Translation. Region: Russian Federal
Source: Moscow Government – Government of Moscow –
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Filipp Chizhevsky is a conductor, founder and artistic director of the Questa Musica ensemble, artistic director of the State Academic Symphony Orchestra named after E.F. Svetlanov, and since 2025 – artistic director and chief conductor of the State Academic Chamber Orchestra of Russia. A career that evokes sincere admiration: being the leader of three large, well-known ensembles at once is a great honor, responsibility and recognition of outstanding achievements.
Philipp Chizhevsky is a guest conductor of the Bolshoi Theatre, a laureate of the International Professional Music Award BraVo, and a two-time winner of the Golden Mask Theatre Award in the Opera/Conductor's Work nomination. Today, he is one of the most sought-after Russian conductors, whose work is well known to everyone interested in the musical life of the capital and who follows significant cultural events.
A fragment of the conversation – the full version of the interview with "Moscow Culture" is available on video.
— “Moscow Culture” is today in my favorite Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, and we chose this one of the best venues in Moscow for a reason: I have long dreamed of talking to Philipp Chizhevsky. Philipp is a conductor, founder and artistic director of the Questa Musica ensemble and artistic director of the State Academic Symphony Orchestra named after E.F. Svetlanov. And can I say it out loud: an artist, a traveler and the most flexible conductor in Russia and even in the whole world.
— I also have a third group — the State Academic Chamber Orchestra of Russia.
— Yes, I apologize, please. I don’t know how you can exist between three bands, several cities, because you have projects not only in Moscow. And also leave room for what you love, but which is not directly related to music — I’m talking about traveling now. How do you manage to do everything?
— I’ll start with the fact that music is everywhere, in stone, in wood, in the air, so for me there is no such clear division. I’m trying to get on this path, and maybe I’m already somewhere on it, since I exist organically everywhere, be it a stage, a kayak, a mountain, or a chaise lounge, or a bicycle, or a walk. Or I’m in a museum, or looking at architecture in some old city — it’s all natural for me. That is, I can feel myself on a mountain, conducting a concert. Do you understand? It’s such a presence in life.
Life is, as we know, short. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart said: "I go to sleep every day with the thought that tomorrow I may not wake up." He died a very young man, by today's standards, very young. I would like everyone to realize that we must have time to live.
It is probably right to mention here such a concept as time. Time was invented by people, it does not exist. I have not planned anything for a long time and somehow manage to glide with the flow. Yes, for me it is as it is – such fatalism and attitude to music as just a component, a resonant structure, organic for me, intertwined with everything else – this is my path.
— You said: "Time does not exist." But it seems to me that music has its own time, and it can be manipulated a little. Music is always alive, it becomes music at the moment of performance, always transforming. Basically, you work with the original source: everything that other conductors, musicians, interpreters have applied is important to remove, get a cast and then reconfigure it for yourself.
— Thank you very much for such a speech. In fact, it is really so. I try to make sure that each performance is cleared of the layer of various interpretations, to play it as if it were a premiere: the premiere of an opera by Richard Wagner, George Friedrich Handel or some symphony. Because all music — I have also come to this — is contemporary for me, because it was contemporary in one way or another.
Our art is different from museums, where we come and look at artifacts – something frozen. Music is fluid, the art in it is temporary, elusive, like a slippery fish. But I probably don’t agree with you that music is complicated. Music is simple, because it is the most direct form of art. Yes, there is certainly a context, a background, and a history before the composer wrote. But for the viewer, emotions are still important.
— And what about our favorite cycle Musica Sacra Nova?! To say that there is a “wow” there is not quite the right definition of emotions, especially the first concerts, the beginning of the cycle, when a large audience is not yet accustomed to such music and the way of perception. It is difficult, you can’t help but deny it!
– I agree, but I am not the author of the cycle, if I were the author…
– But you always participate.
— I always participate with pleasure. If I were the author of the cycle, I would build it somewhat differently. Why stage the works in their entirety? You can take fragments — something to cling to, because not all the works that we discover for the first time (actually sound for the first time or are pulled out from under the bushel of other scores) are equally good.
There is music that was first performed unsuccessfully, and then it was revived, like the same opera "Carmen", although it is also a debatable question – whether it was a failure. Because the high was absolutely wild around the production, the music, the fact that the central character is a gypsy from the lower class. This also turned everything upside down, it was very atypical – an absolutely screaming moment. And everyone went because they wanted to get a share of emotional irritation – such a degree of experience.
For me, the emotional is still higher, and through my impression of the music I try to understand how the composer thought. It seems to me that this is such a correct dialogue, because we have notes from the composer, we perceive his experience through the text more roughly: the language is limited anyway, the letters will not convey all the subtleties.
– But this is your interpretation. You say that you start from what was laid out in the original.
– This is the source.
— The source is you.
— No, the source is the notes, and my perception is that I hear his living voice, as if he has just risen from the dead for me to talk to me. And the text is something else, the story he has recorded is still a language, letters. The notes are what I receive. It’s like a viewer who hears a sound here and now, he perceives it — that very needle that pierces the consciousness and soul. For me, the musical text is what gives me this “wow”. Then, having a picture of the music in my head, I go to the orchestra, and the orchestra gets the “wow”. I hope that we have done something together, that we believed in it, and then we show it to the viewer. And if all the stages are completed, the viewer, accordingly, will also get his “wow”. And it all begins with a dialogue with the composer. The wow effect from the notes is my dialogue with him. At that moment, I am on first-name terms with him, he is my close friend with whom I spend all my time. This is my journey from when I opened the notes to when I played the last chord. I dream about it for a long time afterwards.
