Has any person in history ever had the solution to a world filled with bloodshed, chaos, violence and carnage?
Violinist Dmitry Sitkovetsky playing with the Bangkok Symphony Orchestra.
Possibly, but the most unlikely candidate, was neither a statesman nor a philosopher. He was a bewigged small-town Austrian foppish fiddler, who loved billiards, terrible puns, cute puppy dogs, dirty jokes, and — almost incidentally — composed the most beautiful music ever known. His solution was as childlike and wise as he was.
“I only wish,” wrote Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to his father in 1773, “that the whole world could feel the power of harmony.”
Was Mozart thinking of musical harmony, worldly harmony, or — more likely — the harmonies of the planets and the universe. On Aug 8 at the Thailand Cultural Centre, Bangkok may well feel that same “force of harmony” with three indispensable works of Mozart, led by one of the world’s most celebrated violinists/conductors.
Dmitry Sitkovetsky, holding both the baton of the Bangkok Symphony Orchestra and the bow of his rare Stradivarius violin, will lead the ensemble in Mozart’s tragic Symphony No. 40, the overture to Don Giovanni and Mozart’s final Violin Concerto, a work which the 19-year-old composer actually wrote for himself.
Maestro Sitkovetsky is a favourite in Bangkok and appeared as a soloist with the Bangkok Symphony Orchestra two years ago. While the audience loved him, the real test was with the musicians and they found his personality as genial as his playing was electrifying.
In his previous concert, he played the lush ultra-romantic Sibelius’ Violin Concerto in D Minor and this year, the maestro will be turning to the ultimate in 18th century music.
Whether Sibelius or Mozart, Sitkovetsky has the same feeling about the force of music.
“Sometimes,” he says, “words cannot express our deepest emotions. Those feelings can only be given with sounds. Music, plus all-important silence, can deliver what we feel inside us. Cultural barriers, people with completely different backgrounds, those with religious beliefs or no beliefs at all know that music is special.
“Even those who don’t want to talk to each other can speak through music. All is elevated to a sphere above us.
“All we need is an audience, a conductor, a composer and we can communicate to something far greater than what we are and that is what I live for.”
In 1954, Sitkovetsky was literally born into this musical sphere. Both his parents were among the elite of Russian musicians (his mother a pianist, his father a violinist) and, he claims, “I remember hearing music in my mother’s womb.”
After that he cannot recall a month or year or day when he wasn’t immersed in music.
Not that this was all paradisiacal. His esteemed father died of cancer at the age of 32 and with his mother on constant concert tours, he was left alone much of the time. Yet, in the home of his birth in the Russian province of Azerbaijan, or later in Moscow, where he attended music schools and the Moscow Conservatory, his own fame was spreading and, like Mozart, he was giving recitals throughout the Soviet Union all through his youth and teenage years.
He did have one problem. While Stalin had died the year before his birth, the Soviet Regime still felt musical treasures like Sitkovetsky were far too valuable to roam in the outside world. They could perform in Russia, but were usually forbidden from travelling to Europe and America.
Some artists, like Shostakovich, Ashkenazy and Nureyev had escaped from Mother Russia. But how would this young violinist get out?
“I fooled them,” Sitkovetsky says without regret. “As long as I was valuable, they kept me inside Russia. So I pretended to have tendinitis, a condition where I was unable to play the violin.”
The result? The Politburo shed tears of compassion, but then turned their backs. Who needed another Jewish violinist in Russia if he couldn’t play the violin? Sitkovetsky was no longer (in the official words of the government) “of service to the country”. He was free to leave.
The violinist left Russia in 1977 to resume an unparalleled violin/conducting career.
Wasting no time, he went to the Juilliard School in New York, where his Russian reputation had preceded him. After this, his career began in earnest. Every orchestra wanted him and he travelled from New York to Berlin, Chicago, Philadelphia, Salzburg and international festivals.
Making his home in London, he became founding director of the New European Strings Chamber Orchestra, composed of distinguished string players from Eastern & Western Europe. For them and others, he has transcribed more than 30 works for string orchestras, from Bach to Shostakovich, Stravinsky and Schnittke.
He also became artistic director of major music festivals in Finland and Seattle. But while he won’t admit it, perhaps his favourite is “The Silk Road Festival” based in the town where he was born, Baku, Azerbaijan.
As a conductor, he was appointed principal conductor and artistic adviser of the Ulster Orchestra, has guest-conducted in San Francisco, Dallas and St Petersburg, as well as producing countless recordings and is currently the conductor of the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra.
Sitkovetsky’s choices for the Bangkok Symphony Orchestra are three works which could easily be called iconic. Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni is considered by many to be the only perfect opera in existence. Mozart apparently wrote the overture the night before the first performance (aided by some glasses of sherry and his wife reading him fairy tales).
But, unlike the legends that the composer’s music flowed out of him like a fountain, he had composed his music in his mind, revising, editing and rewriting, until ready to put pen to paper. The overture contains all the mysterious, energetic and joyous characters of the opera. He knew it was special, so he recomposed the piece to play at concerts like this.
Symphony No. 40 was one of three symphonies written in the space of two months. The Mozart you might know as charming and elegant is here, as is the Mozart of utmost tragedy, with a profundity that few other composers have ever reached.
In Mozart’s day, there were few conductors as we know them today. The First Chair Violin, or the soloist, would lead the orchestra — as Sitkovetsky will do as soloist of the Violin Concerto No.5. As the programme notes will explain at the concert, Mozart has written more than the sunny work one would expect from a 19-year-old composer. He has filled the work with tricks, musical jokes, parodies, even a Turkish march.
How will he conduct and play this music? Coming from several generations of musical artists, who often performed for themselves, one might imagine that Sitkovetsky would exemplify the description given Mozart by the philosopher Karl Barth.
“When serenading God,” he wrote, “I suppose the angels would play Johann Sebastian Bach. But when angels wish to entertain themselves and their family of angels, the music must come from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.”
