'If I understand the heckles, I'll respond'
Sir Malcolm Sargent, who dominated the Last Night of the Proms for 20 years, had a flat just opposite the Royal Albert Hall, but was reputed to take a taxi there when he was conducting. The story is no doubt apocryphal – all part of the legend of “Flash Harry” – but I couldn’t help recalling it when I met Jiri Belohlavek, the Czech conductor who on Saturday has the task of steering the swaying, braying prommers through the ritual of the Last Night.
Belohlavek, who is hauling a little black frequent-flyer’s bag behind him on the day we meet, is the antithesis of Flash Harry. An impeccably well-mannered, serious but by no means dour 61-year-old, he became chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra two years ago – the holder of that post traditionally has the dubious honour of bringing the Proms to a raucous end. He has won plaudits for raising the orchestra’s morale after the troubled tenure of Leonard Slatkin, and has just been given a four-year extension to his contract, taking him through to 2012. He is also being courted by US orchestras, and a music directorship is imminent. If he can cope with the prommer who always brings a car horn along to sound at key moments in Henry Wood’s Fantasia on British Sea-Songs on Saturday, these are blissful days for Belohlavek. But how will an earnest Czech musician deal with this mildly bonkers British evening?
“I am sure I will be shocked when the man in the audience blows his horn,” says Belohlavek in his heavily accented and delightfully idiosyncratic English, “but I consider it as a gesture of joy and common feeling. I feel comfortable with it. The question is will a British audience be comfortable with me? I am living with this fact that I will do this Last Night almost more than one year and it builds up the tension and the curiosity, not only in myself but in the people around me. Everybody is asking what is coming. I think this is a very positive sign – it is proof of how much people love that event.”
As well as the man with the horn, he will have to deal with the Last Night speech – a slightly awkward affair when the conductor turns to the prommers before the final singalong and chats to them. Belohlavek says staff at the Proms are making suggestions and feeding him facts, but the speech will ultimately be down to him, with much of it improvised on the night. “It won’t be long,” he says. “It will be an address rather than a speech, and of course for me it is not so easy to face this challenge. I have some points which are important and which I have to keep in, but otherwise it has to be spontaneous. I said to the orchestra’s manager, ‘What will happen if I start to speak Czech?’ He said, ‘No, please – you may speak one sentence in Czech but no more.’ ” How will he deal with hecklers? “If I understand what they are saying, I will respond.”
My guess is he will be terrific. The bouffant hair, professorial manner, dry wit and mittel-European accent will go down a storm – the perfect counterpoint to the prommers’ gawky lunacy and the flag-waving parties up from Dorking in the stalls.
Some critics loathe the jingoism of the Last Night, but Belohlavek is relaxed about it. “It’s a unique event and I think it’s fine once a year to have a big party,” he says. He has never attended a Last Night but has seen several on video, knows vaguely what to expect and respects the traditions. “I am watching it and feeling this is part of heritage,” he says. “Why should you change the heritage? One can shape the first part, but the traditional part I think should stay. With a piece of history one should work in very smooth gloves. Maybe a few days from now I will speak completely differently, but I don’t think so.”
Belohlavek exudes calm on the podium. The BBC Symphony Orchestra has a reputation for bolshieness, but so far the relationship has been harmonious. “My first period of work with them was 1995 to 2000, when I was a permanent guest,” he recalls. “I was told that the permanent guest position in this orchestra was a killer, that everyone fails. But I had from the very beginning a very straightforward and open relationship with the players. I never made the mistake that I would flatter them, but I was always trying to be very fair.” Do they deserve their reputation for being difficult? “I can imagine that they are able to be difficult, but they have never done it for me.”
I attended a rehearsal and was struck by the fact that, when they weren’t playing, some of the brass section were reading newspapers. Is that good practice? “I don’t like this, but thank God I don’t see it,” says Belohlavek. “It is not a good habit, though they are in full concentration when they play. I have seen it in German orchestras as well, though I don’t think that an American orchestra would do it.”
There is, you suspect, an intriguing collision between the wing-and-a-prayer English style and Belohlavek’s central European thoroughness. Do the orchestra think they can get through on their collective self-confidence? “Yes, I think this might be the little trap for this ensemble,” he admits, “because they are incredibly fast sight-readers. The fact that they are so versatile and so fast is of course admirable, and I would never like to lose this, but at the same time we are trying to work on the other side of the balancing act. I am trying to encourage them to understand more deeply what is behind the notes, as Mahler always used to say.”
I spoke briefly to one of the players after the rehearsal and asked her what she thought of Belohlavek. Some in the orchestra feel his tempi are a bit slow, she said, a bit lacking in dash. I put this to him – not something you would do with every maestro – and he answered without missing a beat. “It’s definitely not my intention to dam their exuberance and energy when it is in the score, but energy and controlled energy are two different things, and I definitely am for the controlled energy because in an ensemble without a certain control it is just anarchy.”
The watershed in Belohlavek’s musical life came in 1991, when he was voted out of his job as chief conductor of the Czech Philharmonic. The players wanted the German conductor Gerd Albrecht instead, believing he would bring lucrative record deals and foreign tours. It could have been a disaster for Belohlavek, but he founded his own orchestra, the Prague Philharmonia, and set about developing his career in the west. What could have wrecked his career was in reality the making of it.
“I was devastated when I was going through it,” he says, “but it was a blessing actually. It brought me to different opportunities and to a different standpoint of myself. Up to that point my career had gone so smoothly – everything was fine and everyone was praising me. It’s too easy and life shouldn’t be so – it is never so easy. Only with some problems can man get better and stronger.”
His career has flourished in the past decade, with a successful debut in Katya Kabanova at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, a rapturously received Tristan und Isolde at Glyndebourne and regular appearances with the Berlin Philharmonic. It contrasts with the more limited opportunities he had before the Berlin wall came down in 1989. “I was always working and was able to come to the west, but at that time if you were invited to conduct a western orchestra you were still always like a little exotic creature. It was interesting, but I was never part of the cultural life. Now I feel at the heart of it.” The serious-minded Czech who is now oddly at home in England’s green and pleasant land.
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