Was anyone in your family a musician?

My grandmother’s brother was a conductor who studied with Herbert von Karajan at the Vienna Academy. His name was Imre von Keczer. Until 1948, he was the chief conductor of the orchestra in Karlovy Vary. He was a talented man and an excellent pianist, but after he was fired, he mainly made a living by teaching and arranging music. He died at the age of 49. He was the only musician in our family.

How did you get into music?

My grandmother always sang songs from operettas to me to help me fall asleep – Lehár, Kálmán – and I would drift off to sleep. After moving to Prague we lived not far from the National Theater, and I went to school on Vojtěšská Street. In second grade, I was selected for the People’s School of Arts, and my grandfather bought me a violin. I was almost nine, which is quite late to start playing the violin. I started attending a very good music school on Voršilská Street. For the first two years, learning was very nerve-wracking. But my teacher, Novotný, managed to get me excited about the violin, although unfortunately he also passed on some bad technical habits to me. In 1977, I was accepted to the Prague Conservatory to study with Professor Václav Benda, with whom I worked for two years on remaking my technique. After four years of study at the conservatory, I passed the conducting exams. I studied with Mr. Kasal and privately with Vladimír Válek (long-time chief conductor of the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, ed.).

However, your studies at the conservatory were interrupted by your emigration…

In 1982, I finished my fifth year of violin studies and was in my second year of conducting. So I had already graduated from high school. In the summer, the Prague Conservatory Chamber Orchestra went on a tour to Bayreuth, incidentally with our classmate, the famous mezzo-soprano Dagmar Pecková. I decided that I would not return from the tour. It was August 6, 1982. I wrote a letter so that my colleagues would not worry, left it in my room, and the next day I marched with my bag and violin to the bus to Munich. On the way, a bus with my colleagues from the conservatory passed me, stopped, and the conductor Formáček asked me with concern if I had already found a place to stay. That was the Czech idea: when you come to the West, everything is served to you on a silver platter. Then we all continued on our way. It is true that I had a friend in Munich who helped me find my way around. In Prague, I was sentenced in absentia to a year and a half in prison in the second correctional group. I was expelled from the conservatory with the humorous explanation: “He did not attend classes for two months.”

I arrived in Munich, unable to speak German, only English and French. I was granted asylum and social assistance because I was not allowed to work. I learned German in about three months. Then I was able to do odd jobs, I worked at the Munich Zoo, cementing crocodile terrariums.

That must have been frustrating for a young guy who wanted to make music.

It was. After a few months, I tried to get back into music. The authorities offered me a job at a music school, where I copied things for the teachers. I did that for two months. I kept practicing because I wanted to try the entrance exams and study violin. I also had a plan B, which was to study something else at university. I enrolled at the University of Munich to study musicology. They didn’t recognize my Czech high school diploma, so I had to finish it in Germany. I passed the entrance exams, finished my work, and became an university student. But at the same time, I was preparing for exams at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst with a Hungarian concertmaster of the Munich Opera Orchestra. In June, I passed the entrance exams in Frankfurt. I began studying with Edith Peinemann and moved to Frankfurt, where I have lived for 39 years. In the meantime, I received a letter from the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Munich informing me that I had been accepted to study violin. But I was already in Frankfurt, so I didn’t respond. My only regret was that Leonard Bernstein was visiting Munich that year to work with the school orchestra. But then I met him at the Holstein Festival. You never know what might have been…

You founded the Hába Quartet while studying at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in 1984. How did that come about?

My chamber music professor in Frankfurt was Dušan Pandula, founder of the Hába Quartet in 1946, which was later renamed the Novák Quartet with Alois Hába’s consent and existed until the end of the 1960s. We founded the Young Frankfurt Quartet. Pandula suggested that we take the name of Alois Hába and he played with us for a while. But at the age of 60, he had an accident when he slipped on ice and couldn’t play anymore. However, he continued to work with us as a supervisor. Only two quartets in the world have recorded Hába’s complete works – the Stamic Quartet and us. We played it authentically because Pandula knew exactly how Hába wanted it. The recording was made between 2005 and 2007. We are the successors of the original Hába Quartet because its founding member played with us.

