Justus Frantz

Not only is the music back in Johannesburg as Bongani Tembe, chief executive and artistic director of the Johannesburg and KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestras, promised, but there is also a flourishing of great artistic collaboration between South African musicians and international visiting artists. At the second concert of the Spring Season in Johannesburg, Justus Frantz took to the JPO podium to the great delight of audience members. Creative Feel managed to catch up with this charismatic, internationally acclaimed German pianist and conductor.

Justus Frantz is known for passionately cultivating young talent. His schedule, therefore, includes frequent auditions, giving young musicians valuable opportunities to start their international careers. Among the musicians who were first introduced to audiences by Frantz are violinists Maxim Vengerov, Midori Gotō andJózsef Lendvay, pianist Evgeny Kissin, and composer MartinPanteleev. He is full of praise for the young South African soloist, Astride du Plessis, who that evening played Camille Saint-Saëns’ Violoncello Concerto No. 1 in A minor, Op 23, which Tembe had so carefully chosen for the programme.

Frantz explains that he grew up in a house where music was important and how the whole family would come together to listen to classical concerts on the radio. He began playing the piano at an early age and later studied with Eliza Hansen and Wilhelm Kempff at the Hochschule für Musikund Theater Hamburg with a scholarship from the GermanAcademic Scholarship Foundation. Today, Frantz lives in Hamburg with his family and is a well-known personality, actively contributing to the cultural life of the city.

In 1970, Frantz started playing with the Berliner Philharmoniker under Herbertvon Karajan, who was the principal conductor of the Orchestra for 35 years. With that, Frantz joined a group of first-class pianists. He too feels that Von Karajan is both an icon and an enigma in the story of 20th-century music. Von Karajan arguably did more to turn symphonic music into a commodity in the post-war era and is a familiar face on millions of records, videos, laserdiscs, DVDs and downloads. Today, it is Frantz who uses his talent to bring classical music to a wide audience.

Frantz plays and conducts with orchestras around the world, including the Philharmonia of the Nations, which he founded in 1995. He works on a regular basis with renowned orchestras such as the Mariinsky Orchestra in St. Petersburg, the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, the China PhilharmonicOrchestra, not to mention the KZN Philharmonic Orchestra, the Georgian Chamber Orchestra, Sinfonia Varsovia and many others. Frantz was made a Special Envoy for the UNRefugee Agency in 1989, and in the same year received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the German equivalent of the British OBE.

Frantz celebrated his US debut in 1975 with the New YorkPhilharmonic, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. He says that his long collaboration and close friendship with Bernstein began by chance when Bernstein, listening to WGBH RadioBoston late one night, heard a recording of Dvořák’s PianoConcerto played by Frantz, and was determined to meet the pianist. This deep friendship lasted until Bernstein’s death. During the last 20 years of his life, Frantz says that Bernstein did most of his work at Frantz’s Spanish house in GranCanaria where every summer Frantz invites musicians from all over the world to his music festival, El Finca Festival Frantz& Friends de Monte León.

In 1986, Frantz founded the Schleswig-Holstein MusicFestival (SHMF) and was its director for nine years, turning it into one of the world’s greatest music forums.

During 2018, the focus of the SHMF’s programme was acelebration of Leonard Bernstein. At the Festival finale on25 August, Frantz conducted Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 on what would have been Bernstein’s actual 100th birthday. Bernstein had conducted the work a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall in both East and West Berlin. At that time, he had the choir sing the word ‘freedom’ instead of ‘joy’when they performed the famous ‘Ode to Joy’.

Today, Frantz continues to adhere to Bernstein’smusical ideals. Bernstein’s dream of an international, young and professional orchestra inspired Frantz to found the Philharmonia of the Nations. As the chief conductor, Frantz works throughout the world with the constantly growing and changing orchestra, continuously discovering new names. He feels strongly that such an orchestra builds strong bridges between different nations and cultures. Perhaps this is something that South Africa as a much-divided nation should support much more?