New York Times

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A Conductor Is Back, an Orchestra Reborn

By ALAN RIDING

LUCERNE, Switzerland, Aug. 21 — At the end of many concerts the musicians can be seen hurriedly packing up their instruments and slipping away. The final performance of the new Lucerne Festival Orchestra here on Wednesday was very different. Once the cheers for the conductor, Claudio Abbado, finally died down, the instrumentalists lingered onstage, hugging one another and beaming.

This was evidently the spirit that Mr. Abbado had in mind when he proposed recreating the festival orchestra 10 years after the last one disbanded. "It is different to have best friends together," he explained. "Everyone is there to enjoy making music, to take pleasure, to play with enthusiasm, with passion. They are prepared to do any crazy thing I ask them for the music. To fly, to walk through fire."

He laughed at his own hyperbole.

It so happens that the 120 or so "best friends" who opened the 65th Lucerne Festival on Aug. 14 are also renowned soloists or important players in many of Europe's leading orchestras and ensembles. But what they have in common is that over the years all have worked closely with Mr. Abbado and have now been chosen by him to revive a tradition that dates back to the first festival orchestra, formed by Arturo Toscanini in 1938.

Yet there was more to the occasion than the rebirth of a once-acclaimed orchestra. For musicians and audiences alike, Mr. Abbado's return was also the stuff of emotion. Last year he stepped down after 13 years as chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. But more pertinently, after a diagnosis of stomach cancer in 2000 he is again in good health and, at 70, has proven strong enough to lead a new orchestra.

It is something he is practiced at doing. In 1978 he founded what is now the European Union Youth Orchestra; in 1986 he created the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, which he still heads; in 1997 he turned alumni of this orchestra into the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. And he did this while appearing as a guest conductor with many orchestras and successively holding the top music posts at La Scala, at the Vienna Philharmonic and in Berlin.

Today Mr. Abbado has no interest in pursuing the frenzied peripatetic life of many leading conductors. "It's not necessary," he said in an interview. "I never really did this mad life, like Zubin Mehta and Daniel Barenboim. We are very good friends, but I always say to them, `Why are you doing so much?' I think we are lucky if we can find time to study more, to know something better." But more than slowing him down, his illness appears to have changed his philosophy.

"It's a very good thing," he said. "It's a miracle. My illness is a very good thing, for my music, for my life, for my children, for everything. I see everything differently. I take much more time for myself, to study more, to relax, to be in peace, to stay with my children and to try to know more because we are very ignorant."

He nonetheless conducted his new orchestra here four times in a week. He opened the monthlong festival with an excerpt from Wagner's "Walküre" along with Debussy's "Martyrdom of St. Sebastian" and "La Mer," with Bryn Terfel, Andrea Rost and Eteri Gvazava as soloists. He followed with a concert of Bach's Brandenburg concertos and climaxed with two performances of Mahler's Second Symphony, with Anna Larsson and Ms. Gvazava as soloists.

The last festival orchestra, comprising only Swiss musicians, was disbanded in 1993, reportedly because of falling standards. But the festival's director, Michael Haefliger, immediately saw that Mr. Abbado had something more ambitious in mind. "I think for him it had a romantic connection with what Toscanini did here all those years ago," Mr. Haefliger said. "Maybe after conducting every great orchestra, he had the dream of having his own hand-picked orchestra."

Not that this festival has ever lacked top-flight orchestras. Every year it brings the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic and the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, while this year it is also presenting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra led by Mr. Barenboim, the Munich Philharmonic under James Levine, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra with Mr. Mehta and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra under Mariss Jansons.

Next year Mr. Haefliger is planning the creation of a Lucerne Festival Academy focusing on contemporary music, with Pierre Boulez as its artistic director and members of the Paris-based Ensemble Intercontemporain as teachers. The academy will select 120 young musicians under 28 to form the academy orchestra and will regularly commission new works of contemporary music by rising young composers.

"We want to ask important questions about the future of contemporary music," Mr. Haefliger said, conceding that ticket sales drop by 10 to 20 percent when festival concerts schedule only contemporary music. "Are five-minute talks before performances enough? I don't think so. How do you get audiences engaged? This is not just a question for the music world. It is also about creating a spirit of modernity in society."

Mr. Abbado seems less worried, believing that time will erode resistance to avant-garde music. "It was always like that," he said. "After the war, when I first heard Berg, Schoenberg, Bartok, Stravinsky, I had a reaction: `This is not music.' Today it is classical music. It is like learning a language. Schoenberg is so difficult, you say. But if you study Gesualdo and Monteverdi, then Bach, and if you know Schubert, Mahler, then you'll understand Schoenberg."

"I am always for the idea that a door should be opened," he went on. "At the beginning, when there was something I didn't understand, I would try to listen until the moment I understood. There are things in life that take more time to understand. You can always find something new in the score. You can spend all your life trying to understand better what the composer wants."

But in the end, he said, love of music is all that matters.

"When I was 7, I went to a concert at La Scala and heard Debussy's `Nocturnes,' " he recalled. "I thought, `This is something magical.' And I decided one day to try to create this magical thing. That was the idea. I then studied, not to be a conductor or a soloist, just to prepare this magical thing. Now I have been able to make this magical thing with the best orchestras in the world."

He seemed entirely at peace with himself. "I have been lucky," he added softly.

ABBADO AND PRESS