Semyon Bychkov: beating time

The Russian-born conductor fled the Soviet Union to build a career in the west. As he celebrates his 60th birthday with a London concert, he tells how the past has caught up with him
Semyon Bychkov conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra
Semyon Bychkov conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Proms in London, August 2012. Photograph: Amy T Zielinski/Redferns/Getty Images

The engagement diary of a leading conductor can reveal many things: musical taste, status, popularity with players, administrators and audiences. But rarely has a schedule acted so neatly as a potted biography as Semyon Bychkov's does this month. November's concerts have included performances in St Petersburg (where he was brought up and trained as a musician), Vienna (where he arrived in 1974 with $100 to his name as a Jewish exile from the Soviet Union), the US (where he made his home and established his musical reputation), Tel Aviv and London (where he has recently been awarded honorary positions with both the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Academy of Music). "I wish I could say it was all a magnificent design," he shrugs, "but there was no design. However, when the pattern was pointed out to me, the symbolism was unmistakeable."

That Bychkov's 60th birthday also falls this month adds to the seeming import of these trips down his personal memory lanes. "It is interesting that all this comes around the time of an apparently significant birthday, when it is common to look both forward and back," he says. "Over the years I have played music I have often felt that my relationship with time is a little strange. The past and the present do sometimes come together in the most unexpected ways."

The day after he arrived in Vienna in 1974 Bychkov found himself standing in front of the Staastsoper watching the audience go in to see a new production of Wagner's Lohengrin. Thirty years later to the day, he was the conductor of a new Staatsoper Lohengrin. His prize as an outstanding student in Leningrad was to conduct Rachmaninoff's second symphony with the Leningrad Philharmonic, but his application for an exit visa ensured that the authorities stopped the concert. On his first return visit to his conservatoire in the city 35 years later, this was the piece he conducted.

Born in Leningrad in 1952, Bychkov was part of a remarkable musical family; his younger brother was the conductor Yakov Kreizberg, who later became estranged from the family and died last year, aged 51. By the age of six Bychkov was giving piano concerts. He attended the Glinka Choir school and then applied, aged only 17, for the conducting course at the Leningrad Conservatoire. "The piano was my instrument, but from the beginning my ambitions were not married to a desire to become a pianist. Then as now I wanted to express music through conducting, because the repertoire that meant the most to me also included the orchestral and the operatic." An application from someone so young was highly unorthodox, in that it was widely assumed that you had to be a mature musician even to consider conducting. It was also risky in another way. If he hadn't been accepted he couldn't then change courses, "and I would have been sent to the army. But as things turned out, I never had to shoot a gun."

Despite being a star pupil, when Bychkov's critical views on the Soviet system were reported to the authorities he was obliged to apply for an exit visa, which resulted in him being ostracised within the conservatoire. "I feel no bitterness towards some of the people there who condemned me," he says. "They had no choice but to condemn, unless they wanted to find themselves in the same situation. But I had a very bitter sense of rejection of a system that claimed it was the most just and progressive society on the planet when it was not. It was one that made people lie and cheat and behave in a way they would not choose to do naturally. But it also inspired people to find a way to resist. This partly answers the question as to how a music like Shostakovich's was possible in a place that clamped down so heavily on free thought."

After his emigration, Bychkov's father, a scientist, was denied his own exit visa. "But things started to change 12 years later when Gorbachev came to power, and people gradually began to say what they felt. Soon afterwards I met my father at Vienna airport."

Although his father was persecuted specifically because he was Jewish, Bychkov says he didn't have a religious upbringing and didn't even know the traditions of Judaism. "My grandfather was observant, but because he was an old person he was untouched. For my parents' generation, born soon after the revolution, it was a non-starter. So it was only when I came to America that I became aware of Jewish history and tradition, although I was always touched by belonging, as anyone should be. But am I observant now? No, I'm not. Worse, I somehow always end up conducting on Yom Kippur. But when people point this out I say 'let's face it, I feel guilty enough throughout the year so I don't need a special day. I might as well make music.'"

