Karina Canellakis was appointed Chief Conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic back in May 2018, just two months after making her first guest-appearance with the orchestra - and if their debut on Pentatone with Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra and Four Pieces is anything to go by, it's proved to be a match made in heaven.
On her last working day before heading off on maternity-leave, Karina was kind enough to fit in one more Zoom-call to talk to me about the challenges of balancing lyricism and energy in Bartók's music, making the difficult to decision to step back from her 'very stable, wonderful life' as a violinist in order to pursue a conducting career - and how she knew that her relationship with the Dutch orchestra was meant to be as soon as the players broke for coffee mid-way through their first rehearsal together...
Firstly, a big thank-you - it's so great to have a new recording of the Four Pieces, which are so sparsely represented on disc...
I absolutely love the Four Pieces. If I had to come up with a theory as to why they haven’t been performed more often, it would probably be because of the sheer difficulty of the Scherzo: that movement makes me think of a giant beast that’s running and climbing all over the place! There are a lot of tempo-changes, and to get everybody to really feel that together is very tricky. It sounds a bit like The Miraculous Mandarin in places, and I think you can also hear a lot of Bluebeard’s Castle (one of my favourite pieces of all time).
They were originally written for two pianos, so I think part of the difficulty stems from that. It’s always challenging when a piano work is transcribed for orchestra, even if by the composer, and there are certain things that are sometimes quite difficult for an entire orchestra to execute with as much agility as one could manage on the piano.
You began your musical life as a violinist – was that when Bartók’s music first crossed your path?
Yes, definitely. I go back a long way with the solo violin sonata, which is technically the very last thing he ever wrote, along with the uncompleted Viola Concerto. I adore that piece, and I think I’ve practised it so much over the years that it’s ingrained in my soul somehow: even if I haven’t played in weeks I can still take out my violin and play the end of it! And the quartets had a big impact on me – I used to play a lot of chamber music, and I’ve worked a lot on Nos. 2 and 4 in particular.
So I was always in love with his music: ‘expressive’ is a very generalised word to use, but it’s expressive without using traditionally Romantic harmonies, and that can be difficult. If you think about other twentieth-century composers such as Shostakovich or Stravinsky or Prokofiev, I wouldn’t necessarily describe their music as emotionally expressive in the same way: Shostakovich can be, but a lot of the time there’s such a strong political message behind his music, for instance when he paints those visceral pictures of war.
The big difference with Bartók is that his music is so highly personal: when I was playing as a violinist, what really grabbed me about his music was this sense of opening up his own soul and delving into what was going on in his life. I think that’s very present on this recording, in both the Concerto for Orchestra (particularly the middle movement) and the Four Pieces.
What sparked your initial interest in conducting?
I was always interested in orchestral scores, and part of that came from my dad (who’s also a conductor). I grew up in a very small New York City apartment with a lot of shared space, and every day of my young life I’d be sitting at one side of the dining-room table doing my homework while he sat opposite me studying scores. My dad believes that every musician should know at least something about conducting and score-reading and understanding the big picture: being able to harmonically analyse a piece and to play it a little bit at the piano, being aware of how all the other instruments of the orchestra function. My younger brother’s now a fantastic cellist, and the two of us took conducting classes from the age of about twelve.
I occasionally conducted things with my student orchestra in high school, and I played concertos with my dad conducting when I was really little. I have a particularly vivid memory of Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 with him when I was about twelve, and feeling super-awkward about standing there alone in front of this incredible orchestra of adults…with my back to them! There’s this beautiful romantic orchestral tutti between the first and second movements, and I remember wanting so badly to turn around and have contact with them. So I guess the signs were already there…
And at what stage did you consider pursuing it professionally?
It wasn’t until I was in my late twenties that I dared to take time away from my life as a violinist, because that was a very stable, wonderful life: I loved playing chamber music and I played in some fantastic orchestras, so there really wasn’t any reason for me to make such a drastic change to the rhythm that I was in. It was a combination of factors that made me reconsider, but I think the seed definitely started to sprout during my time in the Berliner Philharmoniker: there I was at 23, working with all these great conductors, but in all that time I never, ever played under a woman. It took me a while to trust that I could even think of conducting as a realistic prospect, rather than thinking ‘If only I were a guy…!’.
