When I first saw Lahav Shani, nine years ago, he was just 24 and scooping first prize at the Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition in Bamberg, Germany.
Despite his youth, his flowing musicianship and warm, confident stage presence were already boding well. “I was very young and inexperienced,” Shani admits now. “After that, though, everything started to snowball.”
His career has indeed turned meteoric. He became principal conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic in 2018, the youngest conductor ever to hold this post, and in the 20/21 season he was appointed successor to the great Zubin Mehta as music director of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the first native Israeli to wield the title.
In December he is in London to conduct the Philharmonia Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall.
I’ve caught him online at his home in Berlin, which is not exactly round the corner from any of these orchestras. “I haven’t been home for three months until now,” Shani admits.
His hectic existence is further complicated by his parallel career as a concert pianist — “next year I am playing a programme consisting entirely of Prokofiev sonatas”.
He was born into a musical environment; his father, Michael Shani, teaches choral conducting at Tel Aviv University and founded the Tel Aviv Chamber Choir back in 1987.
Lahav started to play the piano while still at kindergarten and was able to explore music by taking advantage of his parents’ sizeable collection of videotapes. “When my friends came over, we might put on a video of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.” Both his parents were born in Israel; previous generations had arrived from the Poland-Ukraine border region, Hungary and Slovakia.
“Without the war, these people would never have met,” he acknowledges.
Later Shani studied at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin, where his conducting teacher, Christian Ehwald, was “like a second father to me”.
He also found himself under the mentorship of the legendary conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim: “He always insisted that I should attend his rehearsals and sometimes we would talk and I could ask him questions.” In due course the maestro would watch Shani conducting and offer advice.
A further secret weapon, though, was that for quite a while Shani played the double-bass, including with the IPO: he therefore knows the workings of an orchestra from the inside, moreover with an instrument that provides a crucial foundation for the ensemble’s collective sound.
“It’s important, not just in how you think about the music, but in knowing what it means to be part of this large group of people. It gives me insights into what I need to do to communicate with them.” His long association with the IPO is paying dividends, too:
“Some of the older players were my teachers and some of the younger ones were my friends and fellow students. It’s like a family.”
His two orchestras appear to be very different animals, yet have crucial qualities in common, notably the ability to be spontaneous in performance. “Rotterdam is a very direct and international society, and the orchestra is daring and open to taking risks,” says Shani, “and Israeli society is also very direct, full of chutzpah.
For me there’s nothing worse than doing everything the same way over and over again. The Israel Phil sometimes repeats a single programme up to seven times and unless you’re willing to change things, it could get very boring!”
With the IPO, Shani has just made his Carnegie Hall debut — the culmination of the orchestra’s first tour in three years. “It was amazing,” he beams.
“There’s something special in the atmosphere there — it’s full of spirits, somehow. And
everybody was there!”
His own next stop is the Royal Festival Hall, where he conducts the Philharmonia in a programme including Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, a work that he feels “encompasses a whole world of different emotions and ideas”.
The Philharmonia, along with its sibling London orchestras, has just suffered a 12 per cent cut to its core government funding, while worse cutbacks now threaten the existence of long-established national organisations including English National Opera and the Britten Sinfonia. Shani nevertheless has encouraging words about why we will always need music.
“We live in a world that is becoming more and more divided,” he says.
Lahav Shani GettyImages-956356006
Violinist Julian Rachlin (left) and Lahav Shani perform in Vienna (GettyImages)
“Music is a reminder that you can be proud of your own culture and your heritage. It doesn’t mean we are disconnected from the rest of the world; it’s about understanding and experimenting. You can perform one another’s music without losing your own identity.
There’s nothing more human and more connective than music.”
It is up to his generation to help power the musical world for hard times ahead — and it looks as if it is in good hands.
Lahav Shani conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall on Thursday 8 December
