The Long View | Dausgaard, Politics, Music and Health

I’d already typed the name Thomas Dausgaard a good few times on 7 January, before news broke that the conductor had suddenly resigned his position as music director of the Seattle Symphony. I was writing a review of Dausgaard’s latest recording: a performance of Mendelssohn’s Symphonies 1 and 3 with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra that oozes all the clarity, freshness and intensity that have characterised the Dane’s work with that ensemble for decades. Another winner from Dausgaard, I signed off. Then I began browsing the internet.

Dausgaard’s reign at the SCO in Örebro now stands as one of the only tenures of his career that hasn’t ended under something of a cloud. His departure from the Danish National Symphony Orchestra in 2011 was amicable but undeniably a result of some strain, even if he has conducted some brilliant concerts with the ensemble since (he remains an honorary conductor with the orchestra). In the wake of the Seattle debacle, an opinion piece in The Scotsman hinted, with no qualms about kicking a man already down, that Dausgaard’s chief conductorship of the BBC’s orchestra in Glasgow would fizzle out rather pathetically even if he had the temerity to cross the North Sea and finish it (so, a lose-lose for Dausgaard).

I have never been in the same room when Dausgaard has conducted the BBC Scottish (BBCSSO) or Seattle Symphony Orchestras. Nor have I had to play an instrument under him, as musicians in all those ensembles have with regularity. But I have witnessed him rehearse three orchestras in Sweden and Denmark and have come away with the impression of a musician whose intensity is inspiring and generous, if potentially exhausting. On the handful of occasions on which we have met, I have found Dausgaard a thoughtful, honest and warm person – one who’s piloting of his own career seems rooted in a broader, more holistic view of the world and its cultures. And yes, perhaps also one who’s constantly buzzing personal artistry projects a certain brittleness.

The Seattle appointment may have gone catastrophically wrong, but the most significant piece of reporting on the rift – this deeply contextual piece from Douglas McLennan – opens with the considered and reasoned assessment that the Seattle Symphony has ‘never sounded better’ than under Dausgaard. Reading McLennan’s investigative reporting, it’s easy to conclude that Dausgaard was simply a victim of Seattle’s ‘toxic’ management culture. But then, the BBCSSO hasn’t exactly rushed to the defence of the conductor, whose contract it extended by three years in 2019.

Dausgaard may have rubbed his Glaswegian colleagues up the wrong way by choosing not to visit them for 20 months and counting (there is hearsay about other dissatisfactions). But nowhere on his initial contract did it state that the conductor would be obliged to run the gauntlet of travelling to conduct them, often with no audience, amid the chaos and danger of a global pandemic. Besides, it seems abundantly clear, even as an external observer, that this is a man who has been in some degree of distress, doubtless due in part to the dumpster fire raging in Seattle.

That much was clear when hearing Dausgaard speak to Denmark’s equivalent of Radio 3’s In Tune last week. When he was asked what implications the mid-season resignation might have for his reputation and future career, he seemed entirely stumped, admitting after a significant silence that it was not something he had considered ‘in that way’. This is not a career strategist, still less a man well versed in political machination.

The urge to conduct remained, Dausgaard told the Swedish radio station P2, but his priorities right now included ‘clearing out his ears’, ‘listening better to myself’ and ‘hearing the grass grow’ (a Danish turn of phrase, suggesting taking a step away from the rat-race). He was also frank about the ‘whole different working culture’ introduced to the Seattle Symphony when it changed leadership in September 2018, a culture in which the principle of listening did not, he alleged, extend beyond the concert stage.

Dausgaard explained to P2 his desire to grow and eat his own vegetables and re-establish a personal link with nature (all on his mind before the pandemic, as the logistical insanity of an international conducting career wound steadily up) – a classically Nordic retreat into the natural world that is seen time and again in the art and literature of the region and its creators. His return home also echoes the experience of other artists who have beaten a path back to safe, consensual Scandinavia after stints in countries where the arts are less societally ingrained and more subjected to market pressures (aka ‘the real world’).

More than anything, Dausgaard’s fermata and his openness to discussing it parallels the experiences of those athletes who have decided, after years trotting the globe to perform under the gaze of press and public, that enough is enough. They have taken a break for the good of their own mental health. Nobody has blamed them for that.

From the stance of a listener and a critic – not someone who has been on the receiving end of Dausgaard’s musical leadership or the intense playing style he so obviously demands of his players – I look forward to seeing him conduct again. I also look forward to seeing him build idiosyncratic programmes again. Fascinating, contextual programmes have been one clear manifestation of Dausgaard’s idealism, be it naïve or not. Another has been his desire to get away. This is a man who has lived with headhunting tribes in Borneo and on a remote island in the South Pacific.

Dausgaard’s career trajectory as an international conductor will look just as unorthodox after his two most significant jobs come to an end this year. But I doubt he cares much about that. Nor it is really the point. In concluding his interview with P2, Dausgaard described himself as ‘very thankful for the opportunity’ to re-set. So, whether you like his conducting or not, he can’t be blamed for seeing the bigger picture when so many of us, apparently, can’t.