Tragic Joy with Maestro Jahja Ling

The chime sounds just as you are taking your seat. The musicians are on stage warming up as the first violinist walks out to his seat; he plays a prefect note that the others add to until they are playing as one before he sits down, and then it’s time. The conductor enters and take his place in front of the orchestra and all eyes are on him. He picks up the baton with a couple of taps, followed by a swish of his arm and the music begins.

For the last 12 years, the man holding the baton for the San Diego Symphony has been Maestro Jahja Ling. Born in Jakarta, Ling is the only conductor of Chinese descent who holds a music director position with a major orchestra in the US and under his leadership. In 2013, Ling led The San Diego Symphony on its first international tour that included a sold-out performance at the famed Carnegie Hall in New York. Together, Ling and the Symphony have released eight new live recordings, the first recordings by The San Diego Symphony in over a decade. 

Ling began to play the piano at age four and studied at the Jakarta School of Music. At age 17, he won the Jakarta Piano Competition and one year later was awarded a Rockefeller grant to attend The Juilliard School, where he studied piano with Mieczysław Munz and conducted with John Nelson. After completing a master’s degree at Juilliard, he studied orchestral conducting at the Yale School of Music under Otto-Werner Mueller and received a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in 1985. He was also awarded an honorary doctorate by Wooster College in 1993. In the summer of 1980, Ling was granted the Leonard Bernstein Conducting Fellowship at Tanglewood, and two years later he was selected by Bernstein to be a Conducting Fellow at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute. 

As the 2015-16 season of The San Diego Symphony is coming to a close, I caught up to Maestro Ling while he was traveling and preparing for the final events of what has been a very exciting year so far.

Let me start, Maestro, by saying how much I appreciate your work and have enjoyed it many times over the last few years. We’re thankful you are here. You have put this orchestra on the map over the last twelve years and San Diego is now recognized as a world class Symphony.

Jahja Ling: It’s such a great pleasure to build an orchestra to the state it is now. I think they are doing absolutely fantastic. I think that is how it should be. I think it should be going further. The potential is amazing. 

I understand you’re in Cleveland right now. 

Right now, I am back to my former home. I am invested with the Cleveland Notre Dame Music.

And you have been with the Cleveland Notre Dame Music for over thirty years. 

We have been working together for thirty-two years. Thirty-two seasons. This is the 32nd season with an orchestra, conducting them. 

That must be one of the longest runs with an orchestra in history. 

That’s right

And when you’re not playing in here in San Diego, you are getting to play around the world with other world class symphonies? 

Right now I am doing a lot of things with education. That’s why I am doing this thing in Cleveland with the Cleveland Institute. Because I was just named the Distinguished Principal Guest Maccabee here... so I work with the orchestra institute, the orchestra, and the faculty together. I give master classes and seminars. I love to pass down the traditions that I inherited from some of the greatest musicians I learned from. You know, Leonard Bernstein was my teacher who taught me about Gustav Mahler. 

I know you’re a big fan of Mahler.​ How does Mahler stand out for you?

Well, he is definitely one of the greatest composers... I would not say he is my favorite composer, but I love to do Mahler. You know Mahler, in the past, he was not very much recognized or played a lot until Mr. Bernstein, my mentor, basically introduced it to the public. [He] made it special because he could make the Mahler symphonies come alive, because Mahler’s symphony are usually quite long. Unless you make it live and bring out the inner music, the inner character, then sometimes for the general audience, it is not interesting enough. 

I was there when you did Mahler’s 7^th Symphony two years ago. I believe that was the first time it had been done in Southern California in 35 years.

That’s right, I don’t think we have ever played it before.

As a director, how much artistic leeway do you get when performing these classic works to make them, as you just said, alive and set it apart from what other orchestras play?

The 6^th (Tragische – Tragic) has a very special meaning to me, it definitely is one of the closest pieces to my heart. I did it in 1991 with the Florida Orchestra in Tampa as the music director there, but I repeated it in 1997 with Juilliard in November, and then in December of 1997 with the Cleveland Orchestra, which later became - probably for the orchestra and myself - the most memorable concert ever.

