The Long View | So it’s farewell to Jurowski, whose LPO tenure was nearly as long as my career

I arrived in London with a crinkled tube map and a carload of possessions in January 2004, ready and eager to take up my position on the bottom rung of the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s administrative ladder. The headed notepaper proclaimed Kurt Masur principal conductor, but there was only one musician’s name on my new colleagues’ lips: Vladimir Jurowski.

Sometimes the past really does feel like a foreign country. When I was interviewed for the job a few months earlier, David Blaine was crouched in a Perspex box dangling over the banks of the Thames. 20 months later later, the capital would be awarded the 2012 Olympics. The very next day, suicide bombers snuffed out the lives of 52 fellow Londoners.

That was 2005, just before the Royal Festival Hall closed for a 24-month rebuild. The official timeline says otherwise, but Jurowski effectively became the LPO’s principal conductor that summer, leading the ensemble as principal guest conductor at a Queen Elizabeth Hall Kurt Masur had little desire to visit. Jurowski presided over two orchestral seasons there that resembled no others in London, expanding the orchestra’s repertoire backwards, forwards and sideways.

In January 2007, I was sent to Heathrow to collect the conductor off a plane. I had the taxi journey from Terminal 2 to Blackheath Halls to quiz him about his inaugural season, in order to write the brochure. I remember him stopping at a cash machine, where he withdrew more than I earned in a month (which says more about my salary than his spending). I remember him describing Elgar as ‘an unconscious plagiarist of Brahms.’ I noted his unrelenting but earnest seriousness, and would watch as it gradually softened in the years that followed.

Arriving in Blackheath, the lunacy of London’s orchestral schedule became apparent. Jurowski barely had time to eat an M&S sandwich before commencing a full orchestral rehearsal, which was taking place seven miles, 48 hours and two strange acoustics away from the concert hall for which its resulting performance was intended.

In a recent interview with Richard Morrison marking the end of his LPO tenure, Jurowski referred to the ‘knife-edge spirit’ of London concert life. The minimal rehearsal time, poor rehearsal conditions and lack of a home base for his orchestra clearly frustrated the conductor. In my four years in the LPO’s Vauxhall office, I saw him there just once. On that occasion, I wished I hadn’t. He had read some programme notes I’d written for a different orchestra and sidled over to my open plan desk, warning me to ‘be careful you don’t make yourself look like a dilettante.’ I counted the minutes until home time, but remain grateful for a lesson learned.

Even then, the orchestra’s CEO Tim Walker was unveiling plans for an ‘Orchestral Resource Centre’ for the LPO and fundraising for it. Nothing materialised. A victim of the financial crash? A victim of my colleague, the erstwhile finance director, fraudulently siphoning off over half a million quid from the company accounts? In retrospect, it seems more a victim of London’s chronic paralysis when it comes to classical music infrastructure.

I used to give my plus-one comps to a Met copper with whom I’d studied at university, himself an unforgiving critic, brilliant musician and avid concertgoer. He maintained that Jurowski’s technique and interpretative insight were second to none. I felt some of the conductor’s performances lacked soul. Otherwise, I couldn’t disagree.

In fact, I have never enjoyed watching a conductor quite like I enjoy watching Jurowski. His technique is a sublime marriage of the highly functional with the balletically beautiful. It is entirely natural – an extension of himself. Jurowski stands, walks, gesticulates, punches numbers into a cash machine and eats an M&S sandwich with much the same ferocious elegance he displays on the podium.

So what does he leave behind? London may never get its musical infrastructure problem sorted. But there’s a sense of energy and innovation to its current classical music scene that the well-funded setup in Munich will never have. Is hunger or comfort better for making art? Discuss.

I’ve long had the lingering feeling that Jurowski was ahead of his time in London – that the sort of imagination and reappraisal he brought to his music-making would be a better fit for the world we’re moving into than the one we’re leaving behind. The narrative that Jurowski (and Rattle) are off to Munich where finances are better, political support is better and conditions are better certainly rings true. But London’s classical music community is set to enter a phase of heightened creative energy and dynamism now that the pandemic has forced it to shake off the last vestiges of complacency –complacency that was already crumbling at the end of the last decade. That might just make Jurowski’s rare returns even more special.