CSOradio
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CSOradio
Thirteen years after making his podium debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Vladimir Jurowski finally returns this spring to Orchestra Hall.
He will lead the CSO in a program of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 25 (with Martin Helmchen as soloist), and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 8 in concerts April 27-29.
Acclaimed internationally, Jurowski has held several important posts, including principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra (2007-2021), chief conductor of the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra (from 2017) and general music director of the Bavarian State Opera (from 2021).
In a recent email interview with Jewish Chicago magazine, he shared his memories of his local debut and of Shostakovich, a family friend. “It has been a long time since my last meeting with the CSO. My work and family life ties me almost exclusively to Europe. But I remember well the orchestra’s virtuosity and vibrant style, and its immense emotional force. And I am greatly looking forward to renewing our connection.”
Jurowski recalled meeting Shostakovich and spoke about the importance of the composer’s Eighth Symphony. “I met him when I was only 3 or 4 years old, but his family and my family knew each other well. My father, Michail Jurowski, who sadly passed away last year, used to play piano duets with him. His music, aside from its tremendous musical and artistic worth and power, is a document of the history he lived through.
“The Eighth Symphony is one of his most powerful, sustained and personal creations. And, of course, being composed in 1943, it [sends] an unmistakable and unavoidable message to both the players and the audiences of today. I hope I will have to say very little. As a man with Russian and Ukrainian blood, the music will say more than I ever could.”
Born in Russia, Jurowski, 51, moved with his family to Germany in 1990. “I grew up in Soviet Russia, which was, of course, a society where there was essentially an enforced secularity. There was very little talk of religious faith, even at home,” he said. “But there was certainly an undercurrent of a kind of collective memory. My grandmothers would speak in Yiddish when they didn’t want us to understand what was being said, and their own childhood had been in the remains of the Jewish shtetl culture.
“My adult life in Germany has, among many other things, been a process of reconnection with the combined cultural heritage of central and eastern Europe. And the ‘Jewish blood’ in European musical life is an extraordinary force, including for composers like Shostakovich, who were not themselves Jewish, but who shared a tremendous affinity for the culture and its history, and who employed Jewish themes and colors, both implicitly and explicitly in their compositions. It’s hard to find a composer who was not touched by that.”
