Yuri Temirkanov is about to do something for the first time and he's scared.
"Anything you don't understand, you find frightening," Temirkanov says. "When [scientists] say the universe has no limits, I can't understand that and it scares me."
But what intimidates the 60-year-old Temirkanov -- who is generally considered the greatest Russian conductor of his generation and who survived more KGB threats and interrogations than he cares to remember -- is scarcely as grand as the Big Bang theory.
He's about to go online for the first time.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Yuri Temirkanov to modern life.
"This is not just the first time I've ever used a computer, I've never even been close to one," says the music director-designate of the Baltimore Symphony, who will lead the orchestra in a program of works by Beethoven, Berlioz and Barber tonight, tomorrow, Saturday and Tuesday in Meyerhoff Hall. He officially becomes music director in January.
The occasion for Temirkanov's debut in cyberspace was a chat Monday evening, sponsored by the British classical music magazine Gramophone. For 60 minutes, Temirkanov answered several questions, culled from almost 200 received by a London-based moderator.
The questions popped up on a computer screen in English, were translated into Russian by the conductor's longtime friend and assistant, Marina Stokes; were answered in Russian by Temirkanov; translated back into English by Stokes; and finally typed into the computer by Gregory Tucker, the orchestra's director of public relations.
It's hard to imagine anyone less likely to chat in cyberspace than Temirkanov. He doesn't own a TV set and doesn't even know how to drive a car.
"I have no love for machines," Temirkanov admits.
With the exception of occasional forays into Cable TV when he's in hotel rooms ("The Discovery Channel -- fantastic!" Temirkanov says), the conductor typically spends his time away from music either fishing ("So that I can switch off completely without thinking of anything," he says) or reading books ("In order to think," he adds).
Things have been different lately. This Monday, for example, Temirkanov's morning began with several TV interviews; his afternoon, which began with an appearance on WJHU-FM's "Marc Steiner Show," included a long interview with Washington Post music critic Tim Page, as well as shorter interviews with smaller publications. Then, after a dinner break, came the chat session, which took place in Meyerhoff's basement. Tuesday began with his first BSO rehearsal, then a trip north on the Metroliner for the final concert of a weeklong engagement with the New York Philharmonic, and then a return to Baltimore the same evening for yesterday's double rehearsal in Baltimore.
Given musical demands from two orchestras performing two entirely different programs more than 200 miles apart, Temirkanov's predecessor, former BSO music director David Zinman, would have refused most, if not all, of these non-musical obligations.
Promoting music
But Temirkanov is a realist who understands that promoting classical music in the United States is different from in Russia, where since 1988 Temirkanov has been -- and will continue to be -- music director of Russia's greatest and oldest orchestra, the St. Petersburg Philharmonic.
"He's been wonderfully cooperative and accessible through any number of trying circumstances," says the BSO's Tucker.
But while Temirkanov seems willing to accept many of the demands upon him that leadership of an American orchestra currently involve, there are others he rejects.
One is speaking English when he doesn't want to. Although he understands the language well and speaks it with reasonable fluency when he is with friends or rehearsing an orchestra, he steadfastly refuses to do so in an official capacity.
"My English is not good enough to say what I want to say, but only what I can say," Temirkanov said (in English) last week in New York after an interview for National Public Radio (in Russian), with Stokes on hand to translate.
He also won't spin the truth.
When an online questioner asks him to compare the BSO to other orchestras, Temirkanov responds with directness uncommon in the classical music business, in which hype is the norm.
"[The BSO] is a very good orchestra," he says. "Nevertheless, I don't think I would put Baltimore among the first few orchestras in America or Europe."
And Temirkanov will not speak to the audience at Saturday morning's "casual concert," as he was originally scheduled to do by the orchestra's management.
"My back must be to the audience, not to the orchestra," he says. "When I conduct, I am like an actor, I am talking to the audience, but the words belong to the composer and I am just the vessel through which they pass."
In regarding the podium as a sacred space not to be violated by any language other than music, Temirkanov offers a big contrast to Zinman, who created the casual concert genre and whose persona, in public if not in private, suggested the down-to-earth, boy-from-the-Bronx charm of a character created by comic Billy Crystal.
And the musical contrasts between the two conductors are as pronounced as the personal ones.
In fact, Tuesday's rehearsal of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony could have been called a reversal.
During his 13-year tenure, Zinman cultivated a style of Beethoven playing that shared many of the characteristics of what is called "historically informed performance practice."
Sometimes using replicas of instruments of the period, its practitioners advocate playing in a style they believe is appropriate to the time.
In order to force the BSO's musicians to change what he regarded as an anachronistically Romantic style of performing Beethoven, Zinman made string players, for example, adopt new and initially awkward bowings. These forced the musicians to play with unprecedented clarity and precision. When the bow left the strings, Zinman wanted the sound to die as quickly as possible.
Besides asking for a light-weight sonority, Zinman generally took a literalistic, text-centered approach to Beethoven that discouraged spontaneity and that tried to conform to the composer's metronome markings and dynamic indications.
Retooling
But one conductor's "authentic" Beethoven is not necessarily another's.
"You're doing Schubert, not Beethoven," Temirkanov told the musicians after stopping them early in the first movement of the Beethoven Seventh.
He meant the orchestra was playing without sufficient force and Romantic expressiveness, making Beethoven's music look backward to Haydn (as early Schubert does) instead of forward to Wagner.
The players were using their old bowings for the first time since Zinman's departure last season, and Temirkanov proceeded to undo, step by step, many of the things that Zinman had done for 13 years. He repeatedly asked them to play with longer articulation and a fuller sound.
Zinman tended to ask the players to adhere to initial tempo markings and indications of dynamics; Temirkanov for adjustments of tempo and dynamics uncalled for in the score, but perhaps justified by what the composer himself called the "tempo of feeling."
It is the latter -- some scholars argue -- that Beethoven presumed musicians would adopt after the first measures.
Temirkanov is clearly no fan of so-called "authenticity." He's a full-blooded Romantic, who even expresses skepticism about using reduced orchestras for Mozart and Haydn symphonies -- now an almost universal practice.
"I was asked once what Haydn meant by triple forte," he said during Monday's chat. "My answer was that he probably dreamed of a big orchestra. And now, [when] we use the small orchestra, we kill Haydn's dream."
Toward the end of the chat session, he says that, though he hopes to make recordings with the BSO, he hasn't yet decided upon the repertory. He also confesses that, because Baltimore will be his first American post, he doesn't know yet how he'll handle administrative tasks.
But he does know why he became a conductor.
"When I was very young, I saw a brass band playing in a park and the man in front of the band waving his hands impressed me very much," he says. "After 40 years -- maybe even more -- I finally found out why the man was standing there and why he was waving his arms."
That's why this Russian conductor, though a relative stranger to the ways of American orchestras, is not afraid to answer a question about his ideas for increasing the size of the BSO's audience.
"Everywhere, there is only one little secret," Temirkanov tells those monitoring him on the Internet. "That's to give good concerts."
Maestro
What: Yuri Temirkanov conducts the Baltimore Symphony in works by Berlioz, Beethoven and Barber (with violin soloist Pamela Frank)
When: Today and tomorrow at 8 p.m., Saturday at 11 a.m. and Tuesday at 8 p.m.
Where: Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, 1212 Cathedral St.
Tickets: $14-$55
Call: 410-783-8000
Pub Date: 3/25/99