Talking to Alexander Anissimov, who will tonight conduct his first concert as Principal Conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra, is an unusual experience. It's not particularly that there's a wonderfully efficient translator interposed between his speaking and my understanding. In any case, Anissimov's enthusiasm occasionally gets the better of him, and he makes a short-circuit into direct communication by bursting into broken English. It's rather that he captures something of the flavour of another era, finding his answers by reaching out into unexpected places and shaping his narrative with the cunning pace, circuitous elaboration and colourful detail of a seanchai.
When I ask about his early musical background, I'm brought back beyond his birth to the fact that there was but a single musician in his family history, a horn player in the "capella" of Prince Sheremetyev. That Russian peasant was on his father's side, creating a link through which he feels he has roots that are very close to the land. His mother had a noble Polish background, through Prince Zhukovsky's family. From his father's side, as he puts it, he has the soil, from his mother's, the sky. In music he likes not only things which are earthy, tied to the people, but also things which are refined, for the elite, as well as things which combine the two. As an Anissimov who is a musician, he says, he is a sort of black sheep. But a line of Anissimov musicians is beginning with him, as both his son and daughter have followed him into the profession.
Singing was his earliest musical love, in a list of enthusiasms which includes radio sets, chess and mathematics. He danced and sang in pioneer camp, and got involved in a small dramatic studio. He was nearly a teenager when he was spotted and advised to take up music seriously. His childhood hero was Jack London's Martin Eden, modelled on the author himself - an illiterate sailor at the age of 25 who within a year managed to turn himself into a writer. The young Anissimov was fascinated by the idea of hard work bringing a man so far so quickly. So when he took up the piano he stuck at it all day long, cramming, he claims, four or five years' worth of study into a single year. When the family moved from Moscow to St Petersburg (Leningrad as it was then), he entered the conservatoire there, moving back to Moscow for further studies, and back again to St Petersburg for his first professional appointment, as a conductor in the Maly Theatre (now Opera Mussorgsky), the city's second theatre after the Kirov or Maryinsky.
From there, he moved to the much bigger theatre in Minsk and he also spent some time in Perm in the Urals which has a theatre that's famous in Russia, because it's in the city where Anna Pavlova was born and studied. It was during the Minsk years that he got his first invitation to conduct in Ireland, at the Wexford Festival. He had worked in other countries before that, but it's his debut in Wexford that he credits with the making of his subsequent international career. His interest in conducting developed from his activities as a choral singer. He sang in choirs for over 20 years, and was exposed to a range of conductors which included David Oistrakh, Benjamin Britten, Yevgeny Mravinsky and Arvid Yansons. He liked what he saw of the process of conducting "because it's connected with a very interesting and complex creativity. Inexplicable, sometimes. That's what was interesting, that unknownness, that mystery. There was nothing certain, like pressing a key on the piano. There was uncertainty. The baton was like a magician's baton. The magician points at something and then the magic arises from that point. That's probably how the dream materialised."
There was more to it, though, than mystery and magic and a separate urge to work with a group rather than alone. "I always wanted to be a leader, to lead people somewhere. Someone would say, `Let's go to Nevsky Prospekt'. I would say, `No. We'll go to Gorky Street' and everyone would go after me." He says this matter-of-factly, but also with a quiet smile at his own presumption. By the age of 15, it seems, he already knew he wanted to be a conductor. And the kind of performance which interested him most was the most complex: opera, with "an orchestra, light, decoration, singers". The implications of the theatrical interest spread beyond the opera house. He wants a sense of theatre, too, when - as in the concert hall - there's only the orchestra involved. He wants there to be a kind of musical drama, to make, as he puts it, a sort of alloy. The seanchai in Anissimov comes out when I ask him if there was any particular piece of music which sparked him to want to conduct. He explains that he understands the question in the way I've put it, but that he's going to answer it differently. He recalls his youthful love of singing, and that his favourite song was a Russian folk song. So, when he went for the interview to start his serious musical education, and the distinguished professor interviewing him asked, "And what will you do for us?", he decided to sing his favourite song. There was a woman in the room, too, who seemed to like it; she nodded along with it, and he discovered 15 years on that it was also the professor's favourite song.
