The long-term planning required of a top-level conductor doesn’t come easily to an Italian. “We like to improvise everything,” Gianandrea Noseda says. “I hate the feeling of knowing exactly what I’m going to do in three years’ time. You get tired only reading your schedule.”
At 45, Noseda has a long schedule to avoid thinking about. In Italy he runs the lakeside festival in Stresa as well as the Teatro Regio in Turin. In the US he has regular bookings with the Met (in late 2010 it’s La Traviata with Anna Netrebko) and is also making his debuts with two of the big five, in Chicago and Philadelphia. Meanwhile, in Britain, as well as a developing relationship with the London Symphony Orchestra, since 2002 he has been with the BBC Philharmonic.
In his most recent trip to their home in Manchester last month, he devoted a series of four concerts to Haydn. For an infrequent visitor to the 18th century, it represented a journey to wilder shores. Later this year, after their joint offering of the complete Shostakovich symphonies in 2006, the BBC Phil resume their coalition with the Hallé to perform a Mahler cycle. But the next time Noseda mounts an English podium it will be at a Prom that, even if it’s tipping down outside, will bathe the Albert Hall in sunshine.
Noseda will conduct a programme lush with the aromas of his homeland. Rossini will rub shoulders with Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony. Respighi’s Pini di Roma will share the stage with the palindromically titled Roma, Amor, a new work by Peter Maxwell-Davies. The idea is to provide a more resonant portrait of a nation than that currently suggested by its prime minister.
“Italians are, of course, very narcissistic,” Noseda says. “We like to be approved, probably more than other people. But it’s not happening today. I think sometimes the Italian spirit is not considered in the world picture. From an artistic point of view Italy is more than spaghetti, mandolins, folk songs and the politics.”
As anyone who saw Phil Grabsky’s recent documentary In Search of Beethoven will have noted, Noseda is a zealous communicator in words as well as giving every last drop with a baton in his hand. “Whenever you conduct,” he says, “you take on the podium all your life, all your experiences, all the people you love, all the people you don’t like. Conducting, you cannot avoid being yourself. If you do it everybody will realise.”
As he marches off into a disquisition on Italy’s musical influences, its connections not only with Austria and France but also the folk traditions of the countries that rim the Mediterranean, it’s clearly the Respighi that he is most looking forward to. “It was Respighi’s idea that to be modern an Italian should never be cut off from his past. What is very important in the past of Italians? The Roman Empire. It went up to Carlisle and down to Ankara. This is incredible. How could they control this without planes, without e-mail, without efficient post? I’m not saying it was good. I’m saying it was big. Pini di Roma was a celebration of the grandeur of Italy.”
There’s an autobiographical connection here. Respighi studied in St Petersburg under Rimsky-Korsakov, and played viola in the orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre. Italian composers first went to Russia at the invitation of Catherine II.
“They practically brought the Neapolitan tradition to the north of Europe. Glinka took a lot of elements from our opera and it became the Russian tradition.” It was along this well-trodden path that Noseda himself travelled as a trainee conductor. In 1993 he attended a masterclass given in Siena by Valery Gergiev. He had long given up on the idea of composing. “I only wrote one piece and won a competition with it but I decided I don’t have enough to say.”
Gergiev invited him to St Petersburg to the Rimsky-Korsakov Festival as an observer. Noseda, a middle-class son of Milan, arrived in February 1994 with Russia mired in post-communist austerity. “That was a huge experience. It changed my mind not only towards music but also life, because I couldn’t find food. I lost 6kg in ten days. That makes a huge impact on you.” He didn’t speak a word of Russian, and survived on apples brought from home. But musically it opened a gate.
Noseda duly stepped in to conduct the Mariinsky Orchestra on tour in Italy in 1996, and then in 1997 conducted Le Nozze di Figaro in St Petersburg — Netrebko was his Susanna.
For the following seven years he went back three times a year for a month at a time. He has indelibly become identified with Russian repertoire, notably Rachmaninov, whose three operas he has recorded with the BBC Phil. Next year he conducts the Chicagoans in their first performance of the First Symphony.
Those years in Russia have given Noseda a sceptical insight into the mentality of well-fed American musicians. “Technically they give you whatever you want. It’s more difficult to get them really involved. To ask them to fill it with some personal emotions, you have to use other weapons. If you try to explain why you ask that, they are not interested. The worst thing is just to talk about philosophy.”
Not long before Noseda first conducted the BBC Phil, he gave up on a parallel career at the keyboard. “When the conducting increased I was not talented enough to just save half an hour a day to practise.” He still plays privately whenever he gets back home to Lake Maggiore. He’s there so rarely that he doesn’t own a car — “It’s not very Italian, is it?” When he does play, his wife, Lucia, a retired soprano, sometimes sings along.
But for the weather, he feels at home in Manchester. “I like the energy in the city, which is very similar to the energy in Milan.” The outstanding triumph of his tenure thus far was also a great PR coup, the critically hailed and typically searching Beethoven symphony cycle offered by the BBC as an immensely popular free download in 2005.
But conducting a BBC orchestra has its downside. The Haydn concerts, two of which were broadcast live, could have been much better attended. The Hallé regularly gets bigger audiences at Bridgewater Hall. Noseda refuses to accept the idea that he is in a rivalry with Sir Mark Elder. “I have a huge respect of Mark Elder. We should find more occasions for connections than divisions. It’s very easy to say I want to be recognised as the only one. We are going much too far in the direction of myth, the personality. With stars you don’t help the improvement of society.”
So when he takes his bow at the Albert Hall, the applause will not be for him. “I think it’s for the music. Music is the kind of art that can make you feel even depression until the moment you decide to commit suicide, without arriving there in reality. Or the most incredible uncontainable joy, without drugs. And that helps in educating yourself. If the performance is good.”
Gianandrea Noseda conducts the BBC Philharmonic at the Albert Hall, London SW7, on August 5 and 6, 0845 4015040, www.bbc.co.uk/proms
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