Edinburgh Festival 2013: Kazushi Ono, interview

Some conductors juggle multiple appointments and guest engagements. Some, like Japanese maestro Kazushi Ono, don’t. His schedule bespeaks an artist who prefers to develop lasting relationships with music, musicians and institutions. He’s clearly still happy five years into his job as music director of the innovative Opéra National de Lyon and is looking forward to showing the company off at the Edinburgh Festival, where he conducts its new staging of Beethoven’s Fidelio this weekend.

“I’m concentrating on making opera mainly here in Lyon, and only exceptional cases conducting opera elsewhere,” he explained when we met shortly before the production was unveiled in the French city’s opera house, reopened in 1993 after controversial modernisation. Appearances in the concert hall are rationed, too, and the Lyon job is complemented only by two relatively low-key, low-maintenance posts with orchestras in Japan and Italy.

As Wolfgang Sawallisch’s assistant at the Bavarian State Opera in the 1980s he learnt the importance of working with singers at the piano, and likes to have time for creative give-and-take with a director. It’s unsurprising, then, that his previous operatic work in Britain has been at Glyndebourne, a festival well known for its long rehearsal periods, conducting Hänsel und Gretel in 2008 and a Ravel double bill last summer.

Things were a bit different with the new Fidelio, directed by Gary Hill, an American media artist making a first foray into opera. “It was an exceptional case,” Ono admits, “because Gary is an exceptional person.” The conductor and cast received instructions via an assistant, while Hill sat silently at his laptop. “He was like Buddha on a carpet,” he adds with a laugh.

The production’s premise might be enough to make opera-lovers wince, with Beethoven’s work spliced onto Harry Martinson’s 1956 sci-fi poem Aniara, its characters transported onto a spaceship drifting into oblivion. The phrase “mise en espace” had never been more appropriate, one French newspaper wryly noted. But Ono is unfazed: “the theme of the Beethoven is that of love between husband and wife. And why not on a spaceship?”

^{Tolerant: conductor Kazushi Ono (Picture: Alamy)}

Perhaps previous jobs – as Antonio Pappano’s successor at Brussels’s adventurous La Monnaie, and before that as music director at the Badisches Staatstheater in Karlsruhe, deep in the land of Regietheater or “director’s theatre” – have left him with more tolerance of unusual productions than most.

But it’s all indicative of an open-mindedness that Ono in part puts down to his upbringing: he was born in 1960 into a Tokyo household where Japanese traditions mixed with imported Western culture. Young Kazushi learnt Beethoven and Bach on the piano while his mother taught the Japanese tea ceremony in the next room.

As a Japanese artist in Europe, he explains, he can also experience what the continent has to offer with a certain objectivity – often accompanied by his wife, a journalist who writes on culture. Then he can move on to form what he terms “harmonious relationships” with different composers.

For Ono these relationships are many, and his range is enormous. Two days after he conducted Fidelio in Lyon he was in charge of a double bill of Schoenberg’s Erwartung and Luigi Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero, and he’s already excited about next season’s Britten Festival, when he conducts Peter Grimes and the Turn of the Screw.

The one cloud on the horizon is the rumoured departure to Dresden of Serge Dorny, Lyon’s dynamic boss. But perhaps we will finally see more of Ono in Britain now. Glyndebourne? Apparently discussions are already under way. Covent Garden? “Tony’s a friend,” he says of Pappano with a smile, “and I’m optimistic.”

Fidelio opens at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, on Aug 10. Tickets: 0131 473 2000; eif.co.uk