This interview originally appeared in the July 2017 issue of Gramophone. To find out more about subscribing to Gramophone, the world's leading classical music magazine, please visit: gramophone.co.uk/subscribe

The morning after a life-enhancing performance of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Herbert Blomstedt is warmly greeting some old family friends backstage at the Leipzig Gewandhaus and I fear that I’m intruding. But Blomstedt, a sensitive and serene presence, senses my discomfort and waves me across the room to introduce me to his pals. ‘We’re about to have a really good conversation about Beethoven,’ he tells them and immediately everyone is put at their ease.

Blomstedt clearly feels right at home in Leipzig, where he served as the Gewandhaus Orchestra’s Music Director between 1998 and 2005 – its 19th Gewandhauskapellmeister. It was Riccardo Chailly’s abrupt departure from the orchestra in 2016 that brought Blomstedt back into the fold as an unofficial caretaker before Andris Nelsons takes over the helm next year. Blomstedt had originally inherited the orchestra from Kurt Masur at a time when the city of Leipzig was still recovering from the GDR period and the orchestra was far from the finely honed specimen it is today. He had arrived shortly after quitting his post as Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony, a time that, thanks to a fertile recording contract with Decca, helped clinch his reputation with the record-buying public – discs of Mendelssohn, Bruckner, Nielsen, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and Berwald mapped out his repertoire, the necessary fixtures balanced against more personal enthusiasms.

Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, to Swedish parents who moved back to Gothenburg when Blomstedt was two, his approach to conducting reflects his identity as a citizen of everywhere. He studied with Igor Markevitch in Salzburg – and with Leonard Bernstein during the very early days of Tanglewood. He has led Scandinavian orchestras (the Oslo Philharmonic, the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Swedish RSO) and was Chief Conductor of the Staatskapelle Dresden between 1975 and 1985. And having just watched him lead the first in what will be a run of three Beethoven Ninths, Blomstedt’s looming 90th birthday feels almost implausible.

To celebrate, Accentus Music is releasing a complete cycle of Beethoven symphonies on CD (plus Nos 5, 6, 7 and 9 on DVD/Blu-ray) taken from Blomstedt’s performances with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra between 2014 and 2017, but I wonder what happens to the Choral Symphony in his mind between performances. Is he delivering final and settled thoughts – or does the piece continue to evolve inside his imagination? ‘It never leaves the mind and only when I intensely start working on another piece will it fade,’ he tells me. ‘It’s there when I’m trying to sleep – what can I do to make it more beautiful, or to help a musician with the intonation or the phrasing? It’s a work in progress all the time.’

Blomstedt’s first Beethoven cycle was completed in 1980, during his time in Dresden…‘No, no, I’ve not listened to those records since I made them,’ Blomstedt says, anticipating my question, ‘but each performance is an accumulation of all my experiences with the piece.’ Since last night’s performance he has, he says, been thinking about how Beethoven deals with rhythm in his opening movement – about how his signature ‘da, da, da, DAH’ motif, which haunts the movement in various rhythmically displaced and intensified permutations, is, as he puts it, ‘reversed’ by the unusual ritardando introduced later in the movement (bar 214 in the published score). ‘I never thought before that there was a connection’, he explains, ‘and perhaps it was not conscious for Beethoven. But he definitely works with the contrast, making it into a constructive element.’

I suggest that for music so fixated on interruption – think about how the timpani brutally puncture the orchestral fabric during the Scherzo, or the way Beethoven drops material from earlier in the symphony into his finale – the piece is also vigorously unified by its motivic foundations. ‘Its coherence is astonishing,’ Blomstedt marvels. ‘The whole piece is built on two motifs: the falling fourths you hear right at the beginning, and then the exact opposite: chromatic slurred notes, falling seconds like a sigh, as in the slow movement.’

The falling fourths that open the Adagio are obviously related to the very opening of the symphony, he says, before explaining how the end of the finale runs amok with those falling seconds – and how the very last notes are a sped-up version of the very first notes in the symphony. Is it a conductor’s responsibility, I ask, to point out those intricacies of construction – or can the music lose itself in too much nuts-and-bolts detail? ‘This music is very emotional while also being an intellectual game for us musicians,’ he responds. ‘But that game must never compromise musical sense. For instance, the last notes of the symphony are the same as the first notes; but it would make no sense to accent da-DAH-da-DAH-da to match the opening, especially at that very fast tempo. Always there are pitfalls – but these details cannot be passed over like nothing happened.’

We rewind back to the Gothenburg of Blomstedt’s youth, where Beethoven provided his initiation into music. As a violinist he played Beethoven string quartets and piano trios with his cellist brother and pianist mother and found what he describes as the ‘willpower’ and ‘the motor’ of the music irresistible, a window into a world beyond Sweden. ‘Most Swedes are bound to more sentimental things,’ he explains. ‘We are Northern people and we love when the sun appears and we can dream about nature and sunsets with sweet harmonies. But this is not at all the German way; they want to be active and to produce things. And this is what Beethoven symbolised to me. When I discovered Carl Nielsen, this same idea of movement and goal in music felt very important.’

Studying abroad changed everything: ‘I had been studying in Sweden, and I was lucky enough to get a scholarship for one year in Salzburg to a conducting institute led by Igor Markevitch. I didn’t know his name – what had attracted me was that Karajan was listed as a guest lecturer, but he didn’t show up.

‘But Markevitch’s instruction was just what I needed. I knew how to beat in 2 and 3, but he taught us that what comes out in sound corresponds with what you do with your hands. Alexander Gibson, Daniel Barenboim and Wolfgang Sawallisch were in the same class, and Markevitch was insistent that the score is the bible of music – you must do what it says. But he never allowed us to conduct from the score. In front of the orchestra, you have to guide their impulses, not read the score. How loud is loud? How fast is Allegro? You tell it with your hands.’

Bernstein was a powerful complement to Markevitch: ‘He was less interested in teaching technique – as a musician he more or less improvised on the podium. But his musical ideas were fantastic and the way he analysed scores was inspiring. Bernstein put the New York Philharmonic on the map again, but there was a lesson to be learnt in his success. The orchestral playing got worse and worse because the musicians knew success could be achieved through Bernstein’s personality. They didn’t need to play well.’

And talk of the New York Philharmonic links back nicely to Leipzig. Blomstedt’s predecessor, Kurt Masur, became Music Director of the NYPO in 1991 while he was still at Leipzig. And with Masur’s passing, I wonder how the Leipzig orchestra circa 2017 compares to the orchestra that Blomstedt encountered when he first arrived two decades ago. He tells it as it is. ‘When I arrived [in 1998] it was not in good shape. During the GDR period, the orchestra was one of the main providers of hard currency for the GDR – they played for big fees in Japan, West Germany and America, which all went to the state. To play all these concerts and the opera at home the orchestra was suddenly enlarged by 50 musicians, and they were not the best quality.

‘Masur was here for 25 years and after that long period of time tensions had inevitably grown between him and the orchestra. Although he was never a party member, he was friends with Erich Honecker and through that friendship this concert hall was built. When Masur encouraged restraint in 1989, he became a hero – which led to his post in New York. I am not at all a political person and could not fulfil that same role, but slowly we worked to improve the orchestra – and it has never been better than today.’

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