At this time, my first wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Mahler wrote this when his health was deteriorating and Mahler describes tragic things. At that time, I was so devastated by the diagnosis of my wife’s cancer, which was incurable. I was in New York and taking her to see the best doctors in Memorial Hospital - it was the best hospital for cancer at the time. We had a lot of support from the orchestra. At that time we knew in our heart, that it [wasn't] going to be too long. That she could not survive. So in December, I remember she was already undergoing some chemotherapy. When we played with the Cleveland Orchestra, the whole orchestra poured their heart out for me and for her, because she came to one of the concerts and they could see that she'd become very weak.

That became a trademark; that piece became very close to me. Because it is always a special memory to my late wife. Mr. Bernstein, he inspired me with Mahler, he is the one that in some way knew how to bring out the best musical instinct in me to do that piece. And I’m very grateful that he inspired me and gave me an opportunity to learn with the Cleveland orchestra. They recorded a live performance, and it was like perfection, as something that was magical. It was different because of the tragedy I was facing and the orchestra did something, and what they did collectively was something very special. 

I know you have been trying to play your way through all of Mahler’s Symphonies. From what I have been reading about the 6th, Mahler has flipped around the second and third movements a couple of times. It’s in the Scherzo and Andante (the 2^nd & 3^rd movements)? 

Yeah, a lot of places they switch it in Andante and Scherzo. Some people place [the Andante] as the second movement and the Scherzo as the third. But I always do the original version of it with the Scherzo in the second movement. I feel it is more fitted because I go to the last movement, and for me the connection makes more common sense, I feel, with the pacing of it. So the Scherzo in the second movement is a very distinctive thing, and I feel it is so difficult to do after the Andante. To play again after the Scherzo, it’s just different. If you play the Scherzo before that one then you take away a little bit of the character of the last movement. 

Jahja Ling leads the San Diego Symphony and the San Diego Master Chorale in Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms in the Symphony's final Jacobs Masterworks performance of the 2015-16 season on May 27-29.

And that comes under the creative leeway that conductors get with performing these classic works, yes? 

Yes, usually the composer is very set in what the order of is, but Mahler himself made it so the conductor can have some sort of license to do it according to what they believe. And for me, I believe that I always like the Scherzo as the second movement and then the Andante in the third, but that is the way I see it. 

I know you have been trying to play your way through all the Mahler symphonies here with the San Diego Company.

Actually, I have done all of the Mahler symphonies except for the 8th. I would like to do the 8^th, but it costs a lot of money, and we have to get approval from the board and management because you need very special people for that. People are not normally interested. You need to have like four or five choirs. Then you need to have a bigger orchestra, and then you need eight or nine soloists, and that is very expensive. So they were reluctant to do it. I have asked several times, but no one really has that kind of intention or the will to do that.

I hope one of these days we can do that with support. We just need a sponsor that would put out the money; it’s actually in the six figures. If we can get those kinds of sponsors, then I am sure we can do it. 

You're conducting the 6th at the end of April on the 29th and 30th. 

Yes

And that’s going to be the solo piece that night.

Yeah, that’s the solo act and that should be plenty. It's about a 90 minute piece. 

You have mentioned your loyal mentor Mr. Bernstein, several times. You have one of his programs coming up here, I believe, in May.

Yes, I am doing one of my favorite pieces that he wrote, Chichester Psalms. The most touching piece that I feel was very deeply felt by him. The special character of his inner candidness. The inner feeling like a prayer. The lord is my shepherd, so... very deeply touched, [as] I have worked with him personally. So this especially has special meaning to me.  

Maestro Jahja Ling is one of those few figures that will leave a permeant imprint in the San Diego artistic community when he steps down after the 2016-2017 season. After Mahler’s 6^th on April 29^th & 30^th, you will have two more weekends through May to see him led the Symphony.

On May 20^th through the 22^nd will be the Fantastic Variations with a program that will include Wagner’s Siegried Idyll, Schubert’s Symphony in B minor, D.759: Unfinished and Struss’s Don Quinxote.

The following weekend of May 27^th to the 29^th will mark the end of the 2015-16 season with Appalachian Spring: An American Finale. This concert will feature an evening of all American composers with Barber’s Overture to The School for Scandal, Copland’s Suite from Appalachian Spring, Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F, and Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. These last three concerts are perfect programs to showcase the dynamic range of the Symphony’s talent and why they are now considered world-class. This is what Maestro Ling has brought to San Diego and brings to the stage each time he steps onto it. This is why you should get your tickets while you still can and be thinking about that subscription for the next season. To Maestro Ling, thank you sir!