It was just a few hours before a concert, and the London Symphony Orchestra was only now rehearsing with its star soloist.
Janine Jansen, the violinist featured in Bernstein’s “Serenade (After Plato’s Symposium),” was supposed to have performed the piece with the orchestra on its home turf in early February. But illness forced her to cancel, so she didn’t get together with the orchestra until the sound check for its first stop on its North American tour, at the Granada Theater in Santa Barbara, Calif., last week.
The conductor Antonio Pappano walked onto the stage with Jansen, then cued her to begin. To an average listener, what followed would have sounded like a pretty good performance. But to Pappano, there was work to be done.
“We can do better,” he told the musicians. “I’m sure.”
Concise in his directions and quick to compliment a success, he refined dynamics, asking the violins for a velvety glow, and demanded precision, telling the players: “You’ve got to be exactly with me or exactly with her. There’s no other choice.”
Eventually, Pappano was satisfied. He might not have had the luxury of an earlier performance, but “Serenade” was now ready for the London Symphony’s tour, which concludes at Carnegie Hall on March 5 and 6.
The Carnegie concerts will be Pappano’s first appearance with the London Symphony in New York since becoming the orchestra’s chief conductor last year. And they will be something of a homecoming for Pappano, who cut his teeth in Manhattan as a humble rehearsal pianist before rising to the top of his field, conducting at the coronation of King Charles III and receiving knighthoods in England and Italy.
PAPPANO, 65, is a rarity in classical music: a maestro who never went to a music school. Born in England to Italian immigrant parents, then transplanted to Connecticut at 13, he learned through experience (and came away with an accent that remains charmingly jumbled to this day).
His father, Pasquale, was a voice teacher, and as a child Pappano played piano during his lessons. He accompanied students in art songs and arias, pop songs and show tunes. Eventually, he said, he and his father developed something like an assembly line with two studios.
“My father would do the vocal exercises in one room, then I would take the student and do the songs and the arias while he started with the next one,” Pappano said. “So I was really the coach.”
That set up Pappano to work as a répétiteur, or a rehearsal pianist, at Connecticut Grand Opera in 1979. He went to school for about a year and a half, studying English and music at Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport, Conn., so he could continue to help his father.
In his recent memoir, “My Life in Music,” Pappano writes that because he never received a proper music education, “In a way, I have been playing catch-up all these years.” But his formative experiences weren’t so different from a conservatory student’s. He watched Leonard Bernstein and André Previn teach at Tanglewood. He met Imre Palló, a regular conductor at New York City Opera, who suggested that he audition for a répétiteur post there.
That audition, Pappano said, was the most grueling of his career. He was 21, and had to play through excerpts from Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” and “Salome,” and translate some of Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande.” (Luckily, he had learned French in school.) He got the job, and proved a decent pianist.
“They used to hate me when I first came because I used to get there early, and when everyone else got there they could hear me play Chopin études from the room,” he said. “I was insufferable.”
Pappano’s time at City Opera, he said, was “the best.” He learned a lot by being “part of a team,” and because he was the young guy on staff, he was often handed work that no one else wanted. So, he was the pianist in the room when Hal Prince was directing Bernstein’s “Candide,” and when Prince collaborated with Stephen Sondheim on “Sweeney Todd.” From those artists, he realized that timing was everything in opera and music theater. Jokes had to land, accented syllables had to be precise, and a show lived or died on conductor-director relationships.
“All that became a part of me,” Pappano said. “That’s why I tell young musicians now, you have to watch the masters. Beg, borrow, steal to be in the rehearsals of whoever you admire.”
Because Pappano didn’t have a diploma, he thought a lot about what could replace its value. He learned German, to add to his French and the Italian dialect of his family. He wanted to expand his repertoire to include Wagner, so he took on répétiteur and assistant conductor jobs abroad in the 1980s. Along the way his ear “started to change,” developing a sense of what felt right or wrong.
“You start to hear sounds that appeal to you, or that you’re allergic to,” he said. “And then you start to build your own image of what it is that defines your — well, taste, but I hate that word.”
