Vladimir Jurowski: I can’t ever go back to terrorist-state Russia

Now based in Berlin, the superstar conductor talks about why it wouldn’t be safe for him to return to his homeland

It was more than a decade ago that Vladimir Jurowski, one of Russia’s best-known musical sons, began to realise that things were taking a sinister turn in the country of his birth.
“It was a feeling, a hunch that things were about to get worse, especially after Russia annexed the Crimea,” says the 52-year-old conductor. “The irony was that at exactly that moment they held out a hand to me. The government offered to restore my Russian passport, which I lost after I emigrated to Germany with my family when I was 18. It was actually the great-grandson of Leo Tolstoy who approached me from the Culture Ministry. Other émigré Russian artists and musicians received the same offer, and some people accepted, but I just couldn’t. I remembered the case of Sergei Prokofiev, who accepted an offer to return to the Soviet Union in 1936, and from then on was trapped. He was never able to leave again. I didn’t want that to be my fate.”
Jurowski’s career has actually been centred on Germany and the UK ever since he became music director of Glyndebourne Festival Opera in 2001 at the age of 29, where he dazzled audiences with his sheer balletic grace and the fine-grained subtlety of his performances. But he kept his artistic and personal ties to Russia. He conducted the Russian National Orchestra often, and until 2020 was artistic director of the Russian State Academic Symphony Orchestra, but that chapter of his life is now closed.
“I don’t think I can ever return, I would put my own safety at risk, because my views on Russia are well known,” he says. “I think the country is moving towards what they call a national state and what I would call a fascist state. Obviously it’s not exactly like Stalin’s Soviet Union, or like Hitler’s Germany of 1938, but there are a lot of similarities, and these are growing every day. Things have become especially bad since the last elections, with things like the death of Alexei Navalny. There are the limitations on the freedom of speech, the repression of dissidents and the media and gay people. And the people running the country, in my opinion, are criminals, they are proper mafiosi. So really it’s a terrorist state, which you can compare to Iran, or North Korea.”
Jurowski says all this with weary equanimity, tinged with sadness. His long, romantic-poet’s hair is now flecked with grey, but he’s still as lean as ever, and still enunciates his English words with careful precision. We’re meeting in one of the numerous artists’ rooms tucked away at the back of the Royal Festival Hall, where he’s rehearsing for what he calls “Wagner’s most immense and most immensely complex” opera, Die Götterdämmerung, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the orchestra he led for 15 years.
Jurowski has the émigré’s super-sharp awareness of cultural and political realities which won’t allow him to float complacently above politics. Just recently he aroused some negative comments by remarking in a New York Times interview that “no musician is ever apolitical”. 
“That was misunderstood,” he tells me. “I didn’t mean all music is political, in fact I think music in its essence is non-political. But there is always a context for music-making, it happens in a certain place at a certain time. Even Bach’s B minor Mass was political – he wrote it partly to put himself in favour with the Catholic court in Dresden. And now certain kinds of music have become intensely political. Tchaikovsky’s music is being used by the Russian regime for propaganda purposes, and of course many people in the West wanted to ban his music, and the music of other Russian composers, when Russia invaded Ukraine. This seems completely stupid to me. We cannot blame Tchaikovsky for the crimes of the current Russian state. Of course, I can understand why Ukrainians feel differently.”
Even more controversial was Jurowski’s decision to allow two young climate change protestors to make a public statement, after they had invaded the orchestral platform during a performance of Bruckner’s 4th Symphony with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra last September at Lucerne. It’s clear that the audience was not at all pleased with his decision. Why did he do it?  
“We had continued to play while they were glueing themselves to my podium, and I thought – now let them speak, for two minutes,” says Jurowski. “Lots of people in the audience were shouting in protest at this, and I said, look I promised they could speak, so if you don’t stop shouting I will leave and that will be the end of the concert. If you give them a chance, we’ll finish the symphony. I had this email correspondence afterwards with the protestors where I explained that, ok, you want to save the environment but there is also an ecology of the human soul – and this ecology is nurtured by the arts and also classical concerts. I really wanted them to understand that, but at the same time when the planet is burning, we should not be so petty as to forbid them from voicing their worries.” 
It’s now three years since Jurowski stepped down from the LPO to head up the State Opera in Munich and the Radio Orchestra in Berlin where he lives with his wife Patricia (he has two children, one now working in a German opera house, the other boarding at a cathedral school in England). In doing so he seemed to be following in the footsteps of other conductors such as Kent Nagano and Esa-Pekka Salonen who’ve struggled for a while with the underfunded and highly-pressurised British orchestral scene, before sinking gratefully into the soft embrace of a European or American orchestra, where funding and rehearsal time are so much more plentiful. Except, he tells me, that things are changing.
“The world is moving on, and things are very different in Germany now. For instance, the German radio orchestras which have been the most protected area of funding for years and years, are now becoming an endangered species. The bosses of the two main public radio and television stations have stated that they may not need all these orchestras in the near future. So the debate about possible closure and redundancies, which we know from other countries like Italy, and more recently at the BBC with the debate about the orchestras [the planned closure of the BBC Singers and cuts to the English BBC orchestras of 20 per cent were actually withdrawn under public pressure), is now happening in Germany. And because of the economic downturn in Germany, and the demands on public money from Covid, the refugee crisis and so on, people are beginning to ask questions we never heard in Germany before, such as – why do we need this elitist form of art? They are not asking as loudly as in the UK, but it’s coming.”
Jurowski is still sad that the UK has left “the European family of nations” as he called it, and is dismayed about the funding crisis in the arts sector. And he’s still fond of the country that gave him his first big post (a feeling which is reciprocated – in February Jurowski was awarded the highest honour available to a non-UK citizen, an Honorary KBE.) He can even find words of praise for our orchestral scene, “because everything moves so much quicker, and there is so much less time for everything, and because of that people are incredibly well prepared and super engaged.
“Also you have these wonderful audiences, I wish German audiences could learn from them, they are so open-minded and curious. It is remarkable what the British art scene is still achieving, despite all the funding problems. Really the artistic resources of your country are astonishingly rich.”
Vladimir Jurowski conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra in Wagner’s ‘Götterdämmerung’ at the Royal Festival Hall on Saturday; lpo.org.uk. Vol 3 of the LPO’s Stravinsky CD series, conducted by Jurowski, is released on Friday on the LPO label