Later, at the St Petersburg conservatory, he had to face an audition with a choral conductor of formidable reputation. She asked him what he would he like to play . . . or sing? He was taken aback by the mention of singing, as he was only expecting to have to play. She then surprised him by pointing out that she had already heard him sing "when you were that high, and you sang for Professor Sveshnikov". In other words, as he sees it, his whole path in music was decided when he was small, thanks to a single, not at all child-like, patriotic song called Motherland. Then, having explained all of this, he adds, almost as an afterthought, that from the moment he heard the legendary Mravinsky conduct Tchaikovsky's Romeo And Juliet he started dreaming about conducting that particular piece and about being a conductor. I inquire about musicians and conductors who have influenced him, and elicit an intriguingly varied list. He sang in a choir that performed Pergolesi and Prokofiev with one of Russia's great singers, Zara Dolukhanova, who made an indelible impression. I've heard recordings of this littleknown (in the West) mezzo-soprano, and can vouch for the vocal beauty and dramatic presence she projects. He encountered the composer Sergei Slonimsky as a harmony teacher and received encouragement about his compositional efforts from another composer, Boris Tishchenko. He was bowled over by English Chamber Opera, when they visited St Petersburg with Britten's Rape Of Lucretia and Turn Of The Screw. "Absolutely fantastic. For the Soviet reality of that time, it was like a new planet. I still remember every note distinctly." Growing up in a time of Soviet "thaw", he encountered the music of Schoenberg ("again, like a new planet"), Hindemith's Ludus Tonalis, and newer works by the more adventurous native composers, Denisov, Schnittke, Gubaidulina, Silvestrov, Volkonsky, many of them presented to the St Petersburg public through the special advocacy of the conductor Gennadi Rozhdestvensky.
But there were important influences outside of music to be soaked up by Anissimov as an eager sponge in an artistic ferment. He mentions his Russian literature teacher. "She was magic. Musicians spend five, six hours a day practising. At the same time, we read a lot, thanks to her, and took part in evening parties where poetry was read, and I discovered Pasternak, Mandelstam, Blok, Gumilev, authors unknown to the mass of people - not prohibited, but not really allowed at the same time." He tells of reciting a poem by Lermontov at one of these evenings, not knowing at the time that many years later he would one day conduct and record - at the Wexford Festival - an opera based on it, Rubinstein's The Demon. "I knew the poem so well and loved it, it helped a lot."
His life story appears to be full of long, meaningful, trailing connections. His father's easygoing nature as a teacher of philosophy to music students (giving easy passes in exams) paid back when one of those students later held a powerful position through which he could reward the son of his lenient ex-professor, for instance. Then there was the feeling he had at the end of his first NCH concert with the National Symphony Orchestra that this was an orchestra he would like to take charge of. He'd had a similar feeling about Minsk before he was based there, and it came true, too. He evokes the resonances of love at first sight when he talks about the NSO.
When I ask about any changes he would like to institute, and its strengths and weaknesses, he initially parries the questions, explaining that he's very emotional, and it's like talking about a son or daughter - you know very well his or her weak points, but you don't want anyone else to know. Yet, while on the one hand he says it's the best orchestra in the world for him, because it's the one he's conducting currently, it filters out that he would like its achievement to be more even, for the back desks to be as good as the firsts. He wishes the orchestra could be emotional, "professionally emotional", all the time, for other conductors and not just for him. And that the orchestra would by itself maintain a level of playing below which it would never go, no matter what the limitations encountered in any particular conductor. He recalls Mahler's contention that there are no bad orchestras, only bad conductors - and suggests that, in a way, there are no very good orchestras, only very good conductors. "When the orchestra's level is very good, to make an extra level, you need an extra conductor. The personality of a conductor is very important for a good orchestra. For a bad one it doesn't matter."
But he has no interest in revolutionary changes. He would prefer to build gradually. He thinks of his approach as diplomatic, wise, calm. If there is something which is blue and you say it's black, he'll agree, he explains. But in five minutes he'll start trying to persuade you that it's blue, working his way so that you feel you've reached the conclusion for yourself that it's blue. But he won't start a war over saying that it's blue. He tells of working with ballerinas who complain his speeds are too fast. He listens with great sympathy, agrees to slow it down, and then conducts it exactly as before. The ballerinas dance without complaint as the magician wields his wand.
Alexander Anissimov conducts the NSO in "Golden Jubilee Favourites" at the NCH tonight. He conducts the Wexford Festival production of Gomes's Fosca, opening on Thursday, October 15th, and Beethoven's Choral Symphony on the last day of the festival, Sunday, November 1st. And he opens the NSO subscription series in a French and Russian programme on Friday, November 6th.
