As head of two of Russia's most important musical institutions, the Kirov (later Mariinsky) Opera and Ballet Theater (1976-88) and the Leningrad (later St. Petersburg) Philharmonic Orchestra, of which he was chief conductor for more than thirty years. 1988 Yuri Temirkanov, who has died at the age of 84, was at the foundation of music in the Soviet Union for almost half a century.
He was also a well-known figure internationally, not only for his frequent tours with Russian orchestras, but also for his relationships with American, British and other European ensembles.
From 1979 he was principal guest and principal conductor of the Royal Philharmonic from 1992 to 1998, and after a series of guest appearances with orchestras in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles in the 1990s, he became music director. of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra from 2000 to 2006. He also held positions with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and the Dresden Philharmonic.
However, despite his powerfully passionate, often searing performances, he was a controversial figure. Both his idiosyncratic style on stage and the unpredictability of his dazzling, idiosyncratic lectures provoked criticism. His unreconstructed views on women - not least female conductors, a phenomenon he believed was contrary to nature - and his alleged close relationship with Vladimir Putin also caused a stir.
As recently as 2012, he opined in an interview that a woman "must be beautiful, sympathetic and attractive. Musicians will look at her and be distracted from the music." Digging himself even deeper, he continued: "The essence of the conducting profession is power. The essence of a woman is weakness."
Yet Lara Webber, who held both assistant and assistant conductor positions at the Baltimore Orchestra, stated that these opinions were inconsistent with the man she knew and worked with, and that he was a "really supportive boss."
Although he denied ever being a member of the Communist Party, he told the Baltimore Sun in 2004 that Putin was "a very good friend, very good." The newspaper noted that Temirkanov used his close relationship with Putin to lobby for Russian orchestras that faced a financial crisis in the post-Soviet years.
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Temirkanov's stage choreography changed over the years. When he took the Leningrad Philharmonic to the Edinburgh festival in 1991, I noted that his comic antics could have earned him a few bucks on the fringe circuit.
Waving his Pavarotti handkerchief and ironically brushing back his hair at the sight of a camera, he quietly enjoyed the spotlight. With a mocking smile, he had an astonishing repertoire of gestures, in which a movement of the wrist functioned as a kind of semiotic code. He did not conduct with a baton, hardly even with his arms: more with his eyebrows and occasionally with his elbows.
Histrionics suited him best in a Prokofiev program. In the Classical Symphony and the Romeo and Juliet music he brought out a rather heavy humor - with sour brass and the lower strings penetrating deeply - but this was compensated by a contrasting mode of the greatest delicacy, in which the higher strings played in a entered into dialogue in an overly hushed whisper. .
His lectures were especially exciting in the Russian repertoire. And no matter how you view his music, he was always a pleasure to watch on stage during these years.
When performing at the BBC Proms in 2004, his gestures in Glinka's Valse-Fantaisie were extraordinary: the palm outstretched like a pushy beggar, sweeping, scooping, sometimes just a nod of the head. But the result was breathtaking: a waltz that truly soared, with degrees of delicacy that rarely rose above mezzo forte.
The synergy between this orchestra (now called the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra) and its long-standing music director was so great that Temirkanov could risk daring but often convincing rubato and idiosyncratic turns of phrase. In more recent years, streamed performances showed a genial, silver-haired maestro still gesturing extravagantly, if more quietly.
Born in Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria, North Caucasus, he was one of four children of Khatu Sagidovich Temirkanov, Minister of Culture in Kabardino-Balkaria, who was executed by the Germans in 1941, and his wife Polina Petyrovna.
Yuri studied violin at the Leningrad Conservatory School for Talented Children and then conducting at the Conservatory, graduating in 1965. He started as a conductor at the Malïy Opera Theater in Leningrad and made his debut with La Traviata. After winning the Soviet All-Union Conductors' Competition in 1968, he became music director of the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra, the city's second major ensemble.
As artistic director and chief conductor of Kirov Opera and Ballet, he exercised great authority. For his own 1982 production of Eugene Onegin (filmed in 1984), he conducted intensive archival research to determine details such as how a lady holds a fan, how a man sits when wearing a tail. According to Sergei Leiferkus, who sang the title role, Temirkanov knew the entire Pushkin novel and the entire opera libretto by heart. His aim was to achieve maximum fidelity to the original, and it will come as no surprise that he was unsympathetic to the more progressive dramaturgy then prevalent in Europe.
When he brought the Kirov to Covent Garden in 1987 - the first time a Russian opera company had appeared at the Royal Opera - with his own productions of Onegin and the Queen of Spades, and Boris Godunov, directed by Boris Pokrovsky, the stagings were already looking old-fashioned from (although both his Onegin and the Queen of Spades remain in the Mariinsky repertoire to this day). His performance of Onegin in particular was again criticized as erratic.
He recorded Tchaikovsky's six numbered symphonies twice, once with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, once with the Royal Philharmonic. In both, the dark mysteries of the later works are captured flawlessly. Russian music featured in his recorded catalogue, but he also made versions of works by composers such as Mozart, Mahler, Berlioz, Dvořák and Sibelius.
Temirkanov's wife, Irina Guseva, died in 1997. Their son, Vladimir, a violinist, was also predeceased.
* Yuri Temirkanov, conductor, born December 10, 1938; died November 2, 2023
