It was not overnight that the brilliant violinist Renaud Capuçon (Chambéry, 1976), brother of the equally famous cellist Gautier Capuçon, decided to take up the baton and combine his instrument with orchestral conducting, as he has been doing since accepting ownership of the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra in 2021. The dream of occupying the podium had entered him almost three decades ago, being the concertino of Claudio Abbado’s Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra. One day, while on tour, the great Milanese master asked him to conduct four or five minutes of the opening of Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser. I wanted to listen. The young Renaud climbed the podium terrified…
“The musicians played alone, of course, but musically it was something incredible, because I felt at that precise moment that one day I would conduct”, he confesses now on the phone in conversation with La Van guàrdia.
I wasn’t in a hurry, there were millions of things to do before I got to this point… “In fact, it was thanks to my wife, who five years ago encouraged me to take the plunge; without her I would still be thinking that ‘it’s better to wait because I respect the director’s position too much’ and all that you say to yourself when you don’t want to cross that border – he explains -. Because for a violinist it is a big step to go on stage without his instrument, psychologically it is very big”.
In any case, Capuçon combines the bow of the violin with the baton in many of his appearances, such as those this week in Madrid and Barcelona at the head of the Swiss line-up. Today he performs at the Auditorio Nacional as part of Ibermúsica and tomorrow at the Palau de la Música, as part of BCN Clàssics. On the program, the Violin Concerto no. 5 by Mozart, where he himself will be the soloist; then he will sit with the musicians performing Metamorphosen by Richard Strauss and finally conduct Symphony no. 1 by Beethoven. A whole range of aspects of his musical personality.
But what led the formation of Lausanne, one of the most requested in Europe, founded in 1942 by Victor Desarzens, to bet on a violinist who was launching himself into the arena of musical direction for the first time?
Capuçon was actually a strong candidate. “I always loved this orchestra, it is one of the best chamber ensembles in Europe. We did a concert, they voted for me and now we live a love story – he says -. Somehow, I don’t know, I’m a musician before a violinist, I always considered myself a musician playing the violin. And throughout these thirty years I have conducted many chamber orchestras from the violin, I have made a lot of chamber music, which helps you to talk about your conception and to get people to understand you. I have also been directing festival programs for over twenty years. I think that all this time I had been preparing for the current stage. It was an organic thing.”
Even so, he lives one challenge after another: the most recent ones have been conducting Martha Argerich in Schumann’s Piano Concerto, performing Schubert’s 9th, Fauré’s Requiem… “I live it as the continuation of my musical life, which started when I was 4 and I’m about to turn 48. I’m getting old!” he laughs.
As a violinist, Capuçon was guided by his instinct rather than by the strict fashions of the time to contain expressiveness: less vibrato, no portamento… “There have always been fashions in music – he points out -. There was a time when Bach was played as if it were Tchaikovsky, with slides, portamentos… thank God in recent decades Harnoncourt, Leonhardt and others revised the original manuscripts. In the last 15 years it has been difficult for a symphony orchestra to play Bach: it was reserved for ensembles, but fortunately that is no longer the case. I learned a lot from Harnoncourt and also from playing premieres by living composers: all this has given me knowledge to later interpret Brahms or Schubert. It’s very interesting to be open-minded and play as you wear, not following trends. I try to be myself”.
