ABBADO AND MEDIA

 THE TORONTO STAR
September 6th 2003

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...around

Lucerne celebrates Claudio Abbado's special touch

WILLIAM LITTLER


LUCERNE, Switzerland,

—Every conductor's dream? Why, to create a hand-picked orchestra of their own, of course. For most conductors it remains a dream. For Claudio Abbado last month, it became a Swiss reality. Last year, shortly before announcing his intention of stepping down after 13 years as chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, arguably Europe's foremost orchestra, the Italian maestro placed a call to Michael Haefliger, director of the Lucerne Festival, inviting him to meet in Salzburg. "Ordinarily Claudio Abbado doesn't call you," Haefliger laughed over coffee in his office the other morning, partway through this summer's still-ongoing festival. "You call him. So I wondered what this was all about." Arriving in Salzburg, Haefliger found Abbado in a reflective mood. Having recently survived a near-fatal bout with stomach cancer, the great conductor talked fondly of 1938 and the arrival of Arturo Toscanini at the Lucerne Festival to conduct a specially formed orchestra on the rolling lawns adjacent to Tribschen, the lakeside villa where Richard Wagner had composed some of his finest music. "I soon realized," Haefliger explained, "that Abbado was contemplating the formation of another such orchestra and he wanted to do it in association with the Lucerne Festival." That was enough for the festival's director. After hearing the conductor out and without yet knowing that this was to be Abbado's major project after leaving the Berlin Philharmonic, he went to his board, launched a fundraising campaign and started contacting musicians. Not just any musicians, mind you. These were to be some of Abbado's favourite musicians, old friends from orchestras he has conducted in the past as well as admired solo and chamber players. Sabine Meyer agreed to play principal clarinet, the Berlin Philharmonic's Emmanuel Pahud, principal flute. The Hagen Quartet joined the string sections. "The response was amazing," Haefliger recalled. "Everybody wanted to be part of the orchestra and work again with Abbado." What made their participation possible was the shortness of the orchestra's season. It would only exist to play for the festival, and for only part of the festival at that. In this first summer (Abbado's initial contract is for three years), there were only four full-orchestra concerts, plus a number of others devoted to chamber music. "The chamber music is an essential part of Abbado's idea," Haefliger said. "He taught chamber music early in his career and still believes that a chamber-music approach is essential to high level orchestral playing." One could certainly hear the approach vindicated in the orchestra's playing the other night, when it brought its first season to a close with a performance of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2, the so-called Resurrection Symphony, that literally brought tears to this listener's eyes. At the end of the performance, in the superb concert hall of Lucerne's handsome Jean Nouvel-designed Culture and Congress Centre, the players did not just shake hands with each other, as they sometimes do in European orchestras, they embraced. It was as if they realized they had just participated in something far out of the ordinary. They had. I've seldom heard orchestral playing so passionate, so fully engaged in realizing a conductor's vision of a major piece of music. And his chorus, the Orféon Donostiarra, sang in like manner. As for Abbado himself, he may have lost weight in the wake of his illness, but he conducted in what has to be called the white heat of inspiration, like a man virtually reborn through music at the age of 70. The afternoon following the concert, he sat in the Conferernce Centre's small hall, listening in what looked like a state of mild discomfort as longtime associates celebrated the launching of a new book, Claudio Abbado Dirigent (conductor), published (in German) by Nicolai and edited by one of them, Ulrich Eckhardt. When it came his turn to speak, a soft voice of humility confessed simply that music was his life. He may speak softly, Haefliger smiled, "but there is no question that he is the boss." Indeed, the book is not so much a biography as a record of his work as one of the most successful musical bosses of our day. Whether as musical director of La Scala in his native Milan, as musical director of the Vienna State Opera, as general music director of the City of Vienna, as director of the Salzburg Easter Festival or as player-elected artistic director of the Berlin Philharmonic, he has helped set some of the highest standards for music-making in our time. He has also worked to imbue the emerging generation of musicians with those standards, having founded the European Community Youth Orchestra, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, from which the Mahler Chamber Orchestra has also emerged. Members of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra appeared prominently in the new Lucerne Festival Orchestra, making it as much an avenue toward the future as a gathering of the current elite. To watch the young musicians and their distinguished mentors playing together almost as if their lives depended on it provided a moving reminder of what is so often missing in orchestral concerts these days. The recorded evidence suggests that symphony orchestras, by and large, play at a higher technical level today than ever before, and yet symphony orchestras everywhere appear to be in trouble. High-level professionalism just isn't the same as inspiration and audiences can sense the difference. The audience that roared its thanks to the new Lucerne Festival Orchestra knew it was listening to something special. Claudio Abbado had once again demonstrated that in making music, it is only the special that really matters.