ICSM Online Journal > Obituaries

Vakhtang Jordania by Martin Anderson
posted 13 Nov 2005

Vakhtang Jordania, conductor, born Tbilisi, Georgia, 9 December 1942; married (1) Nana Askurava, marriage dissolved, 1 son; (2) Natalia Bondarchuk, marriage dissolved, 1 daughter, (3) Kimberley Stebbins, 1 son, 1 daughter; died Broadway, Virginia, 4 October 2005.

The escape of the Georgian-born conductor Vakhtang Jordania to the West at the height of the Cold War had all the ingredients of a Harry Lime thriller: KGB heavies, love-story, family turmoil, high art mixed with intrigue, danger laced with farce – the very stuff of Hollywood melodrama. Instant acclaim in the United States should have led to the prestigious appointments his talent merited; that they were slow to come meant that at his early death from cancer – he was 62 – Jordania’s potential was still only partly realised. He did, though, have the satisfaction of being welcomed back to his former Soviet fiefdoms as a conquering hero.

Jordania, born in Tbilisi , began his musical training at the piano as a five-year-old but the experience of an orchestral concert at age nine was enough to convince him he wanted to be a conductor. After graduating from the Tbilisi Conservatoire, he continued his studies – in orchestral and operatic conducting – at the Leningrad Conservatoire, where the conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic, the legendarily tough Yevgeny Mravinsky, was impressed enough to appoint Jordania his assistant, a post he held for three years.

International acclaim came in 1971 when Jordania carried off the first prize in the Herbert von Karajan conducting competition in Berlin . The Soviet authorities were always delighted when their citizens came home with gongs snatched from under western noses, and Jordania was now guaranteed a position among the more prominent Soviet artists. He held the music directorships of the Leningrad Radio, Saratov Philharmonic and Kharkov Philharmonic Orchestras; with guest appearances elsewhere in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, he was conducting well over a hundred concerts every year, appearing with soloists of the calibre of Emil Gilels, David and Igor Oistrakh and Leonid Kogan. He also worked with Dmitri Shostakovich and Kirill Kondrashin.

But he was soon to find the lifestyle oppressive, despite the creature comforts. Unable to communicate with western colleagues, circumscribed in his musical diet (even Stravinsky scores were frowned upon, let alone those by more avant-garde figures), he felt himself imprisoned.

A chink was soon to appear in the Iron Curtain. In 1980 he had been asked to prepare the violinist Viktoria Mullova for the Sibelius Competition in Helsinki – and she won it. Mullova and Jordania began a relationship, and often talked of defection, even though he would have had to leave his second wife and the children of both his marriages. When the KGB gave Mullova their approval for a tour of Finland in the summer of 1983 – but banned her usual accompanist from travelling abroad – their opportunity had come. Jordania, no virtuoso pianist, somehow managed to get himself accredited as her accompanist, and off they went.

Predictably enough, the critics shouted Mullova’s name and lobbed insults at Jordania’s pianism – which played into the hands of the would-be escapees. In a hotel near the Swedish border, Mullova explained to the KGB minder that Jordania was “very depressed” by the adverse reviews and would he mind leaving them alone. They then hurried out of the hotel, took a taxi over the border and a flight to Stockholm .

This is when the plot takes on a touch of farce. It was Sunday when they arrived in Stockholm , so the American embassy, where they had intended to ask for political asylum, was closed. And it was then 3 July, the embassy stayed closed for the Monday holiday, too. The Swedish police had the answer: lying low in blonde wigs until the embassy opened its doors again.

Musical America did not throw itself at Jordania’s feet, and there was also a language barrier to overcome. He made an early appearance in New York , conducting the American Symphony Orchestra in Carnegie Hall that November. The New York Times noted his ‘confident and spirited performance’ and reported that ‘the full house leaped to its feet’. Nonetheless, he had to take whatever freelance dates he could to fill his diary, crisscrossing America , travelling across Europe and on to Australia , New Zealand and South Korea .

An appointment as the first music director of the relatively modest Chattanooga Symphony Orchestra and Opera in 1985 gave him a base and stability. He responded with a charm and enthusiasm which earned him considerable local affection: one of the musicians described him as ‘a sort of Russian Sean Connery’. He improved standards, pulled in soloists of the standard of the violinist Itzhak Perlman and flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal, and gave a platform to promising young musicians.

He remained in Chattanooga until 1992, his last year there coinciding with the first of two as head of the Spokane Symphony in Washington state, after which he made his home in Virginia .

By now, of course, the Soviet Union was no more, and Jordania was free to return. He conducted widely across the former USSR , especially in opera. And it was back in Kharkov – Kharkiv in Ukrainian – that he made a particular impact, to the extent that the Vakhtang Jordania Conducting Competition was set up in his honour in 2001. Michael Mishra, the British, Illinois-based, conductor who won the Grand Prize in 2003, was struck by the fact that,

although it had been 20 years since his departure from the Kharkov Philharmonic […] he seemed to be very much the principal mover and shaker in the city’s musical life. I would not want to use the word “Godfather”, imbued as it is with sinister overtones, but there was definitely a sense that when Jordania was in town, something special was afoot and things could happen – one might characterise it as a charisma that was able to cut through much, though by no means all, of the post-Soviet bureaucracy that plagues cultural institutions and city government in Ukraine.

Mishra found Jordania’s conducting had

a sense of total control and alertness all contained within a technique and personal demeanour that on the surface looked almost casual. His ability to galvanise and electrify an orchestra with deceptively casual gestures reminded me of certain other Russian/Soviet conductors – Temirkanov, or the idiosyncratic Svetlanov on one of his better days.

The American conductor Jonathan Sternberg – who had given Jordania and Mullova their earliest US break with his Temple University Orchestra and was a regular jury-member of the competition – described him as

a no-nonsense conductor of more than usual gifts. His movements on the podium were for the orchestra, not the audience, and thus his public in both the Ukraine and Korea were geared more to the music and his interpretations than to the event.

Korea , indeed, became another important base for Jordania’s acitivities. He had held a position with the Korean Broadcasting System Symphony Orchestra in Seoul in the 1990s and at the time of his death was principal conductor of the Daegu City Symphony Orchestra and principal guest conductor of the Korean American Opera Company, as well as holding appointments at St Petersburg Festival Orchestra and the Kharkov Opera.

His recording career got off to a spasmodic start but he was to earn three Grammy nominations, and promised much more. He died at an age when most conductors are merely getting into their stride.

First published, in a slightly shorter version, in The Independent on 31 October 2005

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