Speak softly, carry a baton

From Transylvania to Israel, America to New Zealand, conductor Yoel Levi has carried his scores and a love for music around the world. He talks to HEATH LEES.

It's hard to square Yoel Levi's genial, quietly spoken character with the image of the charismatic conductor who took over the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in the late 1980s and transformed a good group of musicians into a dynamic, world-class orchestra.

The fact that he has been in New Zealand - where he conducted the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, including Auckland concerts last Friday and Saturday - reflects his new freedom to travel after parting company with the orchestra he had moulded for so long.

Industry rumour suggested that Levi's departure from the ASO was not a happy one, but he plays it down.

"I've signed a five-year contract with them as music director emeritus, and am engaged for two major conducting projects per year," he says, and he sounds pleased.

What pleases him more, though, is his new job as chief guest conductor with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra - "the first Israeli ever to be appointed to that position," he says, with unconcealed pride.

"I was once a member of this orchestra, so coming back to it now is very special."

Levi was born in that area between Romania and Hungary which everyone calls Transylvania, although few really know where it begins or ends. At the time of Levi's birth in 1950, his parents had already begun preparations for moving to Israel.

So at the tender age of one month, the baby Yoel moved, he says, from one poor country to another.

Ask him where he got his gift for music and he looks blank.

The closest he can get is through his father, who hadn't a scrap of classical training but loved all kinds of folk-music and played it on an old, wind-up gramophone.

Seeing his 6-year-old drawn to music, but having very little money, his father managed to stretch the budget as far as an accordion.

An out-of-work cello teacher from Russia gave him makeshift lessons, but two years later his father found a family who loaned him a cello, which Levi loved.

"After a year," he says, "the family wanted the instrument back, so that was the end of my career as a cellist. I very nearly gave up music."

Just then a recent immigrant, a Romanian violinist, came upon the scene, and under his guidance the boy took up the violin, which was to become his major instrument, along with percussion.

He was the first student to graduate from the University Academy of Music in Jerusalem in two instruments.

In 1978, out of the blue, Levi received a call to be Lorin Maazel's assistant conductor with the prestigious Cleveland Orchestra in Ohio, and on the way decided to try his luck at a top-level conducting competition at Besancon in France.

He won the competition outright.

At Cleveland, the famous conductor George Szell had been dead for half a dozen years.

But Levi indulged his admiration for Szell in talking with the musicians who had worked under him and studying Szell's scores, all individually marked by the conductor.

"Under him," says Levi, "the orchestra played like a chamber ensemble, listening to each other intently, making every note count."

A decade later, with the Szell sound still in his head, Levi arrived in Atlanta as music director of the ASO. "I wanted to take the Szell philosophy a step further, and concentrated on every element of the music-making, right down to the seating - who sits with whom. An orchestra is like a huge puzzle, and if you don't attend to one or other of the pieces then it doesn't come together.

"Over 12 years in Atlanta I changed about 30 per cent of the orchestra, so I had an opportunity to shape the sound and to create something very special."

As a testimony to this sound, Levi points to the ASO's impressive list of more than 30 recordings covering a huge range.

Ask him how he keeps being excited about music and he says it's simply because it's the most important thing in his life.

"The day I stop enjoying music," he says, "is the day I stop appearing on the podium. Live performance is exciting.

"Every time I think, 'This could be your last concert', and I act as though it were."