Lord of the dance

Some conductors conduct from the fingers — think of Gergiev’s convulsive gestures, flickering up and down the keyboard of an invisible piano in the air — while for others (check out footage of an elderly Richard Strauss) it all comes from the wrist: graceful, fluid and utterly detached. You could cut off Toscanini and poker-down-the-back-of-his-tail-coat Karajan (famously dismissed by fellow-conductor Fürtwangler as ‘just a time-beater’) at the waist and lose nothing from their precise gestures; but try the same trick with the irrepressible Dudamel or Kristjan Jarvi and the life-force of movements that start from the feet and shudder up through the entire body would be gone.

With Teodor Currentzis it’s all about the knees. Classical music’s latest maverick conductor comes with a bulging kit-bag of mythology (mostly self-created). You can take what you will from the Greek-born-Russian’s gnomic pronouncements in interviews and guru-like cult of personality, the after-dark guerrilla performances and the eccentric base in Perm, some 900 miles from Moscow on the edge of Siberia, but it’s hard to argue with the recordings.

Currentzis’s trilogy of Mozart’s Da Ponte operas, recorded with his period orchestra MusicAeterna, roars and snarls its way into your ears. It’s transgressive and urgent, often ugly, definitely uneven, but utterly, addictively dramatic. More recently, his account of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony chills a familiar score down to sub-zero temperatures, before applying searing emotional heat — the impression left by the Currentzis branding-iron burnt indelibly into the music’s flesh.

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Which brings us back to those knees. There’s a rhythmic imperative to all Currentzis does, a dance that sits just below even the stillest of musical surfaces. He takes music back to its primitive suggestion of movement and, like most primitive suggestions, it’s hard to gainsay.