He says he never expected the new world to be perfect, but arriving in the US in 1975 "was like being born for a second time. The fundamental things were pretty simple: freedom, opportunity and the ability to make your own decisions and then to take whatever consequences come as the result of your decisions." He enrolled at the Mannes College of Music in Manhattan, where he conducted the student orchestra. "And that is the place that launched me. Even though it wasn't professional, I did Mahler and Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, and everything that happened in America came from that."

His professional career began with orchestras in Grand Rapids and then Buffalo. "And you begin to make decisions which, if they go well, move you from A to B to C, and if they go badly move you in more of a zigzag. But you learn that very few decisions are fatal. Planning that first season at Grand Rapids in 1980, I was like a kid in a toy store. The programme that opened my first season was Stauss's Zarathustra, intermission, Beethoven's ninth symphony. Some people were angry. They had never been to such a long concert in their lives, and they probably never will again."

During the 80s he began to make guest debuts with the great American orchestras of Chicago, Boston and New York as well as the Amsterdam Concertgebouw and, most notably, as a last-minute cover for Riccardo Muti with the Berlin Philharmonic. "It was another return to my past. I had first encountered the Berlin phil in Leningrad in 1969. As students we couldn't afford tickets, but we always managed to get in. This time we made our way over the roof of the concert hall. It was summer, so all the windows were open, and I jumped through one. Unfortunately, it was the ladies' room and the police were called. So in my first rehearsal I told the orchestra how nice it was to meet them all these years after they got me arrested."

He says it took him a long time to learn how to run an orchestra. "It is not meant to be easy all the time. Some decisions will be approved and some will be contested. The difficult thing is to extricate your ego from the decision. Your decision might be criticised, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you are being criticised. Sometimes yes, but sometimes no. At the Buffalo Philharmonic we had a warmth of relationship from the beginning until the day I left. That simply never happened with the Orchestre de Paris. I stayed a long time [nine years] because I wanted to make it work. But it has proved to be one of life's lessons."

Paris is now his principal home, where he lives with his second wife, the pianist Marielle Labèque, one half of the Labèque Sisters piano duo. "I think it is a gift of my profession that you can get to know these countries from the inside. I feel at home in Paris, but also in America, St Petersburg, Germany, where I worked for many years, and now London."

He says his attachments to the Royal Academy of Music and the BBC Symphony Orchestra have been particularly appealing because of the combination of youth and experience. "As I grow older I am becoming more conscious of my obligation to share what I've learnt with those who are coming after me. It is a natural process. When I look at the people now my age, who were once the younger generation, I see many extremely talented musicians who went on to become uninterested, bored, frustrated and unfulfilled. It is very sad. Today's youngsters have plenty of enthusiasm and idealism, and everything they play is, for them, the best thing ever. So my greatest responsibility is not to explain where they down bow, or where it goes slower – although of course that is part of it – but to show them that it is possible to go through your career without losing that enthusiasm to do anything to make the music convincing. When they look at me and they see that this dinosaur is still sweating and he has changed three shirts in three hours, they say that maybe they can do that too."

In 2010 Bychkov gave up his last permanent post with an orchestra when he retired from the WDR Sinfonieorchester in Cologne. "It was the first time I found myself without a permanent responsibility for an artistic institution since I was 17. I have always been a leader of something or other: a choir or a symphony orchestra or an opera house. So when I gave that up, even though my diary was full with things I wanted to do, there was a little trepidation. But the reality has been better than I ever thought it could be. As a leader, in some way, you influence the lives of the people in your organisation, and not always in ways that they find agreeable. Now that is gone I am received only for what I am able to give, which is music. So when I arrive for a concert or opera they have the best of me, and I have the best of them."

Semyon Bychkov will conduct the London Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Mahler and Berg at the Barbican, London on 25 November.