The Ascent of Petrenko

Feldkirch: You always pass it on your way to Salzburg in the summer from the Upper Ticino region. Every year, the navigator doesn’t let you miss it. But who would have thought that this quiet little town where you must stop to buy the Austrian highway pass to continue the journey without risking a fine was Kirill Petrenko's most cherished place of learning? Chief conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker since 2019, Petrenko cut his teeth there, in Vorarlberg, the small state in western Austria overlooking Lake Constance. “For me it was like a leap of faith,” Petrenko said.

“I arrived in Austria in 1990 with my father, without knowing a word of German. My path passed through the Feldkirch Conservatory, where I wanted to finish my piano study with a diploma. Those first three years in Austria were a very useful time for me. I had time to settle into the country, learn the language and adapt to the mentality. I learned about a lot of music that I had never heard in Russia, such as early music, Baroque music and even contemporary music, as well as Mahler and Bruckner, which were completely new to me.”

Kirill was born in 1972 in Omsk, a city in Siberia rooted in the war and chemical industry, when it was still part of the Soviet Union. In 1990, the momentous political upheavals in the USSR pushed his family – his father a musician and mother a playwright – to move to the West, to Austria. But not before he could benefit from a rock-solid education typical of the Russian school and music system. Piano lessons, music history, theory and analysis, iron discipline.

When he was elected head of the Berliner Philharmoniker, Petrenko succeeded Sir Simon Rattle. But his shy personality and his way of making music – because of the “expressionist” and therefore anti-rhetorical and almost objective tension that ignites his interpretations – immediately recalled that of Claudio Abbado, one of his predecessors. And this is no accident: the third key formative stage was Vienna, at the Universität für Musik, where Petrenko studied conducting with Uroš Lajovic, a pupil of Hans Swarowsky, Abbado's teacher. Thus, Russian, Soviet, Siberian Kirill became Austrian, Viennese, in training and musical “imprint.”

His graduation performance on the podium of the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra at the Musikverein sparked great expectations for an immediate career boost. But after graduation, Petrenko made different choices. From 1997-99, he took the podium of the Vienna Volksoper, the popular theatre and temple of operetta, where he conducted more than 40 performances a season, starting with Ein Walzertraum by Oscar Straus, with which he made his debut under the banner of miraculous lightness.

Another decisive moment in his musical journey was his appointment as conductor of the Meiningen Orchestra and Theatre in 1999. It was a small provincial town where he could carry out a real apprenticeship with the symphonic and operatic repertoire; but above all, it was a glorious city with a history of conducting, where Hans von Bülow, the first principal conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker (at that time the orchestra was called Bilse'schen Kapelle), created the first truly modern ensemble. To Petrenko, that tradition seems to have remained etched in him, especially in the variant imprinted by his second conductor, the legendary Fritz Steinbach: a conducting style marked by rhythmic rigor combined with a peculiar sensitivity for breaths and metronomic oscillations, capable of emphasizing expressive curves, as well as for certain dizzying accelerations placed to define and almost seal the great structural seams of the compositions.

The connection to the new capital of reunified Germany was drawn. In Berlin, Kirill has held his first international post since 2002 (after conducting three premieres at the Frankfurt Opera: Pfitzner's Palestrina, Puccini's Tosca and Musorgsky's Chovanščina) as music director of the Komische Oper, founded by the legendary director Walter Felsenstein. Does this explain his cultural openness when it comes to opera house practice? His consecration – but that is recent history – comes with the musical direction of the Bavarian Opera in Munich, the Ring in Bayreuth, and then with his ascension to the podium of the Berliner Philharmoniker, joining a Pantheon of the greatest.

Andrea Estero
Translation by Alexa Ahern