Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla: Influences

Lithuanian conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s performing career started early, albeit as a singer rather than on the podium. She spent much of her early childhood in rehearsals with her father’s professional chamber choir, Aidija, and by the age of six was touring with the choir and singing solos. This explains why so many tracks on this playlist compiled by Gražinytė-Tyla involve choral and vocal music. Gregorian chant, Gražinytė-Tyla tells Apple Music Classical, was “my birth in music”. As she explains: “My dad and a friend of his got a scholarship to study it in Paris in 1989, and brought this music back to Lithuania.” One of Gražinytė-Tyla’s “fragments” of memories is of her “standing in the Cathedral in Vilnius, covered with the magic and mystery of flowing Gregorian chant”. In honour of this, Gražinytė-Tyla has included one of her favourite chants, “Salve regina”, that she often sang herself. Another childhood memory is of hearing her mother playing the piano: “My mum used to practise while I was supposed to be having a nap…or sometimes I actually did, then woke up to the magic strains of Chopin’s G-flat major Étude.” Gražinytė-Tyla’s playlist also recalls her father’s choir with whom she toured so often. As a child, before she had decided to make music her profession, Gražinytė-Tyla specialised in art, and she recalls drawing the singers during rehearsals or concerts. She vividly remembers doing this while they imitated the bird calls in Clément Janequin’s “Le chant des oiseaux”—and also credits that piece for instilling in her a love of French music, which now also extends to Poulenc. Two of her other favourite pieces from the choir Aidija’s repertoire were Monteverdi’s madrigal “Sì ch’io vorrei morire”, and Bach’s “Gute Nacht” from the German composer’s motet Jesu, meine Freude. Aged 10, Gražinytė-Tyla was entranced by her first encounter with Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute, and in particular the Queen of the Night’s famous, furious show aria, “Der Hölle Rache”. “It was a direct broadcast from the Met,” she recalls. “I’ve no idea who sang so unbelievably this jewel of our human music, but I stayed speechless and listened thousands of times to the tape which had recorded that very broadcast.” Was this perhaps the seed that led to Gražinytė-Tyla forsaking art and deciding to make music her career? In any case, it instilled her deep love of opera, and set the budding conductor on the road which would ultimately lead to her performing one of the great but only recently discovered operas of the 20th century, Weinberg’s The Passenger (an except of her recording ends the playlist). The Jewish Polish composer, who fled the Nazis to the USSR where he became a close friend of Shostakovich, has long been overshadowed by his more celebrated Soviet colleague. But thanks to violinist Gidon Kremer, Weinberg is finding a wider audience and more champions including Gražinytė-Tyla, who has also recorded several of his symphonies. Gražinytė-Tyla gives Kremer his due by including a track of his recording with musicians of Kremerata Baltica and pianist Yulianna Avdeeva of Weinberg’s Piano Quintet, with which, she says, “the true discovery of Weinberg started”. Naturally, as a conductor, Gražinytė-Tyla includes examples of the art as demonstrated by two much acclaimed practitioners. There’s Abbado, who she credits for unlocking for her the mysteries of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7. And there’s Toscanini, often depicted as a great martinet when it came to detail; yet Gražinytė-Tyla provocatively points out some significant details in his recording of Verdi’s La traviata: “In this grand finale from about 3:22, listen to what is going on. Above a rather stable bass, the lines above, while remaining still connected to the bass, live their fully individual lives and certainly don’t bother their mind about ‘being together’ (or at least not as a main goal)!”