In today's "Sunday Times" - London
Great orchestras are made by partnerships with great
conductors, says HUGH CANNING
Bands of gold
Are there any great orchestras left in the world, or great conductors?
The election of Sir Simon Rattle by the Berlin Philharmonic would
seem to suggest that it is great partnerships between maestro and
musicians that create a special magic. Herbert von Karajan and the
Berlin Phil, Georg Szell and the Clevelanders, Leopold Stokowski and
the Phabulous Philadelphians, and Leonard Bernstein with the New York
Phil are the charismatic combinations that have set concert halls
alight and the record-shop tills a-jangling. Berlin conspicuously
made a sensible, but hardly scintillating, choice in appointing
Claudio Abbado in succession to Karajan. But the relationship has
not gelled into something out of the ordinary. They will be hoping
for something extra from Rattle.
What is certain is that the Rattle Berlin appointment will have a
knock-on effect on all of the world's leading and aspiring musical
institutions. If Daniel Barenboim had been chosen in preference to
Rattle, the Boston Symphony and the Philadelphia would have tussled
to appoint the British conductor, and the Chicago Symphony would
have been looking for a new music director - it is unthinkable that
Barenboim could have kept Chicago and Berlin. A game of musical
chairs would have ensued.
It will happen anyway, because 2002 is a watershed year. Not only
will Berlin change hands, but the senior maestros of three top American
orchestras, the New York Philharmonic (Kurt Masur), the Philadelphia
(Wolfgang Sawallisch) and the Cleveland (Christoph von Dohnanyi) will
not be renewing their contracts. Seiji Ozawa, the long-reigning
music director of the Boston Symphony has just announced that he will
become chef dirigeant of the Vienna State Opera, an unexpected move
that may not rule out remaining in Boston, but the Symphony has long
needed some new blood.
Lorin Maazel - a candidate for the Berlin job in 1989 and 2002 - will
hand on the principal conductor's baton of Germany's leading radio
band, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and Bernard Haitink will
depart as music director of Covent Garden. Haitink's successor, the
London-born Italo-American Antonio Pappano, has already been announced.
The Cleveland Orchestra also wasted no time waiting for the outcome
of the Berlin election to announce the succession to Dohnanyi.
Cleveland was, famously, one of Rattle's greatest flops, so they
looked elsewhere: to the 38-year-old Austrian Franz Welser-Most,
whose music directorship of the London Philharmonic in the early
1990s was undistinguished. Welser-Most retreated to the Zurich Opera
to lick his wounds - the players dubbed him Frankly Worse Than Most
and the nickname has stuck - but the Cleveland, one of the world's
true virtuoso ensembles, could be the making of him.
The so-called Big Five American orchestras - New York, Chicago,
Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia - are the glittering prizes that
await the rising generation of conductors in their forties and fifties.
These orchestras, traditionally associated with great names such as
Bernstein, Fritz Reiner, Solti, Serge Koussevitsky and Szell, remain
the creme de la creme of virtuosity and musicianship - not to mention
financial endowment - in the United States, but they no longer occupy
the unchallenged positions they held in the 1950s and 1960s.
Esa-Pekka Salonen and Michael Tilson Thomas have raised the profiles
of, respectively, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and San Francisco
Symphony in the three or four years of their music directorships.
Both conductors must expect to be wooed by one or more of the top
American orchestras with vacancies in 2002. Whether they will budge
must however remain debatable. Salonen is soon to take the LA Phil
into a new home, the unfortunately (but inevitably) named Walt Disney
Hall, which is LA's - and Disney's - tribute to Salonen's impact on
the city. Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony - or MTT &
the SFS as they are marketed on the West Coast - are such a winning
combination that they have been hailed by American critics as the
country's most dynamic and forward-looking orchestra.
Clearly, a bracing wind of change is blowing through the world's
great musical institutions. Berlin chose Rattle, 44, in favour of
the perceived traditionalist Barenboim, 58, while the most talked-about
American orchestras are led by Salonen, 40, and MTT, a Peter Panish
fiftysomething.
Europe's other great orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam,
has substantially expanded its repertoire under Riccardo Chailly, an
ever-improving conductor of catholic tastes who nurtures the Romantics
- Brahms, Bruckner, Tchaikovsky - relishes the modernists - Mahler,
Stravinsky and the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Webern and
Berg, and the French impressionists Debussy and Ravel - and proselytises
for his contemporaries. The RCO is undoubtedly a different, more
modern-sounding band than the orchestra of Willem Mengelberg, Eduard
van Beinum and Bernard Haitink, and it is also more versatile.
