2023-06-13 17:18:00
Dhe flowers of applause are already in buckets in the lobby of the Dutch National Opera. They won’t be handed over until five hours later. It goes through the winding backstage corridors to an unobtrusive white door with a rather small, windowless conductor’s room behind it. Joana Mallwitz is waiting. Nervous, but also with a happy twinkle in his eyes. Her bleached hair is flying, her movements also have something harmoniously expansive.
She lets herself look at the score again before she really has to concentrate. If everything went as planned, Mallwitz would now be preparing for the revival of Bayreuth’s “Parsifal”, which should have premiered last year with her conducting. But then Corona came, and that’s why the new “Parsifal” is only coming to the Green Hill this summer. Still without Joana Mallwitz. It will still work out with Bayreuth. Katharina Wagner is still interested.
The revival of a “Flying Dutchman” here in Amsterdam also burst due to the pandemic. Doesn’t matter. Get on with her now Antonín Dvoraks Nymphenoper “Rusalka” a, staged by Philipp Stölzl, actually planned for 2020 with the Czech Jakub Hrůsa on the podium. The pandemic is still stirring up a lot this season, and is still complexly shifting old and new plans into each other. The fact that Joana Mallwitz will be commuting to London in the coming week to resume a “Marriage of Figaro” all goes back to the pre-Covid era. Especially since the 36-year-old is now also the mother of a two-year-old, Noah.
But that is now hidden, one and a half hours before the start of the premiere. “Everything is focused,” is how Joana Mallwitz sums up the rhythm of her performance days. “I collect myself, iron my concert clothes, that alone is grounding. Three hours before I stay alone, except now with you. I spoke to the singers one last time. As a conductor, I can’t warm up or warm up. But the music has to warm me up, so I read the score carefully in the hours before each performance.” The beautiful and the difficult passages are marked with colored markers. But very casually.
Body off, head on
“Besides, I have to move,” she says. She likes to run before a performance, that’s actually always possible. “Sometimes I just walk in circles in the cloakroom. When my body then gets tired and slacks off, I know of course that it is conserving all the energy for the performance. The body goes on the back burner, so to speak, and the mind goes into imagination mode.”
In an interview with Herbert von Karajan she once read that if he had been told at short notice that his concert would be cancelled, he would have fallen asleep immediately. “It’s the same for me because everything is gathering in this moment. And just before that, the adrenaline kicks in and I go out to conduct – and I hope that what’s happening on stage, text and music are on the same wavelength.”
At the age of 18, the native of Hildesheim was absorbed by the theatre. Since then she has worked as Kapellmeister and chief conductor in Heidelberg, Erfurt and until recently (the final open-air concert is still pending) in Nuremberg for the past five years.
In Amsterdam, Joana Mallwitz is – once again – in front of a new orchestra. But not in front of anyone. The Koninklijk Concertgebouworkest, which plays in the opera once a year, always at the Holland Festival, is one of the two or three best orchestras in the world, alongside the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics. In 2020, in the middle of the first Corona summer, she caused a sensation with the Viennese in Salzburg with a spectacularly spontaneously popped up “Così fan tutte”, she was the first woman there at an opera premiere podium.
Her first symphony concert with the Viennese is scheduled for January 2024 at the Salzburg Mozart Week. The signs point to a long-term cooperation. For the Berliners, who have also been wanting to have her on their debutante podium for a long time, it will work out in 2025. Joana Mallwitz will then have had a certain amount of time to get used to her new position as chief conductor of the Berlin Konzerthausorchester. It starts there at the end of August.
A new level
Shortly after our meeting, you will also be there on schedule Signing of a contract with Deutsche Grammophon announced. Her debut in the recording studio, as in her first Berlin concert, will be Kurt Weill. Later Haydn. A statement? Sure, of course.
“The relationship grows with every piece if you repeat it under different circumstances,” says Joana Mallwitz, now looking forward to the premiere. “It was with great pleasure that I conducted ‘Rusalka’ in Dresden last year. Now I was able to start at another level, even with the difficult Czech language. So lucky to rediscover it with such fantastic musicians.”
Afterwards she says – we are standing outside on the balcony of the opera, her husband, the tenor Simon Bode, is there, the director’s speech is swinging – that the orchestra has already told her that it shouldn’t be the last encounter and that we are very happy impressed. She seems modest, devout, but somehow also happy about what has been achieved. Everyone, musicians, artistic director, head of the orchestra, spokesman, raved in unison beforehand how good the time together had been.
Joanna Mallwitz and the author Manuel Brug in Amsterdam
Source: Jacob Hoff
And yes, the performance was fun. Visually and acoustically. The Czech forest nymph Rusalka is a prostitute in New York who loses herself in cinema dreams in film director Philipp Stölzl’s tried-and-tested staging, which has been well received by the public. The musical “The Prince and the Mermaid” in the cinema next to the street pushes her to have surgery and try Hollywood. But since the speechless is not understood, although she has been formed after the image of the leading actress.
Only the music that cries and laments about Rusalka and her sad fate of being an outcast who no longer knows where she belongs. And which only brings bad luck to everyone. Joana Mallwitz lets the orchestra roar and whisper, paints an ideal, endangered picture of nature with a fine line and elegant, angular swinging arms, where the stage deliberately only offers decals. The truth lies in its sounds, but it does not reach the people it drives. One felt creative unrest, but also the desire to linger.
The following morning, Joana Mallwitz, rested and relaxed despite a short night’s sleep, strolls long strides across the Amstel Bridge. She came from Haarlem by bus, where she rented a house for two months. Husband, mother and mother-in-law take turns looking after the children: “Noah is starting to speak now, and that’s great fun.” It’s been a lot going on in the past few weeks.
“But it’s getting much quieter now in terms of travel,” says Joana Mallwitz when we settled down in a café after a short walk to the botanical garden. “In Berlin, our boxes have been waiting to be unpacked for some time. I always commuted to Nuremberg, my husband was on the road, and everything stayed where it was. I now look forward to a social home, between friends and people close to me. Strangely enough, in such an open, noisy situation, when there is life around me, I can learn and prepare very well. I feel so cared for, I’m part of a community. As in the theatre, as in the orchestra.”
After 18 years in the theater, half of her life to date, the decision to join a concert orchestra was the right one for Joana Mallwitz. “I’m still doing opera, around next season when I’m finally allowed to make my debut at the Berlin Lindenoper, that fits right now. But apart from a stay in America in the fall, the family will be based in Berlin next year.”
She is looking forward to the other conductors in Berlin, the competition, the exchange, the inspiration. And she’s already sitting over her trademark, the expedition concerts, when Joana Mallwitz explains and dissects a piece with her musicians in order to play it through in its entirety at the end. She developed the format in Erfurt on the side because she felt she needed to speak to the audience, in Nuremberg the series was overrun and had to be streamed: “I leave my comfort zone all the time, I don’t really want to explain myself, being even more the center of attention on the podium than I already am. But it benefits me and the audience immensely and also the music. New, intensive connections are created.”
And what does she say about the new director who looks so amazingly like her at the cinema, Cate Blanchett? “A lot of people say that, funny. I’m a big Cate Blanchett fan, but I haven’t seen ‘Tár’ the movie yet. To much to do.”
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