Conductors don’t often use their rear-view mirror: their eyes are set on the road ahead, whether it’s this week’s rehearsals and concerts, or learning (or refreshing) a score for three weeks away, or planning next season’s programme, or discussing with agents and promoters concerts, or operas, that may not take place for years. Sir Antonio Pappano, as one of the most hard-working of today’s major conductors, recently stopped the clock to take stock of his past – and the fruits of this retrospection is a book, Faber’s rather unimaginatively titled My Life in Music. It comes at a milestone in an unquestionably distinguished career, arguably the biggest change in direction he’s yet taken. This summer he steps down as Music Director of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. His 18-year tenure at the head of Rome’s Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia ended last season, and this autumn he becomes Chief Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra (though, given the number of concerts he’s conducted already, that role might just as well have started already).

When we met in Pappano’s office at the Royal Opera House in early May, a score was open on his piano, Giordano’s Andrea Chénier, the last opera he’d be conducting as the company’s musical boss, and he’d be joined by a longtime musical partner, the tenor Jonas Kaufmann. The score of Mendelssohn’s Elijah was on his iPad and he was listening to an early edit of a recording made for LSO Live. And this seemingly inexhaustible conductor had just returned from an 11-concert European tour with the LSO and was still buzzing. I told him how sorry I was to have missed his Vaughan Williams Fifth before they set out (though have since caught up with it on Marquee TV, and magnificent it was too). ‘I love English music,’ he told me. ‘And if you look at my concerts coming up, you can see where the accent is. I don’t do it to make a statement. I do it because I was knocked out conducting Vaughan Williams Nos 4 and 6, and that gave me an appetite for this stuff. And it’s also part of my heritage and certainly a heritage of the orchestra, but then it’s not like they’re playing this stuff every day either. So when we get to Symphony No 9 they won’t have played it for a while. So that will be very interesting to dig. And that’s a good adventure for me.’ And then he adds, in surprised delight, ‘We played the Fifth in Germany and it went down a storm. The audience absolutely loved it. I’m kicking myself that I didn’t do Vaughan Williams in Rome sooner, especially something like the Fifth Symphony, because it’s so overtly spiritual. And in a Catholic country like that …’

My Life in Music, and I won’t pre-empt Gramophone’s review, is fascinating on ‘Pappano BC’ (Before Covent Garden). It shows that the opera-house route is still one that equips a conductor for pretty well anything that might be encountered later, and of course it was the road taken by nearly all the greats from Mahler, Toscanini, Walter, Szell, Karajan and Solti onward. One figure who was hugely important to Pappano in his early career was Daniel Barenboim, whose assistant he was at Bayreuth. ‘Daniel has quite an unorthodox technique, too, if you watch him. Sometimes it’s hugely big, and sometimes it’s so minimal that you can barely see anything. But the important thing about conducting is that you have to learn how to rehearse. At the end of the day, I don’t think I’m the greatest conductor to look at, but I do know how to rehearse. So now, even when I get up in front of, say, the LSO, I know that they can sight-read better than most orchestras play – as we all know. The trick is that you’ve got to come up with the goods, you’ve got to come up with something that keeps them on their toes and interested. And watching Daniel was key. And I talk in the book about how to keep the process of the rehearsals ever-nourishing to the people you’re working with.’

For me, one of the most fascinating threads running through the book is Pappano’s nearly two decades at the helm of the Santa Cecilia orchestra – one, incidentally, just celebrated by Warner Classics in a new 27-CD set of his Roman recordings (excluding the operas). He inherited an ensemble in good shape, something he’s very happy to credit to his predecessor Myung Whun Chung (‘He did a fantastic job. I mean, he’s no slouch. My goodness!’), but the relationship between Pappano and his players helped forge a creative crucible. ‘The chemistry between me and them – what with all my Italian baggage, and what I could bring to them in terms of flair and theatricality because of what I am, a theatre conductor – is, I think, very natural. And because of that, I had the ability to bring out of them what just needed encouraging, their cantabilità – their sense of colour. That’s what drew Lenny to them, you know, in the last years of his life [Bernstein was the orchestra’s Honorary President from 1983 to 1990], but I had time to do it – 18 years. It takes time.’

I was surprised at how much contemporary music Pappano had conducted in Rome, by a lot of composers I’d never even heard of – and that, of course, doesn’t just need a sympathetic orchestra, but an audience that trusts you. ‘Absolutely. And with the focus being on Milan and La Scala – “La Scala, La Scala, La Scala” – those two words put together (it’s very much a thing in Italy), the Santa Cecilia orchestra, although it has a glowing history, was kind of sleeping and people had forgot. It’s a shame there’s not a disc of contemporary music in the new set,’ Pappano adds. ‘I mean, I did a lot of premieres and that was fantastic. And also talking to the audience which was enormously important. And I also introduced works that hadn’t been heard there for years. Do you know that when I performed Elgar’s First Symphony at Santa Cecilia, it had been 90 years since it was performed in Rome, by Barbirolli. Wow, 90, can you imagine?’

