For one night only: Jorma Panula in Riga

Jorma Panula is now 94, and anyone who sees or hear him conduct these days is likely to be a fellow musician: one of his many conducting students, or a member of the ensembles they are leading. You will trawl YouTube in vain for examples of Panula putting into practice the wisdom he has imparted to generations of conductors: Sakari Oramo, Osmo Vänskä, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Klaus Mäkelä, Santtu-Matias Rouvali... you name them, Panula has taught them. Typically, this rare chance to catch Panula in action took place as the culmination of a week of masterclasses in Riga.

As soloist in Richard Strauss' Oboe Concerto, Egils Upatnieks took a couple of minutes to warm to his task. It may be that, as principal oboe of the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra, he is unused to the spotlight, though oboists are soloists by nature. Once settled into his groove, he unfolded the concerto not as the usual endless stream of melody, but as a conversation piece in the mould of other late-Strauss works: the yang to Metamorphosen’s yin, a scene without words from Capriccio, requiring the attentive complicity of his orchestral colleagues.

Panula drew unobtrusive attention to the opening flutter in the bass as a unifying leitmotif for the whole concerto. Upatnieks’s sound is lighter and narrower than some of his central-European counterparts: more a swallow than a nightingale. His keen, vocal phrasing of the slow movement brought to mind a gallery of Straussian heroines, left alone for a moment with their thoughts: the Marschallin and the Empress as well as the Countess. 

Conducting is good for you, they say – all that cardio-vascular exercise of hours spent with arms raised above the heart – and Panula is a walking advert for its health benefits, cutting a remarkably spry figure. Any assumption that his minimalist body language in the Strauss had been occasioned by physical rather than artistic necessity was soon dispelled by the Second Symphony of Sibelius. Each gesture was proportionate to its effect, though that idea puts the cart before the horse.

Panula is not the first aged maestro to demonstrate that less can be more; that the alchemy of charisma and technique, a mystery to the rest of us, may shape a complex form with absolute economy of means, as if to fulfil Hokusai’s stated ambition to make a whole painting from a single stroke of the brush. Perhaps it’s obvious to say, but Panula conducts the musicians, and they make the music. What he never does, on this evidence, is to make a ballet from the score. If the attention of the audience is inevitably focused on him, it transfers through his movement to the form and expression of the notes brought to life by the orchestra. Some of his celebrated students could do with a top-up lesson in this regard.

Thus the first movement of the symphony began in plain-spoken fashion, picking up where the Strauss left off: an approach that can work for Sibelius, but one we don’t associate with the Tchaikovskian passions of the Second. Through the course of the development, however, Panula generated the uncanny illusion of the music listening to itself: not a “performance” of fixed dimensions but an evolving dialogue, a living thing. A broad basic pulse bore fruit at the climax of that development with one of those tremendous sudden crises unique to Sibelius. The same pulse then set the slow movement into unusually forthright motion, as an instrumental recitative to match the eloquence of the Strauss concerto.

More impressive still, the long finale, so often falling into an episodic sequence of nationalistic tableaux, maintained symphonic tension through every bar. It takes more than conducting to achieve such fierce and unrelenting focus, of course, and the LNSO played out of their skins. On the night, their commitment was all the more palpable when experienced from close quarters, in the old shoebox-shaped Riga Latvian Society House, one of several venues drafted into commission while the orchestra’s usual home undergoes renovation. Panula has far more years on him than the orchestra had personnel on stage. But numbers don’t begin to tell the story. You had to be there – except you didn’t, quite, because Latvian Radio broadcast the concert live; for now, it can be replayed on Latvian Public Media (external link).

Peter's press trip was funded by the Riga Investment and Tourism Agency