Herbert Blomstedt interview

Just before his 85th birthday, the great conductor speaks to Michael White

Herbert Blomstedt (photo: Gert Mothes)

Like popes, conductors tend to carry on until they drop; and although Herbert Blomstedt insists that's as far as comparisons go, he does happen to share with the current incumbent of the Holy See an 85th birthday this year – which (very like the pontiff) he's facing in robust health, with a full diary.

I caught up with him in Monaco where he was on tour with the Dresden Staatskapelle, playing Bruckner. And it was an appropriate thing to find him doing, given that for much of his career he's been regarded as a kapellmeister figure: serious, sober, and a touch severe in his dedication to the core German repertory.

But the reason I wanted to meet him (which I'd never done before) had nothing to do with any of that. For years I've carried a torch for Herbert Blomstedt as the man responsible for what I consider the best Nielsen symphony cycle on disc – done in the late-1980s/early-‘90s when he was music director of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.

Why such a dazzlingly idiomatic reading of these (in my opinion) great works should have come out of San Francisco is hard to explain. There was no Nielsen tradition there before he arrived. And as he told me when we talked, there's been none since.

'Years after those recordings I was back with the orchestra, doing Nielsen again, and it felt as though we'd only just been playing it the day before. I mentioned this to the concert master, and he said the explanation's simple: no one here has touched this music since you left.'

But if Nielsen wasn't in the SFSO's blood, it was certainly in Blomstedt's. Though born in the America, he had Scandinavian parents who took him back to northern Europe at an early age – which is how he came to learn his craft in that part of the world. His first appointment, in the mid-1950s, was with the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra in Sweden, after which he progressed in orderly succession through chief conductorships with the Oslo Philharmonic, Danish RSO, and Swedish RSO before returning to the US. And it was in fact with the Danish RSO that he first committed a Nielsen cycle to disc: a set made for EMI, who reissued it as part of larger Nielsen package in 2008.

But that Danish Nielsen set was never in the same league as the San Francisco set, as Blomstedt concedes. 'At the time I took over the Danish RSO in the 1960s, it was a less than virtuoso orchestra – full of elderly ladies and gentlemen, some of whom had been there since it was founded in the 1920s. There was no retirement policy in those days.'

Blomstedt, by comparison, kept moving on. And looking over his career you find that orderliness is the only word for the way his tenures have tended to fall into neat, 10-year periods – as was the case with the Dresden Staatskapelle which he ran from 1975-85.

They were the years of the old DDR and not, perhaps, a time to remember with affection. But Blomstedt recalls his concerts then in Dresden as 'the highlights of my life. The Staatskapelle then was unmatchable – a marvellous orchestra, strong-willed and stubborn in the best sense, defending its idiosyncrasies like a proud mother refusing to let anyone touch her children. It was very special.'

He accepts that the specialness owed much to isolation in the East and that some of the pride of being born into a closed tradition has been lost since the wall came down. 

'The Staatskapelle has had difficulties recently, and it's not like it used to be – however bad those old times were in other ways. I never experienced direct political interference as its conductor, but of course there were problems – usually to do with certain players in the orchestra not being allowed to travel in case they defected, and others that you couldn't get rid of because they were Party members. And as finances got bad toward the end, we were under endless pressure to go on tour and earn western currency – always for high fees, on the same level as the Vienna or Berlin Philharmonics, although none of it ever got back to the players'.

Nonetheless, a fondness for the old East Germany took him back there some years later to take charge of the Gewandhaus, Leipzig: an ensemble he sums up as 'less defined than Dresden but more flexible, more open to ideas'. It's the Gewandhaus that features in the main recording project for his 85th birthday year: a Bruckner symphony cycle assembled from live performances over a long period, from 2005 (No 8) until recently (Nos 1 and 2). It comes out on the Querstand label and, combined with the repertoire in his current concert schedule, makes this very much a Brucknerjahre.

The pity is that nothing on the schedule brings him to Britain. But then, it rarely ever has. His visits to the UK have been no more than occasional, almost always with an orchestra on tour; and I was astonished when he told me that throughout his long career he's only ever conducted three concerts with a British band. Which probably explains why his profile in the UK has never been as high as his achievements merit.

The Bruckner Fifth I heard him do in Monaco, as part of the Printemps des Arts festival there, was the best concert experience I've had in months: spacious, unhurried, but with no sense of drag and not a moment's loss of intensity. The Staatskapelle sound was rich and ripe but crystal clear. The massive architecture of the score was masterfully realised. And that all this came with a stick technique so understated it was almost awkward made the end result the more remarkable. 

Blomstedt is not a glamorous personality, but to my mind he ranks high among the living giants of the podium. A low-key, undervalued, underestimated giant perhaps – but listen to those Nielsen discs and there's no doubt about his stature.

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