Generous to a fault, Pappano is lavish in his praise of his Italian musicians. ‘The virtuosity was always there – if you listen to some of the playing, the wind playing, in Scheherazade – the new recording that’s come out [and warmly welcomed by Mark Pullinger in May] – I mean, just the fast stuff, you’ve got to hear it to believe it. And it’s just unbelievable the way they can get around the instrument. But, of course, Italian musicians have that ability. And it’s always about the sound.’

The new Warner Classics box contains one recording that’s never been out before, Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, recorded live in 2023. Pappano tells me he had to twist the arm of Warner Classics President Alain Lanceron for its inclusion. ‘I just think it’s the greatest symphony ever written,’ is his trenchant opinion of the work. ‘They didn’t play a lot of Bruckner, partly because the President of the orchestra at the time – and I say that in the book – didn’t like Bruckner at all, and he had the final word about these things, but he let me get on with it. So I managed to programme it three times. And so this is the fruit of that work. We also did Nos 7 and 9 quite a bit, and also the Te Deum.’

With his long pedigree in Wagner, I wonder whether it unlocked the key to Bruckner. ‘Strangely enough, it’s much easier for me to be Wagnerian in Bruckner than it is to be Wagnerian in Wagner. I’ll tell you why. Because in Wagner there’s this neurotic text that somehow seems to fight against the expectations of pomp and grandeur, and majesty and burnished sound. And I’m kind of nervy, when it comes to text and drama. But in Bruckner – because the spiritual element is so strong – it’s different. And I can conjure the sounds – wait till you hear the brass – it’s just magnificent! And the way the strings, you know … the Catholic thing, the tremolo, the cellos! I’m serious – and I’m very proud of them because the finales of those pieces are very difficult to put together because they’re so changeable. So it’s a dream realised!’

Given Barenboim’s track record as a noted Brucknerian, I wondered whether Pappano had ever worked with him on these symphonies. ‘With Barenboim it was mostly opera. I did see him rehearse Bruckner, but not often. And we don’t conduct Bruckner at all the same way! I’ll tell you why, because there are two schools of thought about Bruckner. Interestingly enough, Furtwängler – God, right? – in the long wind-ups to climaxes almost always speeds up, accelerates. And to me, that goes against the tug, the Wagnerian tug. You have to torture people to arrive; it has to be hard won. And of course, Daniel belongs to that school. I don’t. It’s not a criticism at all. But in Bruckner I prefer the slower burn so that when it hits, it’s unbearable. I don’t know if it’s right. I just feel that that’s the way. This whole question of influence is very important. If it’s done right it makes you come to your own conclusions. Not “Oh, you know how he was very influenced by Barenboim”. Of course, I was very influenced by him, but if I conducted the same as him, that’s rubbish. That’s copying. I’m very different from him. I have very different repertoire choices from him. He wouldn’t go near Rachmaninov’s Second in a million years, nor Vaughan Williams. So that’s helped me keep my individuality intact and therefore the influence he’s had on me has been about bigger things: how do you treat tempo in a classical symphony when so much of the material is repetitive. The importance of transforming the themes after a combustible development? How do you deal with the repeat? What is important in conducting? Who do you take care of? Those things are really important. How do you deal with them? And they take a long time. You know, sometimes he would tell me stuff and make me feel like an idiot until I realised three years later, “Oh, that’s what he was talking about”. That’s influence. Yeah.’

The next chapter in Pappano’s career, where orchestral music will become the central focus, will no doubt be covered in these pages over the coming years. And it will also allow him to shift priorities, not just on repertoire. ‘I’ll no longer have two jobs. And that allows me to really focus in, big time. I think these are times when fidelity – presence – in an organisation is incredibly important because there so many questions. What is the future of classical music? What is the future of education? What is the future of our children? What is the future of our audience? Will there be a new hall? Can that possibly happen again? Can it possibly be revived? All those things mean that – to me at least – what I produce with the LSO has to have an intensity that is worthy of the ticket that people are paying for. The LSO have an incredible energy. It’s really quite something. And our relationship has always been very natural. Nothing’s changed whether I have a title or not – we just get on with it. And I think that that’s the secret to my relationship with them, and theirs with me, so that we can be the strongest model for British prowess in the arts. We have to be at the top of our game.’

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