to maintain an ongoing sense of in-the-moment trust and adaptability “requires the orchestra to be moveable. It requires it to have enough multi-dimensionality that it will have no problem moving between totally different worlds.”
Becoming head of the OSR entailed a kind of coming full circle for Nott. Born in 1962 in England’s West Midlands, he was immersed in the Anglican choral tradition as a boy and sang in professional choirs. “I grew up enjoying French music and finding German music a tiny bit stiff,” he adds, wryly noting that by following the advice of the patron who enabled him to study as an opera coach in London, he then went on to spend years focusing on German repertoire.
Starting in the late 1980s, Nott followed the kapellmeister model and built his career through a series of positions in Germany, earning particular acclaim for his work as head of the Bamberg Symphony, as well as in Lucerne in Central Switzerland, which has remained the English conductor’s home base for many years.
Nott believes that his work with the OSR has provided him with insights into “how a language colours a performing tradition.” Through “an aesthetic that’s based on the perfume of the French language,” the OSR has developed “a sensitivity to sound – partly because of the subtlety required in order to play French music.” But these qualities can also inform interpretations of, say, Stravinsky or other Russian composers, or the German repertoire for that matter.
The OSR is Geneva’s only major symphonic orchestra. That entails “a certain danger” of falling into a rut, “because there’s no competition.” Nott recalls that “my biggest job, at the beginning, was to find my way in to make sure that the musical product was as right on the ball, as exciting as it possibly can be. It’s always a question of fusing ideas and histories and modernity, and then moving it along. In the last seven years we’ve been together, it’s been an exciting journey.”
Nott pours forth myriad reflections on music at a rapid pace, with elegance and brio – but the overriding image is of a journey through time:
“You have to be able to play with time, which is what the whole gift of music is. It certainly is my metier, which is to be a time magician. A comedian can’t possibly tell the joke in the same timing, night after night. I think the audience in all music dictates the timing. What we really want as human beings is proof that time is not linear, that there is more than simply birth to death in one straight line – that, actually, time can be bent. My job is to be so sensitive to time that I can make the linearity disappear when I take you from the first note to the last note. I think that is part of the power of music.”
While Geneva is sometimes overlooked as a cultural destination, Nott observes that “it remains a very big and generous small city. There’s an interesting mix of modern art and a big jazz tradition, a lot of electronic music, and many other facets that I knew nothing about even living as close as Lucerne. I can certainly recommend Geneva.”
Indeed, The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps) itself has a strong connection to this part of the world. It was while he was living in a rented house in Clarens, on the opposite side of Lake Geneva, that Stravinsky completed the score, working in a cramped room that could barely hold an upright piano.
What does it mean for Nott and the OSR to take up this 20th-century musical icon at this moment in time? Ernest Ansermet’s 1950 recording with the orchestra is a landmark of the Sacre discography, and the OSR also recorded it with Igor Markevich and Neeme Järvi.
“Le Sacre is also famous for how it happened, with the Ballets Russes bringing a Russian tradition to Paris, another big centre, just before the Russian Revolution and just before a big chunk of the world is going to blow itself apart. When it’s done well, Sacre is just as avant-garde, I think, as it was more than 100 years ago. It’s a kind of allegory of my desire to prove to everybody that time is not linear.”
Nott refers to the old recordings by Monteux and Ansermet. “You find that the Danse sacrale [the final section in Part Two, when the Chosen One dances herself to death] turns out to be pretty much on the limit of what was playable at the time.” Nowadays, by contrast, the standard of playing has increased to the point that student orchestras can programme Le Sacre with confidence.
“So it’s not a dangerous piece anymore. I want to recreate the danger of it. Part of the way I can do that is by dancing it musically – meaning that we have a certain flow that is not pre-meditated. It’s not just about getting it metronomically correct.”
“Or take the opening of Part Two, which is a long bit of very Debussy-esque, colourful bitonal music. It gets its power from the subtle balance of these added-note chords – which is why it becomes very nice doing Sacre with a French-rooted orchestra. There is a Frenchness that gives this music a poetry, a sensuality.”
Nott has conducted Le Sacre from memory several times. “It’s one of the scariest pieces to conduct by heart. But when I do that, by definition, I communicate with the players in a different way than if I have a score. This will be the third time I’ve done it with the OSR. I’m intrigued by the various tweaks that Stravinsky made during the course of his life.” A new critical performing edition was issued in 2021, for example.
“Le Sacre becomes a kind of mirror to who you are at the time in which you approach it. I think that’s as true for the audience as it is for the players, as it is for me as a conductor. And that is the definition of a stroke of genius, isn’t it?”
Jonathan Nott and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande perform The Rite of Spring on 5th & 6th February in Geneva, and on tour from 11th–16th February.
This article was sponsored by the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande.
