Gennady Rozhdestvensky obituary

The maverick Russian conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky, who has died aged 87, managed to maintain throughout his professional life an astonishing balancing act between apparent chaos and an underlying grasp of form. There was always an element of risk in his performances but when they worked, the results could be extraordinary. Even had he not been an inspirational conductor, he would still have been remembered for championing the oddball scores of Russian and international music in difficult times.

Nothing sums up his individual approach to the Russian arts more than his choice as his favourite work of Shostakovich’s opera The Nose, which he single-handedly brought back to life from obscurity in the early 1970s, shortly before the composer’s death.

Figures from Russia’s past are frequently invoked as role models for the present. Stalin did it in the cause of nationalism, as Putin does now. Rozhdestvensky expressed it differently. He was, he said, impressed by the “amazing correspondence” between the great satirical writer Gogol’s masterpiece The Nose – in which the appendage takes a holiday from the face of a petty official – and Shostakovich’s opera. What fascinated Rozhdestvensky was that although the two geniuses lived nearly a century apart, their delight in making fun of authority seemed to belong to the same period.

His own time was decidedly out of joint, but he seemed to skip through it. His official ddebut took place when he was 20, conducting the Bolshoi theatre orchestra in Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, and many of his duties in his first 10 years as a Bolshoi staff conductor were linked to the ballet.

“It was real torture to conduct those ballet performances,” he said in 1995, “because there was practically no connection with the stage until you tried to take the music as written by the composer. Then you had a conflict with the dancers because it was either too slow or too fast. The choreographer was not educated in the music and could not read the score.”

Unlike many conductors who regard the rigours of accompanying the dance as a necessary step on the way to greater things, Rozhdestvensky decided that the great Russian ballet scores would be with him for the rest of his life.

When he conducted Romeo and Juliet at Covent Garden in 1986, he had the opportunity of realising Prokofiev’s original intentions for the first time in the theatre; the Bolshoi performances had always used a re-orchestration of certain numbers by the percussionist so that the dancers could hear everything loud and clear. He was equally proud of championing the original version of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov at the Royal Opera at a time when the Rimsky-Korsokov arrangement was still standard. His recordings of the original Romeo and Juliet with the orchestra of the Bolshoi theatre (which he served as conductor, 1956-60, principal conductor, 1965-70, and artistic director, 2000-01) and of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake with the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra, remain by far the most vivid interpretations of those great scores.

During his tenure with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, from 1978 to 1981, he took the unprecedented step of conducting Tchaikovsky’s most fertile masterpiece, The Sleeping Beauty, in its entirety, and in the 90s he blazed a trail in the recording studio for the missing link in Shostakovich’s output, the ballets The Golden Age, The Bolt and The Limpid Stream, none of which had fully surfaced since the late 20s and early 30s.

Shostakovich had been a central component in his repertoire throughout his years with the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra (1961-74), and later with the USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra (1983-92), with whom he recorded a cycle of the symphonies that has never been surpassed in its raw intensity and unflinching harshness. Western orchestras, he felt, never understood Shostakovich in the same way.

He demonstrated the difference by recounting a rehearsal of the Fourth Symphony in Cleveland, Ohio, when the players were amused at the clicking of wood block, castanets and side-drum. “I asked them, ‘Why are you laughing?’ They replied, ‘Maestro, it sounds like horses’ hooves,’ and I said, ‘I do not agree with you one hundred per cent it’s horses.’ ‘But what is it? Explain.’ So I did: ‘One explanation is that it happens in prison, when the prisoners contact each other by …’ and I tapped the radiator to demonstrate this point. One of the musicians commented, ‘I cannot believe it, because it’s much easier for prisoners to phone each other.’” This anecdote was served up to demonstrate the difference in schooling between American and Russian musicians.

He always remembered the composer’s even-handed approach to his works when he conducted the Fourth and 12th Symphonies at the Edinburgh festival in 1962. Regarding the Fourth, along with the Eighth, as one of the two idiosyncratic pinnacles among the symphonies, Rozhdestvensky assumed that the public propaganda of the 12th Symphony was less important, “but it was a vital lesson to learn that he approached the details of both with the same absolute scrupulousness”.

His own instincts were always for the wildest, least trammelled aspects of Shostakovich and Prokofiev; and among several distinctive orchestrations, his arrangement of Prokofiev’s early piano piece Suggestion Diabolique includes a brief but uproarious part for four accordions.

His encyclopedic championing of the unusual in his native music has overshadowed his achievements on behalf of western music. He conducted the Soviet premiere of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream as the Bolshoi’s music director in 1965, and among the many unforgettable programmes he undertook with the BBC Symphony Orchestra was a 1981 Prom that followed Schubert’s Ninth with Britten’s Spring Symphony – unbuttoned joy from start to finish.

In the brief period of licensing freedom that opened up the Soviet radio archives, there was a chance to sample such outrageously brilliant performances as his account of Richard Strauss’s Rosenkavalier Suite. Among the greatest Russian composers, Sofia Gubaidulina and Alfred Schnittke, who knew him and his surprisingly prolific output well, dedicated substantial works to him.

Rozhdestvensky was born in Moscow and not only dutifully followed in the footsteps of his father, the conductor Nikolai Anosov – taking his mother Natalya’s patronymic of Rozhdestvenskaya to avoid confusion – but took lessons from him at the Moscow Conservatory, where he also studied the piano under Lev Oborin.

In 1969, he married the pianist Viktoria Postnikova. Their partnership as soloist and conductor was a fascinating match of strong personalities, and Rozhdestvensky partnered his wife in a recording of Tchaikovsky’s folksong arrangements for piano duet.

How he always did what he wanted as Soviet officialdom’s court jester remains a mystery. “I lived with communism for more than 50 years, and I have seen around me terrible things,” was as much as he would say. “I was not repressed and I was not in the war. I am very lucky not to have been killed.”

On the podium, his manner often suggested the clown with a personal array of tics and grimaces as well as a certain amount of lackadaisical shoulder-shrugging, but his stick technique was clear and disciplined. In later years, his notorious inclination to abandon rehearsals at an early stage often delighted British orchestral musicians, pleased to finish early, but outraged more conscientious players. His perceived lack of commitment led to a serious rift with the Stockholm Philharmonic, where he spent two periods (1974-77 and 1992-95). Even in Stockholm, though, the recorded legacy yielded brilliant results – not only in the Shostakovich ballets but also in an underrated series of Carl Nielsen’s symphonies.

He may have seemed happy-go-lucky in execution, but this was frequently deceptive; and his commitment to a rounded picture of Shostakovich and Prokofiev as well as to a younger generation of composers who needed his help under the Soviet regime remains unquestionable. He was honoured in Russia with the award of the Lenin prize in 1970, People’s Artist of the USSR in 1972 and the Order of Red Banner of Labour in 1981. In 2014 he was appointed an honorary CBE.

He is survived by his wife and their son, Sasha, a violinist.

• Gennady Nikolayevich Rozhdestvensky, conductor, born 4 May 1931; died 16 June 2018