JAAP VAN ZWEDEN IS A GLOBAL MAESTRO OF MUSIC AND MULTITASKING

 By JOYCE LAU

Jaap van Zweden is the music director of the Hong Kong Philharmonic and will also be the music director designate of the New York Philharmonic starting in 2017. CreditCheung Chi Wai/Hong Kong Philharmonic

HONG KONG — When Jaap van Zweden takes up his new role as theNew York Philharmonic’s music director designate in 2017, he will be jetting between two very different ensembles on opposite sides of the world.

The top orchestras in New York and Hong Kong moved this year to lock the highly sought Dutch conductor into contracts that run until 2022. In Hong Kong, he has now cemented a decade-long commitment that began in 2012 to raise a regionally respected orchestra to the level of the global elite.

In New York, he will be following in the footsteps of Leonard Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, Zubin Mehta, Kurt Masur and Lorin Maazel at a legacy organization, where he will officially become music director in 2018.

In order to handle those jobs, Mr. van Zweden, 55, will cut short by a year his term as music director at the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, which he has led since 2008.

Mr. van Zweden said that he was already accustomed to juggling multiple appointments, more than 8,000 miles and 12 time zones away. He was in the United States in September, was scheduled to fly to Asia to bring the Hong Kong Philharmonic on a three-city China tour in late October, and then return to New York for concerts in November, performing Wagner, Tchaikovsky and the world premiere of a viola concerto by the composer Julia Adolphe.

“Right now I’m balancing Dallas and Hong Kong, and later I will be balancing New York and Hong Kong,” he said in a telephone interview from Dallas. “The balancing act is already in my system. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I sit up at 3 a.m. But that is just the body being tired, not the mind. The beautiful thing is that the music pulls me through.”

The New York and Hong Kong orchestras are not just distant geographically — they are also at very different phases of their development, requiring different types of effort from their shared music director.

“The Hong Kong Philharmonic is such a young orchestra, with a willingness and eagerness to become great,” Mr. Van Zweden said of an ensemble that was founded in the postwar era, but did not turn professional until the 1970s. “And then in New York, there is this incredible thing, that I am stepping into the world of great conductors like Bernstein.”

It was Bernstein who gave Mr. van Zweden his start, when Mr. van Zweden was the concertmaster for the Royal Concertgebouw in the Netherlands, a job the former violin prodigy began when he was 19.

Bernstein was rehearsing the Concertgebouw, which was on tour in Berlin in 1990. “He wanted to sit in the audience and listen to us play in the hall,” Mr. van Zweden said. “He handed me the baton and said, ‘You do it.’ I said, ‘Lenny, I can’t do that. I’ve never conducted anything in my life.’ But to say no to Bernstein was dangerous.”

Bernstein’s initial assessment of Mr. van Zweden as a conductor was that he was “pretty bad.” But he also encouraged the young violinist to pursue the skill, so Mr. Van Zweden started taking lessons on the side.

“It was a tough 15 minutes,” Mr. van Zweden said of his first stab at conducting. “But it was also a wonderful moment in my life. It is a very powerful feeling, to be standing in the front of that ensemble.”

He started conducting full-time in Europe in the ’90s, but it was the Dallas Symphony that gave him his first role as a music director in America.They were so impressed with a guest performance he made in 2006 that they gave him the top job in 2008 – and paid richly for it.

An analysis of tax filings by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra showed that Mr. van Zweden’s 2013 salary was $5,100,538, more than the pay for top conductors in Los Angeles and Chicago. Part of that sum was given as a signing bonus to keep Mr. van Zweden through 2019, despite that it will not happen when he starts the New York job.

He would not disclose his salary in New York, though it is not expected to reach $5 million a year.

Mr. van Zweden made his name, in part, by the work he did overhauling the Hong Kong Philharmonic. When he took over from Edo de Waart, a fellow Dutch conductor, in 2012, he was given an ensemble that was well regarded, but not yet among the world’s best.

Alexis Alrich, an American composer and music critic who has been attending Hong Kong Philharmonic concerts since 2007, has seen a marked improvement in its quality.

“Now in 2016 I hear a much more polished group,” Ms. Alrich wrote in an email. “Jaap van Zweden’s intensity in rehearsal and performance has raised the level of technique and also the power of expression.”

Mr. van Zweden is known for his tightly controlled sound.

“I’m extremely disciplined,” Mr. van Zweden said. “Discipline makes you free. When I started working in Hong Kong, players asked me to let them play freely. But that freedom is not something I can give to you. It’s something you earn. You should be sitting on the edge of your seat, not out of fear of making mistakes, but of excitement.”

As a new music director in Hong Kong, Mr. Van Zweden resisted the instinct to re-audition or bring his own players there. “It’s not difficult to just replace people, but I didn’t do that,” he said. “At every orchestra in the world, you have stronger and less strong players. And it’s the music director’s duty to make the less strong players stronger.”

Mr. van Zweden is pushing the Hong Kong Philharmonic into more challenging repertoire – with more Mahler, more Wagner and more contemporary composition.

In 2014, the Hong Kong Philharmonic began a four-year project to perform Wagner’s “Ring” cycle with the German baritone Matthias Goerne. Each of its four operas, one performed per year, will be recorded live for Naxos. The second recording, “Die Walküre,” is on its way, while the third concert, featuring “Siegfried,” will be performed in January.

“It makes us a more complete orchestra to have Wagner’s ‘The Ring’ under our belt,” Mr. van Zweden said. “And I’ve never done ‘The Ring.’ It was a first for me, too.”

Mr. van Zweden will be balancing one more major task – one that he speaks about relatively less than his orchestral ambitions.

In the early 1990s, before Mr. Van Zweden became a world-famous conductor, his son was diagnosed with autism.

“It changed me as a human being to have a child with problems,” Mr. van Zweden said. “There were a lot of tears over that boy. It’s a heavy burden, but maybe something heavy on your shoulders becomes wings.”

Mr. van Zweden and his wife, Aaltje, struggled to find treatments for their son — the third of their four children — but Mr. van Zweden said they felt like they had few choices.

“So what are you told to do?” Mr. van Zweden asked rhetorically. “You put your child in a special house and visit once a week?”

In 1997 they founded the Papageno Foundation to help autistic children. Over the years, it has grown to include music therapy for children, as well the Papageno House, a facility in the Dutch town of Laren that encourages autistic young adults to live and work independently. It is where their son, now 24, lives.

It has a restaurant and, of course, a small concert hall and orchestra.

“If I leave this Earth, I will have some concerts, some CDs to my name,” Mr. van Zweden said. “But I can also leave something else.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/arts/music/jaap-van-zweden-is-a-global-maestro-of-music-and-multitasking.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FClassical%20Music&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=5&pgtype=collection