Terry Gross gives Yannick Nézet-Séguin the full ‘Fresh Air’ treatment
Sex, death, a turtle tattoo, and more came up during a taping Tuesday night in front of an audience at WHYY. The segment is scheduled to air Thursday.
For her, it was a rare swerve from politics, literature, and pop culture into opera and classical music. For him, a chance to tell his story to a national audience in his own words.
And though Tuesday night’s meeting of Fresh Air host Terry Gross and Philadelphia Orchestra music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin at WHYY didn’t yield any major revelations, it did portray the conductor-of-the-moment as a sensitive, sincere, thinking artist.
That in itself may be news in the current media environment. An edited, 45-minute version of the conversation is slated to air Thursday, locally at 3 and 7 p.m. on WHYY-FM (90.9) and nationally on 650 stations at various times. It will be available as a podcast starting Friday.
Gross, in her usual hybrid mode both disarming and bold, told Nézet-Séguin early on in the interview she saw an “adorable” home video of him at age 10 air-conducting to a recording and asked him what he thought conducting was then compared to what he thinks it is now.
“When I watch this video, the disconcerting thing, which is probably good and bad at the same time, [is that] I feel I haven’t changed,” he said, adding that conducting struck almost like a religious calling. “For me, making music in a group is what animates me, and I think this is what I could feel right away when I was 10.”
The format had a slightly fish-out-of-water feel to it. Gross typically conducts her personality probes remotely, peeling back the layers of her interviewees in stepped levels of intimacy. This interview, though, was in person, in front of an audience.
And not just any audience. WHYY and the Philadelphia Orchestra share donors and a board member or two, some of whom were there to experience the interview as a kind of after-dinner salon.
Moreover, the encounter was introduced by Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer, a friend to both the orchestra and the station — not to mention a major donor to the Metropolitan Opera, where Nézet-Séguin is the “Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer Music Director.” (Her introduction won’t be part of the broadcast version of the segment.) The Neubauer Family Foundation is a supporter of Fresh Air.
Gross, too, is a Met Opera fan. She noted Nézet-Séguin’s positive approach in working with musicians and asked whether there was a generational move away from conductors leading in an authoritarian style.
“I think the shift clearly is happening in conducting, but it is a shift I think that is probably in every different area of leadership around the world,” he said. Fear, he warned, can get in the way of making music. “If the conductor is there just to add to the scare, this doesn’t work.”
They touched on the mechanics of conducting, how one works with singers as opposed to instrumentalists, why he has a turtle tattoo (a Tahitian-vacation souvenir) — as well as the conversational trident of sex, religion, and death.
She asked Nézet-Séguin about being a visible gay figure. “I think I wouldn’t be the conductor I am without Pierre,” he said, referring to partner Pierre Tourville. “The fact of living my life openly as a gay person might also, I feel, help mentalities evolve in certain countries.”
Is he religious? she wondered. He said he had been an altar boy and attended church as a child, but at some point became more of an artist who absorbed the spirituality of religious music. “And that is how my spirituality stayed alive, because I would conduct some Bach cantatas and marvel that these cantatas must have been God-sent. And it became increasingly more spiritual than religious.”
Gross at one point played a recording of the opening of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 and asked the conductor to explain it: the lonely trumpet triplets, an explosion, and then that mournful tune.
After the excerpt, Gross asked whether classical music, which so often touches on death, made him consider mortality.
“This is a theme that, surprisingly or not, I am thinking about daily since I am a child,” he said. His drawings as a youngster often had to do with the passion of Christ.
Nézet-Séguin quickly turned the conversation to what a “truly happy life” he has and then tried to reconcile that with the idea of death. Having to deal with the balance of these two forces, he said, inspires him to make something out of it.
“It makes me deal on a daily basis with more universal issues, and I feel a responsibility not only as a conductor but just simply because I am an artist, I feel a responsibility in return to give these moments where everybody can feel these emotions together in a concert hall or listening to a recording.
“And get some comforting, get some hope, get some dream, get some empathy.”