The Daily Telegraph, November 2006
“It’s 6.30pm in a restaurant in Covent Garden, London, and the waitress has been waiting some time for the excitable, slightly jowly man with the black eyes and dark curly hair sitting opposite me to say whether he likes the wine. But Semyon Bychkov is too excited to register. He’s in full flow on the subject Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades, which he is conducting at the Royal Opera House. ‘You know, Tchaikovsky takes such care in the detail of this opera. Look at the way he mirrors the ebb and flow of the character’s inner life in the tempi. Tempo is really everything. Not absolute tempo, but having the right tempo relationships. That’s why I pay such attention to the composer’s markings. So many things fell into place in this score when I did that. That’s why I use a metronome much more these days.’
But doesn’t that make for a mechanised performance? ‘No, it’s a discipline, it tells you whether you’re being true to the music. You can’t argue with it. We have a saying in Russia: if you don’t like your face, don’t blame the mirror!’ He laughs a proper Russian belly-laugh at this, as warm as the handshake he gave when we met.
Bychkov’s stint at Covent Garden is a rare appearance for a conductor we see all too little of in this country. His first big appointment was at the Orchestre de Paris in 1989, after which he moved to the WDR Symphony Orchestra in Cologne in 1998. But it’s in the world’s leading opera houses that he has really astonished people, drawing out a miraculous wealth of detail in the great works of Strauss and Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky, but generating at the same time a tremendous dramatic sweep.
Reaching his current eminence was a struggle. As a Jewish student in the Soviet Union during the dark years of Brezhnev, he was constantly under a cloud, particularly when he and his family made known their desire to emigrate. ‘I remember they said to my father, ‘Just wait until you’re dead, then we’ll let you go anywhere you want.”
Eventually the meeting came with the KGB, to find our whether he and his wife could leave the country. ‘Amazingly they said yes.’
Bychkov and his wife went to the USA with hardly more than the clothes they stood up in, and for several months were supported by Jewish charities. But then came a year’s conducting course at the Mannes school of music, and soon the first appointments followed, at orchestras in Grand Rapids and Buffalo. Now he says he hardly ever goes back to Russia, but denies being bitter. ‘I used to be full of anger, but since this has changed to an enormous feeling of compassion, because I think the transition to the new-style Russia has brought much suffering and confusion.’
But if he’s serene in regard to his past, Bychkov seems a driven perfectionist in the present quite prepared to trash the results of an expensive recording session if he’s not happy with it. ‘I did that twice with Philips Classics. They were not pleased, but it was not coherent so what could I do?’
Bychkov does seem drawn to operas with over-wrought dangerously passionate figures: Strauss’s Electra, and Salome, Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, and now Hermann, the anti-hero of The Queen of Spades, who sacrifices all to his obsession with gambling. ‘Well, I suppose I am drawn to extremes. It’s the same with tempi. I can feel them all except ‘moderate’. What the hell does ‘moderately’ mean? I can’t relate to it!’ Again that big laugh, which turns heads in the restaurant. Passion combined with exactitude – those are Bychkov’s traits, and they should make for a thrilling night at the opera.”