SFist Interviews Christian Tetzlaff

On his Madrid program, there was a piece that got us all curious: did he get to hear that Morphological Disintegration of J. S. Bach's Chaconne, by Xavier Montsalvatge? But, sadly, no luck: I have no clue what that is. It's right before my piece, so I'm concentrating in my room, and I really don't know.

What other steps does he take to get ready? It's good in the afternoon if I can sleep a bit. His routine is to get really bored the whole day long so in the evening, I'm right there. I mean, it's not like I'm running through Madrid and doing sightseeing. Bummer, you do have to sacrifice a lot to perform at that level.

We asked about tomorrow's night program: oh, that's a very long story. We have done an American tour with Leif-Ove four years ago. We naturally wanted to have something quite different, nothing that we had already played. Some of the pieces, the Schubert and the Janacek, we haven't played in a long long time. So we mixed it with the Mozart and Brahms, which we played on a European tour last year, so that not everything is too new for us. And then we tried to make it a program that has a nice journey to it. This time, it starts from rather troubled and anguished, but beautiful, pieces, Janacek and the Brahms, to something more classical and, ja, even though the Schubert is in B-minor, it's a very upbeat and virtuosic piece. And lucky us: We haven't played this music program ever. It should work as a night's journey. We inquired about the musicological element of the program: I would not stress that there are interconnection between the pieces, other than we think that they make a wonderful contrast, in between the two halves, and also between each other.

Doing our homework, we found that Janacek said, about the sonata,"...in the 1914 Sonata for violin and piano I could just about hear sound of the steel clashing in my troubled head..." Christian picks up before we could finish, "...and the gunshots of the Russians." It's a specific place in the piece. It is marked feroce, espressivo, but with a sordino. It's very far away gunshots. It's a very specific place, if you hear it you will know where it is.

We asked if the global economic crisis had affected him, as some performers are having more difficulty scheduling challenging pieces: I've never encountered that. I would not want to put together a program with only pieces that people don't know, with only unusual pieces, maybe, but to schedule some things, I've never seen any problem. When I have a new piece, and I ask a conductor friend of mine to schedule that, I've never had a problem with that either. Good thing, since we can be sure we'll see him soon, as he reminded us when we asked him if he had any SF idiosyncratic experience: I come to this orchestra on a regular basis, every two years or so, but nothing happens to me in San Francisco, there is no anecdote, sorry. There is some wisdom in that pre-concert nap after all.