Thanks to Pandula, we discovered a lot of musical literature that is not played much today – French quartets, for example. Tell me, who plays Jolivet today? In the beginning, we also played a lot of Czech composers, including Hába. At first we concentrated mainly on contemporary music and gave a lot of premieres. Then we moved away from that a little because we improved our technique and could compete with other quartets in Mozart and Beethoven.

Contemporary music has the advantage that no one knows how it should be played. And so it happened that after a night of revelry at a festival in the early 1990s, we played Scelsi very poorly, improvising, out of time with each other – it was awful. And the audience loved it. Two years later, we played it excellently, everything was precise, and the organizers told us: “Well, it was good, but you played it more passionately before.”

When the lineup changed, with Arnold Ilg on cello, Sha Katsouris on violin, Hovhannes Mokatsian on viola, and me on viola, the quality improved greatly. We toured Europe, went to China, and had our own series in Kronberg. We played in this lineup for seventeen years. After leaving Hovhannes, Artur Podlesniy joined us, and we were lucky that his nature suited us well.

However, when I eventually stop, I don’t know if my colleagues will continue.

When talking about your professional career, we cannot leave out the excellent hr-Sinfonieorchester, incidentally the third oldest radio orchestra in Germany, where you have been playing in the first violin section for decades.

While still studying in Frankfurt, which I completed in 1988, I played in a smaller radio orchestra for Hessischer Rundfunk, a popular orchestra that recorded music from musicals, operas, films, and popular music. I played there for four years. After this orchestra was disbanded, I got a job in 1993 with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, as the hr-Sinfonieorchester was then called. I was happy because I needed to support my family – I had a wife, a little daughter…

You mentioned that you had been attracted to conducting since your youth. Did you have the opportunity to return to it?

I started thinking about it again in my early thirties. I took a few courses and started conducting youth orchestras and better amateur ensembles. In 2015, I even recorded double bass concertos with our orchestra. When Paavo Järvi was chief conductor in Frankfurt, he offered me the opportunity to take part in courses in Pärnu because he knew I was conducting. I didn’t go until 2016, when I was there with Petr Popelka (now chief conductor of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, ed.). I’m conducting more and more, and I’ve been the principal conductor of the Johann Strauss Orchestra Wiesbaden for a year now. I also conduct film recordings, summer open-air concerts…

I know that you and Paavo Järvi are close friends.

Paavo and I met in 2005, a year before he became music director in Frankfurt. I was head of the orchestra union department for fifteen years, from 2002 to 2017, which was not the easiest position. We had an excellent team at the time: manager Andrea Zietschmann, now the artistic director of the Berlin Philharmonic, Paavo Järvi, and me. That’s when Paavo and I became friends. We went through a lot together and our friendship is almost brotherly. He was the boss in Frankfurt from 2006 to 2013, and the festival in Pärnu has been held since 2011. He kept inviting me, but I couldn’t make it until 2016, when we played here with the Hába Quartet. I graduated from the conducting academy and played in the orchestra at the same time. It was quite demanding! Since then, I haven’t missed a year except for 2017.

The Estonian Festival Orchestra is an ensemble of high quality. How do you enjoy playing there with other colleagues from leading European orchestras?

You’re right, the excellent players play with great enthusiasm, and the family atmosphere also works wonders. The orchestra is made up of people who enjoy playing with Paavo, such as members of European orchestras where Paavo has worked and knows them personally, as well as Estonian musicians and students. The standard of the musicians is very high and within a few days the orchestra achieves excellent sound homogenity. This contributes to the great overall result you mention. Another reason for the high quality is that Paavo chooses the repertoire for the festival orchestra very carefully – Russian and Nordic music is played here, as well as works by Estonian composers, Lutoslawski and others. We, players in the orchestra always want to show the best we can do and what Paavo inspires us to do.