Clearly, it has dawned on orchestras that they can no longer sit
on the laurels of a glorious past. The Berlin Philharmonic is no
longer the orchestra of Herbert von Karajan, and the self-important,
conductorless, woman-free Vienna Philharmonic can no longer regard
itself as the guardian of the so-called Viennese classics, Haydn,
Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. Indeed, it is a measure of the harsh
realities that the Vienna professors now face that they invite
period-instrument maestros such as Roger Norrington and John Eliot
Gardiner to conduct Mozart and Schubert.
Where all this leaves the impoverished London orchestras is hard to
say, but it is obvious that the British capital is not regarded as
a musical Mecca for the most ambitious conductors. Significantly,
after experimenting with music directors - all-powerful supremos with
considerable control over the artistic programming - the London
Symphony, the London Philharmonic and the Philharmonia now have
principal conductors, which gives the players the freedom to choose
their guest conductors and do lucrative, though artistically
unrewarding, gigs for commercial promoters and advertising jingles.
It's a hard life for musicians in London, and conductors such as
Rattle crave no part in their hand-to-mouth existence.
A measure of quality is retained because distinguished conductors
such as Masur (principal conductor elect of the LPO), Dohnanyi (the
Philharmonia), Sir Colin Davis (LSO) and the young Italian firebrand
Daniele Gatti (Royal Philharmonic Orchestra) want to appear in London,
with all its media opportunities. The LSO has been most successful,
attracting big-name conductors like a magnet to the themed,
composer-oriented projects the orchestra's manager, Clive Gillinson,
dreams up for the Barbican.
He has even bagged Rattle for a couple of guest appearances. London's
loss is Berlin's gain, but Rattle's music directorship of the BPO
promises to bring something of his visionary Birmingham tenure to
the new German capital. The combination of Rattle and the Berlin
Philharmonic is surely good for the entire musical world.
External link
http://berlin-philharmonic.com/ - Includes a brief history
and season previews
Strengths of the famous five
BERLIN PHILHARMONIC
Acquired legendary status as the world's greatest recording
orchestra under its Olympian maestro Herbert von Karajan (chief
conductor 1955-1989). Famed for its rich tone qualities - only
its strings lack the glowing warmth of their counterparts in the
Vienna Philharmonic - Karajan cultivated a super-refinement of
saturated tone that tended to homogenise all music into a Karajan
sound. This served best for the late German Romantics, Brahms,
Wagner and Bruckner, but less well in classical and modern scores.
Stravinsky hated the Karajan recording of his Rite of Spring, and
the Berlin Philharmonic have not - until Rattle - been regarded as
a Haydn and Mozart orchestra.
VIENNA PHILHARMONIC
The house orchestra of the Vienna State Opera performs only a dozen
or so symphonic programmes with a selected elite of maestros - most
of them chosen to bring in the increasingly rare record contracts
- and the globally televised New Year's Day Concert, featuring
Viennese waltz and operetta composers. Anachronistically
heavy-textured for the Viennese classics, but still highly prized
in the late Austro-German Romantic repertoire. French and Russian
style - even under such specialists as Boulez, Jansons and Gergiev
- remains something of a mystery to the Vienna Professors.
CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
The world's glitziest orchestra under the dynamo that was the late
Sir Georg Solti, under Barenboim's conductorship - still controversial
in some Chicagoan quarters - it remains a virtuoso powerhouse, but
musically it has lost its way. Barenboim's last Proms concerts
two years ago with the CSO were easily outclassed by their
lesser-ranked compatriots, the Los Angeles Philharmonic under
Salonen.
ROYAL CONCERTGEBOUW ORCHESTRA, AMSTERDAM
Under the highly musical and versatile Riccardo Chailly, the RCO
may have lost something of its Dutchness, but it remains a formidable
instrument in the music - Bruckner, Mahler, Strauss - for which it
gained its international reputation. The most versatile of Europe's
super-orchestras, just as at home with Rossini overtures as it is
with the great Bruckner and Mahler symphonies. For Mozart, Haydn
and even Bach it has long nurtured a close relationship with the
specialist Nikolaus Harnoncourt.
LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
At its best - and that is often - London's only 2m orchestra (thanks
to an Arts Council subsidy matched by the City of London) can vie
with the finest European and American orchestras. The principal
conductor, Sir Colin Davis, is enjoying an Indian summer with some
of his favourite composers - Sibelius, Berlioz and Verdi - and he
has taken the LSO to its first residency in New York's Alice Tully
Hall (where Davis is principal guest of the New York Phil). A
horses-for-courses artistic policy has attracted the world's leading
musicians - Haitink for Mozart and Strauss, Rostropovich for the
Russians, Tilson Thomas for Mahler and American composers - to the
Barbican.
Hugh Canning
Tony Duggan
Staffordshire,
United Kingdom.
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