This a recent London Times article. No author to hand:
'To the great conductors, music was love and death and the air they
breathed'
Not long ago giants strode this planet. They mesmerised and terrified
and thrilled all who encountered them. Their rage was like thunder,
but their joy touched millions. They were conduits for genius, and
they were geniuses in their own right. They were called conductors.
Even today their recordings send shivers down musically susceptible
spines. Toscanini, Klemperer, Furtwangler, Walter, Szell: the very
names evoke a grander era. Perhaps because many of them had experienced
the foulest chapters of 20th-century history at first hand, their
performances seemed to aspire to a higher plane of truth. To these
conductors music wasn't a business. It was love and death and the
air they breathed.
Where are such towering maestros today? This is the question that
anybody who loves classical music, and who regrets its increasingly
marginalised status, urgently wants to answer. For there is no doubt
that the absence of compelling personalities from the world's podiums
is one big reason why attempts to sell orchestras to a wider public
so often fail. You can devise the most cunning marketing, hire
fantastic players, put on superb programmes. But if the man wafting
the baton has all the charisma of a sock, you have a problem.
Boy, do we have problems. How many of today's conductors blaze
out the sort of performances that stand even remote comparison with
those chipped 78s of Toscanini or Klemperer? How many grip the public
imagination as Bernstein did? I can think of just three. One is
Carlos Kleiber, and since he lives up a mountain, charges a fee
equivalent to the gross domestic product of Portugal, and has appeared
in public just five times in five years, I don't think he quite fits
the bill as the saviour of music. The other two are Valery Gergiev,
the wild-eyed tsar of the Kirov Opera, and our own Simon Rattle, who
sends a 10,000-watt surge through every orchestra he conducts.
As for the rest, well, there are some fine musicians around; one
thinks of Chailly in Amsterdam, Jansons in Pittsburgh, Haitink and
Davis in London. But charismatic? Awesome? Towering? Even their own
publicists wouldn't bend the meaning of adjectives that far.
All of which explains the hysteria currently gripping the orchestral
business. For by chance several of the world's top ensembles are
looking for new principal conductors right now - and there just ain't
enough charisma to go round.
Let's start at the top. Next Wednesday members of the Berlin
Philharmonic will vote on who will succeed Claudio Abbado, the
enigmatic Italian who had the temerity to walk out on them (the
conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic is expected to depart from his
post only in a coffin). The two favourites are Rattle, who hasn't
done any lobbying at all and indeed speaks little German, and Daniel
Barenboim, who has been politicking like crazy in five languages.
I know who would get my vote, but in Berlin the hot money is on
Barenboim, who will roll out wall-to-wall Beethoven and Bruckner
and inspire almost nobody under 60.
If he does go to Berlin, however, he would almost certainly have
to give up being music director of the Chicago Symphony, for it is
inconceivable that the world's two greatest "powerhouse" orchestras
could share the same conductor, even in these thin times. And that
would add even more uncertainty to the American musical scene. Masur
is soon to leave the New York Philharmonic, Sawallisch is retiring
from Philadelphia, and there are also vacancies in Atlanta,
Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Houston.
Where are the giants who will set the wild echoes flying in these
thrusting cities? Your guess is as good as mine. But if you seek an
indication of how dire the situation is, look no further than Cleveland,
Ohio. Last week, that ferociously proud orchestra appointed as its
new maestro the 38-year-old Austrian Franz Welser-Most, still best
known for being nicknamed "Frankly Worse Than Most" during six patchy
and peculiar years with the London Philharmonic.
That was unfair. "Frankly No Worse Than Most" would have been nearer
the mark. But handing him the keys to one of America's great musical
mansions? Things must be a bit desperate.
Given that background, the appointment last week of Mark Elder to
succeed the expansive and expensive Kent Nagano as music director of
Manchester's Halle Orchestra was astute. Yes, Elder can be hilariously
pompous at times; it was he who struck a blow for sanctimonious twits
everywhere by refusing to conduct the patriotic songs at the Last
Night of the Proms during the Gulf War. But he is an inspirational
orchestral trainer, as his 14 years galvanising English National
Opera showed. If anyone can dig the Halle out of its present hole
(the band was one board meeting away from bankruptcy last year), he
can.
What is the secret of conducting greatness? When you look at what
Rattle achieved with modest resources in Birmingham, and what Gergiev
achieves in even more desperate circumstances in St Petersburg, one
thing strikes you - that the great maestro can be far more than a
musical leader. He can be the focus of a whole city's cultural
aspirations, the nub of its intellectual life, even a key player in
its economic regeneration. He fosters civic pride, and in turn that
pride feeds back into his performances and gives them a resonance
far beyond the walls of the concert hall.
Yet for years most conductors have refused to look out beyond the
gravy-trains of their own careers to the wider world that supports
- or increasingly, doesn't support - orchestral life. Now they
must change or perish. We need giants again, not time-servers and
time-keepers. Berlin could send out a signal next week that would
electrify the musical world. Let's hope that boldness prevails over
caution.
Tony Duggan
Staffordshire,
United Kingdom.
|
