Classical music’s recording industry may be a shadow of its former self, but sometimes, a bit of light shines through. One of the brightest of late has been Robert Treviño, a Mexican American conductor who has been the music director of the Basque National Orchestra in San Sebastián, Spain, since 2017.
Treviño, 40, has drawn acclaim in the past several years for recordings that are carefully prepared, exquisitely rendered and attentively controlled without ever sounding at all cautious. Enthusiastic fanfare greeted two Ravel discs on Ondine that tried to reclaim the composer as fundamentally Basque, and hence subject, as Treviño wrote in a note, to the “gravitational pulls of the Iberian Peninsula and France.”
I have particularly admired remarkably sensitive Respighi with the RAI National Symphony Orchestra, of which Treviño is currently the principal guest conductor, and a frankly gorgeous survey of Bruch with the Bamberg Symphony on CPO.
Most intriguing, and perhaps most revealing of Treviño himself, are “Americascapes,” a pair of bold releases of American music with his Basque ensemble. The first volume smartly explores works by Charles Martin Loeffler, Carl Ruggles, Howard Hanson and Henry Cowell. The second, which was released last Friday, begins with George Walker and ends with Silvestre Revueltas. At its dark heart is an aptly eerie, indeed at times quite ghastly account of George Crumb’s “A Haunted Landscape.”
“I think Robert has, in my opinion, a great combination,” said the pianist Yulianna Avdeeva, who recently played Bernstein’s “Age of Anxiety” Symphony with him and the Minnesota Orchestra. “He has a very clear idea of form, and very precise expression of details.”
Speaking from his home in Lithuania, Treviño discussed his musical approach. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
How did you get into music?
When I was 8 years old, I was with my father in a pickup truck. We were driving around and looking [on the radio] for some Beastie Boys, Carlos Santana — he was into all of that, and that’s what I grew up listening to. We came across 101.1, which was the classical music station there [in Fort Worth, Texas], and it was Mozart’s Requiem. For me, it was like a light came on, and I said, “Well, whatever that is, I want to do that.” Some months later, I heard “Peter and the Wolf,” so I decided I wanted to be a bassoonist. And then I saw Seiji Ozawa conducting on PBS, and I said, “Now, that’s the job for me.”
I didn’t get to do anything until I was 13, because I came from a poor family, so there were no piano lessons. I went to public school. I went in for the first day of middle school and picked bassoon as my extracurricular activity. I had this sort of romantic idea: I thought, I love music like this, so it’s going to come real easy for me. And it was everything but. I was last place at the end of the first year, and I realized I had to really work if I wanted this to work out. After that, I never stopped.
How does that affect how you approach conducting now?
Once I started becoming a professional musician, I came very quickly into contact with the idea that the art form is an elitist art form, for the wealthy, and a small, select group of people. I never understood this, because I don’t come from that. What we perform is the musical representation of human existence and the human condition, and in that, like Maya Angelou said, anything that is human cannot be foreign to me, because I am human.
I don’t come from a highfalutin family. I’ve really built a life for myself, with a lot of help. So I am constantly trying to invite other people to join me, to teach young conductors. I try to hand off what David Zinman gave me, what Leif Segerstam has given me. As far as the public is concerned, I do everything I can to reduce any walls. My background makes me feel not only an obligation, but an opportunity, to give other people who may not see their way in, that.
You mentioned some of your mentors. Maybe it’s hard to distill what each of them taught you.
Oh, it’s very easy. In the case of Michael Tilson Thomas, there are the three questions: What is it, how is it and why is it? Kurt Masur: Listen to the orchestra and their culture, especially with a great orchestra, they will teach you how to make good sounds. David Zinman: Trust your study well enough that your hands will just flow, understand that you are there to mold the sound and go forward, and not to be neurotic. Leif Segerstam: Think about everything the music is to represent above that. Cliff Colnot: Know every detail of what score it is, so that you can explain why everything must be rehearsed and done in a certain way.
You wrote a tribute to Segerstam after his recent death, and there was a line in it that stuck with me: “I’ve come to regard the work and role of a proper, ‘real’ conductor as a kind of warrior chief against mediocrity.” Can you elaborate?
One of the reasons I became a conductor and not a composer, was, when I was a young man, I went to hear a performance of an opera where the staging was horrific, the costumes didn’t match. Everything was wrong. Later the same month, I heard a Beethoven Seven by a professional orchestra that was horrendous. And I said, “If we cannot perform a Beethoven Seven with at least a minimal level of professionalism, then I have no business writing anything that’s going to make more music for people not to play well.”
I’ve always taken the tack that my job is to defend what a composer is asking for. But what a composer is often asking for is superhuman or near impossible. That’s exactly the opposite of mediocrity. Mediocrity is extremely easy to obtain.
Your first release was a Beethoven cycle with the Malmo Symphony Orchestra. What are the benefits of recording Beethoven young?
Being able to record it many more times. I remember somebody really gave me a hard time about this, about “How dare you think you can record this.” If that’s really your opinion, then we don’t need to hear a Beethoven symphony anymore, right? I mean, if you feel like it’s been said and done by Karajan or Klemperer, whoever your jam is, we don’t need to listen to Beethoven anymore, so let’s pack it up, put it on the shelf and call it quits. Well, nobody says that. So, then, what does that mean? That means that you expect the piece to still survive.
I have this thing, I say that composers are the nearest thing to immortals that we have. In a way, they’re kind of like vampiric immortals, because they require the life force of us living people to perpetuate their life. If you want to say Beethoven Nine is overdone, I say, my friend, have we achieved what Beethoven proposes to us in the Ninth Symphony? You know, all men are brothers. Have we achieved that? No. Well then, we should still hear this.
If you could record anything, what would you record?
That’s a really hard question. Can I say a few pieces?
Of course.
Bach B minor Mass. “La Bohème.” Brahms Two. Mozart “Requiem.” Oh, there are a couple of pieces by Claude Vivier. I really want to record his music.
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