Someone once said that orchestras should be both museum and contemporary art gallery – National Gallery as well as Tate Modern, if you like. Elena Dubinets, the Artistic Director of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, reminds me of this adage when I suggest that it would be perfectly possible, and probably economically viable too – though far from healthy – for an orchestra to perform music only composed before 1950. ‘It would – but we have to do both. And if we don’t do the gallery stuff – the experimental stuff – our art form is going to die because our younger audiences might be interested in something else other than another Beethoven Ninth, or in interpreting it differently. And so this is what we intentionally do every season. We bring some new element into the classical tradition. We are trying to expand the classical music canon.’

I’d last encountered Dubinets when the Seattle Symphony was voted our Orchestra of the Year in 2018 and, as the ensemble’s Vice President of Artistic Planning and Creative Projects, she made the journey to London to attend the ceremony. Born in Moscow, where she also studied (Moscow Conservatoire), she has published five books (the most recent being Russian Composers Abroad: How They Left, Stayed, Returned, in 2021), and her academic credentials are supported by a proven track record ‘on the ground’. So, when the LPO had a significant reshuffle following both Vladimir Jurowski’s move to the lead the Bavarian State Opera after a hugely rewarding 14 years and the retirement of Tim Walker, the orchestra’s CEO and Artistic Director for 17 years, Dubinets was lured across the pond (the job of CEO and Artistic Director having been split so that she and the new CEO, David Burke, are equals in the hierarchy).

Tim Walker had ensured the future musical health of the LPO by securing the services of Edward Gardner as Chief Conductor (joining a storied roster that includes Sir Thomas Beecham, Sir Malcolm Sargent, Sir Adrian Boult, Sir Georg Solti, Bernard Haitink and Klaus Tennstedt among others) and Karina Canellakis as Principal Guest Conductor. It prompted my question about how the duties of Chief Conductor (as opposed to Music Director) dovetailed with Dubinets’ role as Artistic Director. ‘Most important, a music director oversees the entire season. Ed is only responsible for programming his own weeks and the rest is what I do. So that’s how it’s divided. Of course we share all the information. In fact, I’m looking at next season’s brochure right now, and of course he’s on the cover. We have no secrets from each other, and we work really well together. Ed and I started at the same time two and a half years ago. David has been with LPO for a long time, but in this current capacity he also started with us. So this triangle is a very new thing, relatively speaking. I think it’s working.’

And how does she find working in an orchestra in the UK, as opposed to the US – apart from the greatly reduced budget! ‘Here we don’t depend, I’m afraid, on technologies as much as the American orchestras do. For example, they use all types of databases for everything, including programming. And we work on many things manually, which I’m not sure is a good thing. I keep trying to advance us slightly further in terms of technologies. But we all rely on the very high quality of our colleagues. Each of us is a professional of the highest level. My team, the artistic team and concerts team, is just phenomenal. People have been with this organisation for 20 years and they know everything.’

Another difference is that the LPO doesn’t have its own concert hall – in London it performs at Southbank Centre, sharing with the Philharmonia as well as Chineke! Orchestra, Aurora Orchestra, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the London Sinfonietta – so the bulk of marketing is handled by the Centre. ‘But the biggest difference’, Dubinets adds, ‘is the way orchestras are unionised in the States. In the States, unions are very strong and rigorous, and they protect their members until they retire. But I found the British scene to be much more flexible and accommodating when it comes to artistic matters. Musicians never mind staying an extra five minutes and they never go home right away when the rehearsal is over. They keep practising after a six-hour rehearsal day. If a section didn’t do well during the rehearsal, they will stay over and we don’t pay them for that. So that is what I mean. We do try to protect our musicians, of course, and we try to implement everything that’s written in the CBA [Collective Bargaining Agreement]. But even those documents are much shorter in this country, much more accommodating in terms of the artistic priorities.’

