Here I stand, I can’t help it

When we met 16 years ago, he was a young man of 22 who spoke extremely quickly. In English, because Yoel Gamzou had just arrived in Berlin. With the unfinished 10th Symphony by Gustav Mahler in his luggage, which he had converted from the sketches of the composer, who died in 1911, into a full-length concert form.

He had performed this score in Berlin with an orchestra of which he himself was the founder, in the Chamber Music Hall of the Philharmonie, which he had rented at his own financial risk. In the weeks before the concert, he stood at the Kulturforum every evening and handed out advertising flyers for his project.

It was intense back then! Just as only young people can be passionate about a cause. His world view was firmly established; for Yoel Gamzou there was only one truth. He didn’t actually accept any of his fellow conductors, even the greatest ones: “They only deliver well-rehearsed choreographies.” And the question was whether it wouldn’t be worthwhile to go to the city theater to learn the craft of conducting from scratch learn, he answered without hesitation: “It’s not an option at all!”

In 2012 he accepted a position as bandmaster in Kassel and stayed there, in the northern Hesse province, until 2015. Two years later he was offered the opportunity to become music director in Bremen, and he worked in the Hanseatic city for five seasons. “March through the institutions” was what the 1968ers called it. “I didn’t just want to criticize rabidly,” says Yoel Gamzou looking back. “The theater business can be changed better from the inside than from the outside.”

The fire is still there

He is now working freelance again. However, it is still important to him to always give the musicians the feeling that each and every one of them matters. Because an orchestra consists of a group of individuals. When we see him again, he seems to have grown up in a pleasant way. The fire is still there, but he speaks carefully, reflectively. In 2009 his credo was: “Live so that you could die tomorrow – proud of what you have done.”

And he had come a long way with his head-through-the-wall passion. As a seven-year-old, he had his awakening experience through a record: Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. After the first bars he knew: “This is my music.” This is my life.”

Awakening experience at the age of seven

At the age of twelve he decided to become a conductor, at the age of 15 he left home for New York, with nothing in his pocket but a tiny starting scholarship. But America wasn’t for him; he was drawn back to the old world.

In Milan he will study with the great Carlo Maria Giulini. But at the age of 88, he has withdrawn from the public eye. Yoel Gamzou also calls all the Giulinis that are in the local phone book and actually gets to his idol’s son: But he blocks the request.

Tel Aviv, New York, Milan

The penniless young student camped out at the train station for weeks, repeatedly ringing the bell and begging until his exasperated son gave him five minutes of audience with his father. This becomes three years until Giulini’s death in 2006.

At 19, Yoel Gamzou registered for the renowned conducting competition in Bamberg, Franconia. The chances are minimal, there are 220 applicants for 14 places. But the composer in question here is called: Gustav Mahler. It’s also logical that Gamzou just has to try. When the invitation for the final round comes, he quickly passes out from happiness. But he catches himself, finds the necessary concentration – and wins a special prize.

In Gustav Mahler’s world

In his symphonies, Gustav Mahler conducts the psychoanalysis of an era: the evening sunshine of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and coming catastrophes, decadence and avant-garde, euphoria of progress and suffering from modernity, everything can be found in the monumental works. Everything that also moves Yoel Gamzou’s heart. On January 4th he will perform the “Fifth” of his heart’s composer with the Junge Philharmonie Brandenburg in the Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt, which includes the famous “Adagietto”, which Luchino Visconti made the soundtrack to his “Death in Venice” film adaptation.

For Yoel Gamzou, working with a state youth orchestra is part of his “rare hybrid career”. He thinks it’s right to take care of the next generation – and not just himself. Most recently he was in the orchestra pit at the Hamburg State Opera for a new production of “Freischütz”, directed by Andreas Kriegenburg. He will soon be invited to the Essen Philharmonic Orchestra, and at the beginning of April he will lead a series of “Salome” performances at the Vienna State Opera.

© IMAGO/Heritage Images/IMAGO/Heritage Art/Heritage Images

And Brandenburg in between. He has already performed Mahler’s Fifth three dozen times, but he is really nervous when he thinks about the first part of the concert. Because there is a premiere coming up. The composer is himself. He composed a lot as a teenager, then not at all for 17 years. Until he visited an exhibition in London about the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. As soon as he entered, he was so captivated by the paintings that he didn’t notice how the hours had passed.

Rossetti immortalized his wife Elizabeth Siddal in 52 pictures, although the last portrait from 1862 remained unfinished when she died. Rossetti wrote a poem about the artistic creation process and placed it in the deceased’s coffin. Six and a half years later, his friends persuaded him to have the tomb opened to retrieve the manuscript.

Tim Rice is coming to Berlin

“The Portrait – Archeology of an Obsession” is what Yoel Gamzou calls his 45-minute composition about the poem. A speaker joins the orchestra and recites the verses. “I didn’t want a soloist with a trained speaking voice,” says Gamzou, “but simply a charismatic personality.”

He found her in Tim Rice. The 80-year-old is a megastar in English-speaking countries, after all, he wrote the lyrics to musicals such as “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Evita”, “Chess”, “The Lion King” and “Beauty and the Beast”.

The Rossetti tone poem will not sound like a musical avant-garde, Yoel Gamzou can already reveal that much. The conductor feels most out of place in the present anyway. “Even as a little boy, I really wanted to be born 100 years earlier,” he reports, “not in 1988, not in Tel Aviv, but in Gustav Mahler’s Vienna.” His mother dragged him to the psychiatrist because of this longing for the past – she was able to tell him the nonsense don’t drive out.

He hates everything technical, the typewriter that was ostentatiously perched on his dining room table in 2009 is still there, and he pulls out a museum-quality keyboard cell phone from his trouser pocket. When we first met, Yoel Gamzou raved euphorically about the hardships of a train journey in Gustav Mahler’s time: Because body and mind are only in harmony when both move at the same speed. He still hates getting on a plane. He still overcomes himself just because of the music.