— When I watched The Magic Flute, and for me it is more of a concert version, I had enough of the means that Yegor Peregudov (the director of the production. — Ed.) brought in through the text, the performance of the singers, because they played absolutely accurately.
– They lived.
— The text added quite a lot of content, turned some things upside down and showed that The Magic Flute is not just a fairy tale, but an opera with large layers. Sometimes it seemed to me that you were Mozart. As if his spirit appeared and rejoiced at what was happening.
— Thank you. I will be honest, at some points during both the first and second performances I lost the sense of reality. Maybe partly because of the terrible stuffiness during the second performance. And we had to interrupt the dress rehearsal because an incredible thunderstorm began and even the roof began to leak — rain began to drip right onto the stage. And Mozart also had a storm before these tests. When such natural coincidences occur, they enhance the spirit of mysticism. Of course, it was not by chance that Mozart chose such a, in quotation marks, fairy-tale format for his Singspiel. There is very little fairy tale in fairy tales, the rest is veiled, very subtle symbols.
Artists who work on the edge and want to expose some things, to ridicule something strongly, resort to fairy-tale images. It comes especially true if you do tragedies. And Mozart mainly has dramas and tragedies. In his music – from the super-lyrical theme to the sharp, cutting chords that put you into a stupor – the moment.
I like to say: in Mozart, from a pile of manure to a palace – I don't know, literally a centimeter. In music, in plot twists, he is all very elusive, plastic, sharp – a kind of musical kung fu is obtained, as, by the way, in Dali.
— We know many examples when both operas and new works failed because many great composers experimented. Do you think that contemporary academic music experiments just as powerfully?
– Oh, it's a difficult question, a very important one, I'll try to answer it. As for opera, it's true. In this genre, there's a big risk of both hitting it big, becoming famous overnight, and the opposite – you get hated terribly, and you end up in some difficult circles.
Many were cunning, for example, like Handel, who conceived his first oratorio Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno (The Triumph of Time and Disillusionment – Ed.) as an opera, but he knew that the church had a complicated relationship with opera – why would he need extra problems? In fact, he wrote an opera: there are four allegorical figures, everything unfolds between them, but he called his opera an oratorio – he outsmarted everyone. As for productions, Wagner took wild risks until his death, was ready for anything – such an uncompromising person, very tough, and if something did not suit him in music, he did not give a damn about what would happen in his life, including his career. He never compromised, and, by the way, neither did Gustav Mahler.
As for our contemporaries, there was a boom, I think, in 2010, with opera even a little earlier – in 2008. As an art form, it became incredibly popular, attractive to contemporaries, compatriots, composers and the world as a whole. Composers began to write a lot of operas. It is understandable – this is a synthetic genre, you can do a lot of things, make radical statements, for example, if the author believes that "A Second of Silence" is an opera, then it will be an opera. The fact that opera must be sung, which, in my opinion, is correct – this is the main and only rule that cannot be removed. How they sing is another question. But the way we understood this genre, tried to rethink it, became very interesting at some point.
At the same time, it was a short period of time when everyone was tired of experiments and knew that now they would give us something incomprehensible in terms of sounds, we would see some plastic art, maybe video and we would get an impression of mixed pictures, mixed sound effects. And try to understand something. Whether it is good or bad, interesting – you need a time distance, a healthy view of any kind of art for at least 20-30 years. And, of course, the Electrotheatre, Boris Yukhananov, who very ardently supported, may he rest in peace, composers.
— And then it moved into a broader mass culture: from the complex to the simpler. Then there was a lull, and then Boris Yuryevich appeared, who always exists in the situation of his own universe, in his own universe, and he perceives the world around us in a completely different way.
– You said it right, he perceives – this is exactly about him: he was, is and will be.
— He is always not so much about complications, but about another angle, but in general it seems like there is a complication, which if it does not happen, and if titans like Boris Yuryevich Yukhananov, who are dissolved in many of us, do not appear, then everything will become shallow.
— Understand correctly, the word “complication”, the word “complex” in general — a complex person, complex material — is close to me, I use it often. I go hiking — wild nature, you don’t have to compete with it, evaluate it. We dissolve in it, and then it will probably be more favorable to us, just as complex material becomes more pliable for us. The ability to dissolve in it, to find organics — this is precisely about the opportunity to understand something unusual for yourself, about the same Yukhananov — to dissolve in his world. For him, it’s not even a different perspective — a different world, a different universe, which is absolutely organic for him.
The most important and valuable thing is not even to reflect on how we achieve this fusion. Some call it practices, when we put ourselves into a meditative state, which can probably be taught, but I tend to naturally catch subtle vibrations. On stage, the moment of transformation happens not thanks to us, the musicians, who honestly taught and rehearsed. Every time I go on stage, I know that the miracle will happen now – not before, not after, not during the process, but right now, because there is an audience.
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