Jeremy Houghton sketches Vasily Petrenko: a conversation

As part of his 80th anniversary collection for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Visual Artist-in-Residence Jeremy Houghton sat down with Music Director Vasily Petrenko for a portrait sitting. During this sketch Jeremy and Vasily discussed their creative practices, how intention and technique shape their art and how there may be more similarities between art and music than meet the eye. 

Below is an edited excerpt from their conversation. 

Jeremy Houghton:

So when you learn your music, was learning about the different forms, the different disciplines of art, important?

Vasily Petrenko:

I was lucky because I was born in Leningrad and I was able to attend four years of painting lessons in the Hermitage Museum. So it's about all the history of painting starting from icons, from that ancient art up to the recent days.

Jeremy Houghton:

And are there lessons a conductor can learn from a painter, such as shaping the music?

Vasily Petrenko:

Yes there is. Attention, such as where you put in the spotlight and how you control some of the elements in the painting or in the music. For example, how do you find a balance? Balance of the shadow and light, balance of the dynamics in music. 

Jeremy Houghton:

You mention balance, is being off-balance also important in music?

Vasily Petrenko:

I mean, there's different balance, like in painting, the balance between the colours. And if you're talking about the mid-20th century to the late-20th century, quite often it's so abstract, that you just see the combination of the colours. And the same happens in music. If you examine 20th century music, it lost tonality, it lost its key, it lost rhythm. But the combination of the colours and the timbres, that's what makes it music rather than just noise. And you need to know how to combine them, how to put them on the canvas.

Jeremy Houghton:

I do a lot of paintings which are monochromatic, so I reduce my palette to use hardly any colours. Can you do the same with music? 

Vasily Petrenko:

That comes naturally with instruments. Think about every instrument in the orchestra as a different colour. You may find just the string instruments in a very small setting, like eight to ten musicians, and you can call that monochromatic in a sense. 

Jeremy Houghton:

We have warm colours and cooler colours. Is that the same with music?

Vasily Petrenko:

Yes, and then we go into the territory of synaesthesia between colour and sound. It was explored at the beginning of 20th century, and composers like Scriabin were allocating every key in music a certain colour. The score Prometheus, for instance, has a part called 'luce'. And there's 12 different colours as there are 12 notes in the octave.

Jeremy Houghton:

Okay, wow, that's fascinating.

Vasily Petrenko:

Yeah, and each one has its own colour – C is red, for instance, B is blue. All the colours of the rainbow are there. He writes a chord for which sometimes three or four colours need to be mixed together. And that comes together in the music and it's part of the score. Scriabin made a device – the clavier à lumières – where there was a bulb, literally, a lamp, that had all 12 different colours filters. And he had pedals by which he could rotate them, to make different colour combinations while playing.

Jeremy Houghton:

I'll use warm colours in my pictures to come out and colder colours to recede to get depth. Can you do the same? Does that work musically?

Vasily Petrenko:

I think you can. But it also relates to the nature of instruments. Some of the instruments, the flute for instance, sounds a little bit colder in general than the sound of the oboe. The oboe naturally has more oil and a more warm sound. 

Jeremy Houghton:

And with painting, a different room or different light can change the painting, which is the same with music?

Vasily Petrenko:

Yes, absolutely. We play in so many different halls and have to respond to different spaces. 

Jeremy Houghton:

So rehearsing here at Henry Wood Hall is different from playing at the Royal Albert Hall?

Vasily Petrenko:

So different. Well, here, if we will play with the same volume as in the Royal Albert Hall, we would go deaf!  And when you go on tour, every day you change the hall and every day you have to adjust and adapt yourself.

Jeremy Houghton:

What about texture? I work with thick oil paints. What would be the equivalent? 

Vasily Petrenko:

I think you can connect texture with articulation. You use a different brush, a different instrument, to paint colour onto the canvas. It’s the same with music. Musicians can make very different types and qualities of sound with their different instruments.

Jeremy Houghton:

And do you use silence?

Vasily Petrenko:

Yes, for sure.

Jeremy Houghton:

For me, there's an old Japanese term called ma, which refers to the pause or the interval. And in painting a scene, you can leave something unfinished or leave it white.

Vasily Petrenko:

Yeah, I think in terms of music, it's not unfinished. There are some unfinished pieces, deliberately unfinished, but it's more about the pauses. You have to use silence because then people realise the value of the sound. And it's the same, I think, with painting. When there's the absence of certain colour, people realise more what that colour is and how significant it is.

Jeremy Houghton:

Wow, I love that, there’s so much synergy

Vasily Petrenko:

I think all the arts are synesthetic in many ways. Size also comes into play – sometimes you do a piece for just about four or five minutes or even less, and then you treat it as a little natural mode or still life. And sometimes you do a piece like this Mahler Symphony, which is an hour and a quarter at least, and then you think that this is more like the frescoes of Michelangelo or all those paintings which are massive in size.