Somewhere in the depths of the internet lies a photo of Vasily Petrenko with a wad of £5 notes, posing next to a bin. It was part of the Liverpool Echo’s “Be A Binner, Not A Sinner” campaign to clean up Liverpool and improve its reputation, after the writer Bill Bryson infamously arrived in the city to find they were having, in his words, “a festival of litter.” The Echo would give £5 to anyone found putting their rubbish into public litter bins; on one occasion, Petrenko joined them to hand out the cash. “I’m not sure it was successful,” Petrenko notes today. (A 2022 report found that the city had three times more litter than the national average.)
In his time as the Chief Conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Petrenko threw himself into musical and civic life in Liverpool, and was garlanded for it, receiving the city’s “Honorary Scouser” award in 2009, and becoming a Citizen of Honour seven years later. I attended one of his victory lap concerts in 2021, as the RLPO bade a passionate farewell to their adopted son. “The special feeling of orchestra, conductor and city in sync was certainly on show this evening,” I wrote at the time.
In 2021, Petrenko left to become Music Director of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO) in London. We meet near his new-ish home in West Hampstead, an affluent area of northwest London. It is the school holidays, and Petrenko has more time than I think either he or I realize. What we are meant to be talking about—the RPO’s upcoming semi-staged performance of “Iolanta”, the late Tchaikovsky opera rarely performed in the UK—largely gets lost amid the things he really wants to talk about.
The role of the conductor in society is discussed regularly, but less so how the conductor perceives that society. We spoke about British and European values, when (if ever) he might return to Russia, and water taps.
Unlimited access to our
