Vladimir Jurowski

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Music, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Music Commentary

4.3 • 14.3K Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2007

⏱️ 39 minutes

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the conductor Vladimir Jurowski. Described as the most active and influential conductor in Britain today, he has been the musical director at Glyndebourne for the past six years, and this autumn takes over as Principal Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

Vladimir's roots however lie in Russia, where he was one of the last generation to experience the Communist regime. The two-room apartment in Moscow that he shared with his parents, siblings and grandmothers, was always full of music; his father was a conductor. He says he "grew up in the wings of the theatre", and he knew from a very early age that his life too would be dedicated to music. However, he resisted following in his father's footsteps until he was seventeen, when he heard Mahler's music for the first time.

After that, he says, there was no turning back. He changed as a person, physically he says, when he picked up the baton, and went on to make his conducting debut at the tender age of 23. He has been constantly in demand around the world ever since, but manages to combine this international career with being a husband and father.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Variations 29 & 30 by Johann Sebastian Bach Book: Complete Works by Aleksandr Pushkin Luxury: A piano.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2007. My cast away this week is the conductor of Lademy Rjurovsky. At 35 he's widely considered to be the best of his generation lauded for his
0:35.9	technique personality, panache and brains. He speaks the language of music, say the
0:41.3	critics in a way that transcends period style.
0:44.9	A fact which may owe something to his beginnings.
0:47.3	His father too was a conductor, his grandfather, a composer, and although Home was an unpossessing tower block apartment in Moscow, the three rooms he shared with his parents, sister, brother and two grandmothers were always full of music. Beyond that was simply more of the same. I was five or six when I saw
1:06.0	my first opera, he says. I literally grew up in the wings of a theatre. Vladimir, was there ever any chance that your life would be? Theater. in a way I also got encouraged by my father not to take on music because he was once told
1:27.6	by his father if you can do something else then do something else because it must be like a disease. So consciously of
1:36.1	course there was a life beyond music that you may have been encouraged
1:38.9	towards but emotionally then was it simply that music was there somewhere.
1:42.6	Well, music was the air I used to breathe and I could never have thought back then and
1:50.1	as I can't think now my life without music.
1:54.4	You made your international debut in 1995 in Ireland.
1:58.0	I mean you had only just turned 23.
2:01.0	I mean after that performance in Wexford, the phone started ringing. I mean virtually off the hook
2:06.3	you had Laffenichi in Venice and the Bastille in Paris asking you to come to them, why?
2:13.0	Why?
2:14.0	Well, I didn't turn them all of them, but I did turn down some.
2:19.0	Most?
2:20.0	Well, most of those I wasn't sure about, I turned down four offers from Covent Garden.
2:25.8	I mean, I went there in the first place to stand in last minute and did Nabuco.
	...

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