His authority helped as he played for greats like José Carreras and Montserrat Caballé. But he was still learning, and picked up assistant conducting work with Daniel Barenboim, who remains a hero and close friend. All this “working in the trenches,” as Pappano called it, began to bear fruit in the 1990s. He became the music director of La Monnaie in Brussels, and, by the end of the decade, was appointed at the Royal Opera House in London.
As his profile rose, Pappano would occasionally tour with singers, playing the piano during the recitals of Ian Bostridge, Waltraud Meier and others. And through his relationships with soloists, he developed a prolific catalog of recordings, including studio albums of opera classics with stars like Jonas Kaufmann or Angela Gheorghiu, a favorite.
“The best of her is in the studio,” he said of Gheorghiu, with whom he recorded standard-setting accounts of Puccini, Massenet and Verdi. “She was indefatigable, like a tiger. And that sound — it just seduces the microphone. She was very canny in the studio.”
Pappano stayed at the Royal for over two decades, a period that overlapped with his tenure leading the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. (That job was important for him, he said, to try to define, for himself and the ensemble, the meaning of “italianità” beyond “tomato sauce and things like that.”)
There are traces of his formative years throughout his style, on disc and onstage today. He conducts opera with a director’s sense of dramatic shape and specificity, and is known for his close collaborations with directors on new productions. “There just has to be a unity,” he said. “I’ve worked all my life to try to achieve that.”
PAPPANO FIRST LED the London Symphony in the mid-1990s, for a studio recording of Puccini’s “La Rondine.” Tom Norris, the ensemble’s co-principal second violin, was there and said he was “bowled over.” He was far from alone; there was, he recalled, “a real chemistry” with the players.
Kathryn McDowell, the London Symphony’s longtime managing director, said Pappano was brought back regularly after that not only because of his affinity with the orchestra, but also because he fit in well with what she called its “family of conductors.” Even now, she said, he complements his predecessor, Simon Rattle, who still holds the post of emeritus conductor and specializes in Central European repertoire, whereas Pappano has carved out a niche in British, American and Italian music.
During the pandemic, the London Symphony was hit with multiple blows. The lockdown kept its players offstage for months, plans for a new concert hall were called off, and Rattle left for the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.
But in March 2021, it was revealed that Pappano would leave the Royal Opera House in 2024 and take over the podium of the London Symphony. “It was important,” McDowell said, “to give a sense of stability, of moving forward.”
Musicians welcomed the news. “He knew everyone’s name within about five minutes,” the violinist Clare Duckworth said. “There’s something there that says, ‘I’m part of a team.’” Julián Gil Rodríguez, the principal second violin, said that with Pappano, “there’s a genuine idea of, let’s do this together and see what comes out of it.”
Pappano recalled that at first, he was nervous to be following Rattle, “one of the greatest programmers.” He didn’t think he could compete with that, so he didn’t. “I’m going to put a strong accent on English music, do my American stuff, which I love so dearly, and do my Italian things,” he said. “There’s a lot more to it, but I’m finding my own way.”
On tour, for example, he is conducting the American George Walker’s Sinfonia No. 5, “Visions,” and the British composer William Walton’s First Symphony, in addition to the Bernstein and classics by Rachmaninoff and Mahler.
In Santa Barbara, he led the “Serenade” and Mahler’s First Symphony, which had posed a challenge during the sound check. The offstage trumpets were too loud, and the strings needed to adjust to what he described as the hall’s “skeletal” acoustics.
Nothing took long to fix. “Saying something really kind of banal and basic to an orchestra, they can turn that into gold,” Pappano said. “Just give a little clue, and they can run with that.”
Later that night, his meticulousness paid off in an account of the Mahler that breathed freely while following a clearly defined path. Pappano, who doesn’t conduct with a baton, resisted grand gestures yet expressed himself with his entire body; with a lean or a wobble, he could summon rubato for the rustic joy of the second movement and the funereal klezmer of the third. His finale was like a one-act opera, a journey of darkness to light whose happy ending inspired an immediate standing ovation.
Pappano turned around, a little sweaty and smiling, to face the audience and bow. But only for a moment. He lifted his arms, which had just had a workout with the symphony, to single out each section of players for bows of their own.
The post A Conductor at the Top, and Still Learning on the Job appeared first on New York Times.
