Symphony of sound

Russian conductor Daniel Raiskin will hold the musical director’s baton when the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra (WSO) begins its 71st season this fall.

The orchestra’s board announced Raiskin’s hiring Wednesday, after spending more than three years searching for a successor to Alexander Mickelthwate, who announced last spring that the 2017-18 WSO season would be his last. He will conduct the Oklahoma City Philharmonic starting in the fall.

"I’m a little overwhelmed, but in a positive way," Raiskin said Monday in a telephone interview from his studio in Amsterdam.

A WSO board committee assembled a list of 65 to 75 possible conductors by asking musicians, agents, board members and audience members, said board president Terry Sargeant.

Some of those were invited to guest-conduct the symphony on nights when Mickelthwate was unavailable.

"About a dozen of them have come here the last three years as guest conductors," Sargeant said. "Each of whom would have been a very good conductor for our orchestra, but Daniel just has something special."

“In terms with how well the music making went, I can humbly attest to the fact that it felt well from the first few moments” – Daniel Raiskin on his audition for the position of musical director with Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra

The committee eventually whittled the list of conductors down to four last summer after Mickelthwate’s announcement and they were given another shot to rehearse and perform with the symphony during the 2017-18 season. Raiskin’s turn was on Oct. 27 and 28, where he conducted pieces by Beethoven, Chopin and Henryk Gorecki in a program that featured Russian-American pianist Natasha Paremski. 

"He was starting to emerge by last fall as our favourite," Sargeant said.

"When he talked with the audience with one of the pieces he was conducting, we got a lot of comments from audience members who liked that. They really took to him.

"He wanted to come, and as we narrowed down the candidates, we wanted him to come."

The de facto audition made for a pressure-packed week, Raiskin recalled.

"We really had a very, very busy schedule with lots of activities outside of actual music making and rehearsing and performance. I was scrambling to remember everyone’s names... that was a very intense week and I’m happy it has contributed to the decision," said Raiskin, who will begin moving to Winnipeg in the summer with his wife, Lara, and 14-year-old daughter Sofia, who Raiskin said is planning on taking dance classes with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. The couple’s 19-year-old son, Ilya, will remain in Amsterdam, where he is studying music.

"In terms with how well the music making went, I can humbly attest to the fact that it felt well from the first few moments."

This will be Raiskin’s first major foray with a North American orchestra, but he has led symphonies and performed throughout Europe and around the world. He is the principal guest conductor with the Orquesta Sinfónica de Tenerife, Spain and the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra in Serbia. From 2005-16, he was the chief conductor of the Staatsorchester Rheinische Philharmonie of Koblenz, Germany, and the Artur Rubinstein Philharmonic Orchestra in Lodz, Poland. He has also been a guest conductor for orchestras in more than a dozen European countries, as well as in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Africa, Argentina, Chile and Mexico.

Raiskin was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and lived there until he turned 20. While music was his first love — his main instrument was the viola before he started conducting — as a boy he was as big a fan of the Russian masters of the ice — Tretiak, Fetisov and Kharlamov — as he was with the country’s famous composers, Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky.

"When you grow up in the north like me in the Soviet Union, it was like Canada, a great ice hockey country. You remember the bitter rivalry between the Red Machine, the Soviet hockey team, and the NHL stars," Raiskin says.

He moved to Amsterdam in 1990, a time when many Russian musicians were leaving the country to work in the West despite the structural reforms in the Soviet Union, perestroika and glasnost, that were brought forward by former leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

He left his St. Petersburg youth orchestra in Spain, with just his viola and two pairs of jeans, and caught a plane to Amsterdam, where he has lived ever since. He says his move had little of the drama of the artists, musicians and hockey players who defected from the Soviet Union in the 1970s and ‘80s during the height of the Cold War.

"It was not like a defection from the Soviet times when there was the joke, ‘What’s the definition of a string quartet? The symphony orchestra returning from the U.S. tour," he said.

"Frankly, there were times when the system I was born into was just falling apart and crumbling," Raiskin said remembering Soviet life. "On top of that, I was born into a family... my father was very, very much against the system and also suffered from it."

Raiskin said he gained growing respect for western orchestras since moving to Amsterdam, and word of mouth from musician friends put Canadian symphonies, including the WSO, on his musical radar.

"Slowly I started to hear more and more about the Winnipeg orchestra, which for 27 years has hosted this contemporary music festival," Raiskin says referring to the Winnipeg New Music Festival. "When the invitation came to guest-conduct the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, I was simply curious... my curiosity was rewarded completely."

He said the WSO has made great strides under his predecessor, Mickelthwate, from the growing success of the new music festival, to its 2014 performance at New York’s Carnegie Hall and its Sistema Winnipeg project that helps teach music to disadvantaged youngsters. Raiskin aims to build on those successes.

"It can become a lighthouse, a ray of light that shows the direction. People of incredibly different backgrounds and social circumstances can be drawn to it, to experience music and even play a part in it, like Sistema Winnipeg," Raiskin said. "I’d like to see this developed even further.

"Of course, on the musical front, maybe we need to bring a more international dimension to it... If the national orchestra can visit Winnipeg, we should be able to go places in Canada, and nothing should prevent us to stun everyone and maybe mount a first European tour for the Winnipeg Symphony, in the not-to-distant future. I’d like to put my energy and heart into achieving that." 

alan.small@freepress.mb.ca  

Twitter:@AlanDSmall

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