A number of people who’d worked with me as either a soloist or a concert-master over the years had suggested I think about conducting, but Simon Rattle was the most influential – and the pushiest! Simon kept on telling me that there was something there which I couldn’t ignore, and insisted that I could make a go of it if that was what I wanted: he wouldn’t let it drop, and I’m so grateful to him for that.
Once you did take the plunge, did you encounter any gender-based barriers or resistance – or was the tide already beginning to turn by then?
I feel like I’ve been fine! I did feel like a real black sheep sometimes when I was first starting out, because that was before #MeToo and the whole movement to get more female composers and conductors out there - but that being said, I never consciously thought about it once I was actually working. The minute I got onto the podium I was so completely inside the music, and the orchestral players were inside it with me; I think people are more than ready to welcome good musicians and good music-making regardless of everything else, and that’s the response I’ve got pretty much across the board.
Did you ever experiment with directing from violin?
I did a few play-conducting things with chamber orchestras, but my heart wasn’t really in it because I love big repertoire – the more people on stage the better! I love opera, particularly Wagner and Strauss, Britten and Janáček, and I get to conduct a lot of those works now. And I also always felt split between two things when I was directing from the violin, so it’s not something I’ve pursued.
How did the relationship with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic come about?
I conducted the orchestra for one week: we did two concerts together, and after the second one in the Concertgebouw they offered me the job of Chief Conductor! It was a very unusual level of conviction on both sides, but especially obviously on the part of the orchestra, because at the time nobody had really heard of me as a conductor - I came out of literally nowhere!
I’d played in the Concertgebouw on a couple of tours, but beyond that I didn’t know anything about the Radio Philharmonic or even the Netherlands! We started rehearsing Beethoven together, and the minute the coffee-break started I found myself just chatting to everybody about music and life in general – I knew instantly that something special was going on. We’re so well matched in that we have this very efficient pace of working coupled with a real sense of friendship and warmth on a personal level: the musicians in this orchestra are so open and honest as human beings, and they’ve made me feel like I’ve become part of a big family.
Coming back to the repertoire on the recording, what are the main challenges of the Concerto for Orchestra - both for you and for the players?
One thing that’s really important in Bartók’s music is beauty of sound, and it’s something that sometimes gets overlooked because people concentrate so much on the folk elements in his music. We know that Bartók was obsessed with these peasant melodies that he had researched for years and years, going into various regions of Moravia and noting down what people were singing and the rhythms they were dancing to. They’re usually irregular rhythms in 5 or 7, and he uses them as a basis for almost every single piece he ever wrote. If you play a Beethoven or Mozart symphony you get regular phrase-lengths of four or eight bars, but Bartók almost never does that: it hooks you in as a listener in the most amazing way, because you never know what to expect!
But if you hyperfocus on that element of his music then you can end up somehow ignoring quality of sound – and I do understand why conductors do that, because everything’s so irregular that just keeping everything together is hard enough! There were two things that we prioritised on this recording in terms of sound-quality, and one of them was to try and tune into what his inner world was like at the time he wrote these pieces. He composed the Concerto for Orchestra during a very dark and difficult period of his life: he was seriously unwell in hospital when he received the commission, and was also full of longing and nostalgia and homesickness for Hungary.
He was suffering from the illness which would eventually kill him, so he was probably very feverish and waking during the night in a sort of delirium, and yet he wrote this piece in two months! You hear that struggle so much, especially in the third movement, the Elegy: it was important to me that we achieved a certain kind of balance across the orchestra so that all of that expressive longing and sense of yearning really came out in the sound.
But you can also hear that in many moments of the Four Pieces, which came much earlier in his life when he was in good health, so maybe it was just a part of the man himself rather than related to his illness. There’s this great German word ‘Sehnsucht’, meaning a constant longing for something that isn’t there - some people just have that their whole lives, and Bartók obviously did. There was something deeply passionate and somehow lonely and lost about him as a person, and I think if I could somehow meet him I would sense that.
The other thing we wanted to focus on was high energy – studio recordings tend to flatten things out, and you don’t usually have the kind of excitement burning through the microphones that you get in a live recording. So we made an agreement to absolutely go for it in the same way that we would in concert, worrying less about perfect ensemble and focusing on transmitting emotion and excitement. There was a fabulous atmosphere in the studio, and also a lot of coffee being consumed!
What can you share about current recording plans with the orchestra?
All I will reveal for now is that there will be more – and let’s say it won’t be entirely unrelated to the repertoire on this disc…