The past half decade has seen a number of seismic events that have impacted, and in many cases dramatically changed, the musical horizon – Me Too, which highlighted gender inequality and the urgent need for change; in the States Black Lives Matter, which brought a similar need for racial balance; and then the pandemic, which reset many artistic schedules, forcing changes to be made much more rapidly. There were positives that emerged from these generally negative upheavals, but there were also some fairly knee-jerk reactions, like the ubiquitous programming of music by Florence Price who, after years of almost total neglect, became a kind of fig-leaf that could be draped over both the gender and racial imbalances. ‘The Florence Price thing was very interesting. It was driven by the BLM movement in the States, which happened at the time of the pandemic. I wouldn’t say that it’s only the influence of the pandemic, all of this shocked our industry from every possible angle and we are still trying to understand what it all means. And obviously programming the same composer over and over again, be it Florence Price or Beethoven, doesn’t do us any good.’ Another post-pandemic change is that orchestras have become more agile when it comes to planning. ‘It’s a very good thing. Obviously, we do still have to plan; we can’t do everything on the fly. It’s a big difference with my native country. In Russia, they never announced programmes more than three months out. But here, of course, we have to plan because we try to get the best conductors who might be busy otherwise, and we try to slot them into our schedules as early as we can in order to secure them. Same goes for soloists. Repertoire has also become more fluid. And in particular with the LPO, what we’ve tried to do in the recent years is to react to what’s going on around us much more quickly. A very sad example of this happened exactly two years ago when the Ukraine war began and we changed a number of programmes in the upcoming weeks to include more of the music by Ukrainian composers, which was absolutely necessary at the time, and representing this nation’s creative artists was essential. We changed three or four programmes over two months, which wouldn’t have been possible before the pandemic in general, because the mentality at that time typically within the industry was to try and preserve programming that had been announced in the season materials because the subscribers would have purchased tickets exactly for those programmes and any change would disturb them.’

One of the reasons that I wanted to talk to Dubinets was that the 2024-25 season is the first that is ‘pure her’ (before, she was working with some inherited programmes). ‘Next season is definitely something that I have imagined for this orchestra and it is going to have a season theme again. Last year our theme was “A Place to Call Home” and we presented composers who had lost their homes, and, I hate to say it, but we couldn’t have been more timely because the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan happened and the Ukraine War started. Next season, I didn’t want us to be in a situation when we would again be prophets, when we would be envisioning some terrible situations. So I decided that we could look at the past and see how memories of the past have been incorporated in classical music. It’s called “Moments Remembered”. But it’s entirely based on the fact that memories and our art form are intertwined – that our art form depends on memories. Classical music in general operates on our ability to remember melodies, rhythms, certain forms and chords. So, for example, we’ll open our season with the Eroica, which obviously was created to commemorate Napoleon. And then Beethoven took that dedication away when he realised that Napoleon wanted to be emperor. So one of the major topics for next season along the lines of memories and memorials through classical music is going to be who – and how – we remember. Nowadays, rather than the heroes, we tend to remember the victims. And this has changed our entire outlook, not just as classical musician but us too.’ So the Eroica will be remembered later in the season with a programme that includes Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen (which of course quotes the Eroica’s Funeral March). She singles out one of the most personally important programmes for her which is themed around Kristallnacht, the anniversary of the Second World War and liberation of Auschwitz. ‘When I arrived, I started thinking about this programme. And on November 27 we’ll do a combination of Holocaust-related works. Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, Mieczysław Weinberg’s Violin Concerto performed by Gidon Kremer, and Shostakovich’s Symphony No 13.’ And if that stirs up memories of Jeremy Eichler’s wonderful recent book Time’s Echo, you’d be right. Eichler, music critic of The Boston Globe, has been named the LPO’s Writer-in Residence next season. ‘He will do a framing essay for the entire season not only about Jewish music, of course, but about memory. The essay will be related to the memorial culture in classical music in general. But he will write programme notes for individual pieces – pieces like the Schoenberg or the Shostakovich or John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls. He’ll do a number of pre-concert talks for us, so he will be “on the ground” and working with our audiences because for me it’s lovely if they are able to enjoy music without additional explanation – and there’s nothing wrong with that. But some people want to know more. And for them, Jeremy will be a fabulous person to be a guide.’

When it comes to audiences, concert promoters need a cool head as nowadays we tend to book last minute. ‘We’ve seen it over and over again that on a Monday we would think that our hall is going to be half full on Saturday. And then suddenly we would get a packed house. People don’t seem to enjoy spending a large amount of money for something in advance – and also into committing their own time. And time is the most valuable currency everyone has. So they decide closer to the point what’s most interesting for them. After all, we are part of a huge entertainment ecological system. So we have to compete, not only with other orchestras, but with other art forms. Theatre in London is incredible, museum, cinema, all of it. We have to be able to say something important to people at our concerts in order to attract the attention. And this is how I see my task nowadays.’

The LPO’s 2024-25 London season starts on September 25 at the Royal Festival Hall with Edward Gardner conducting Medea’s Dance of Vengeance by Barber, Berlioz’s La mort de Cléopâtra (with Joyce DiDonato) and Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony.

This feature originally appeared in the August 2024 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue of the world's leading classical music magazine – subscribe to Gramophone today