Opera Chic

Or Maybe, Just Maybe, The New York Guy Simply Isn't As Good As The Chicago Guy

Tony Tommasini, possibly confused after too much partying to celebrate his survivor status in a vastly downsized department, ignores the obvious answer in a baffling comment re: the Muti/CSO thing:

And Mr. Muti would have been all wrong for New York. I, for one, could not be more hopeful about Mr. Gilbert’s potential. But I thought that the Philharmonic players all would have shared my enthusiasm.

Now, the quite evident answer to the mystery that leaves Tony Tommy baffled, ie the reason why the NYPhil don't seem to share TT's unabashed enthusiasm for Gilbert may be, quite simply, that... Gilbert may not be as good a conductor as Muti.

Let us be clear here: OC likes Gilberto, and she thinks that he'll do just fine, and anyway he's got his back covered because all the New York critics are totally in the tank for him and he'll certainly commission a lot of new stuff that'll spread jobs and much-needed benjis among a lot of otherwise underemployed people.

But there is indeed a list of the Big Five when it comes to conductors, too -- the list of the top five conductors in the world.

Opera Chic's, strictly in alphabetical order is this:

Claudio Abbado

Mariss Jansons

James Levine

Riccardo Muti

Antonio Pappano

(your list may be slightly different, but in all seriousness not that different: maybe you can replace Pappano with Barenboim or Jansons with Haitink, but Claudio, Jimbo & Riccardo solidly belong in that list).

The fact Tommasini chooses to ignore is that Gilbert, however interesting and refreshing a choice, cannot be reasonably included in that Big Five list, by all means. Muti can. And indeed he is in very many people's Big Five list -- including, one suspects, a lot of CSO musicians'.

Abbado's Fidelio In Reggio Emilia; A New Deal With Riccardo Muti

Claudio Abbado is all over the Italian papers this morning -- interviews in Corriere della Sera and Repubblica -- introducing Fidelio (the 1814 version) that opens at Teatro Valli in Reggio Emilia on April 6. Amazingly, it's Abbado's first Fidelio -- "Certain operas I need to meditate over for a very long time, it took me twenty years to make Boris Godunov after all", the Milanese maestro says. Between now and 2010 the production will also touch Madrid, Baden-Baden, Ferrara, Aix-En-Provence. It's a shame that this Fidelio has not become the occasion for Abbado's return to Milan after his dismissal from la Scala in 1986 (the orchestra, as they always do, fired him the way they had fired de Sabata once upon a time and the way they would vote Muti out in 2005): but the conductor has torpedoed all the plans to stage his comeback to la Scala with full honors, and has repeated even in these interviews that he has no plan to ever return to Milan (the city has been run by a center-right coalition and a center-right mayor since the mid-1990s, and Abbado is famously very liberal, not to mention, for the bafflement of many of his friends, a big Fidel Castro fan).

Anyway there's something to be said for a guy who, after the kind of monster career Abbado has had and after his illness and all that still has the passion to simply go to the movies -- in this case, Vier Minuten -- and halfway through the film to simply think, this director is perfect for Fidelio; then call the director Chris Kraus -- a opera n00b -- and make it happen. 

Abbado explains how, when the director has the correct understanding of an opera's dramatic structure, being inexperienced in musical theater is not really a problem for a director. And, more importantly, Abbado explains, Kraus "makes the singers act like real actors".

Another very nice touch is that, this coming October, in Bologna, Abbado will conduct Berlioz's Te Deum in a 5,000 seats hall with a monster team of three orchestras -- his Orchestra Mozart,  the Orchestra Giovanile Italiana di Fiesole, and Riccardo Muti's own Orchestra Cherubini.

Many years of supposed bad blood between the two conductors -- the liberal vs the conservative, the champion of 20th century composers vs the champion of the 18th, the Northerner vs the Southerner, blah blah blah -- haven't changed the fact that Abbado was happy to call his colleague and ask him to "lend" him the truly excellent Cherubini kids ("Riccardo did a magnificent job with them", says Abbado). And in fact, even if they're not exactly great friends -- not many conductors love and socialize with their collagues anyway --
they have never hated each other as much as the factions (everything in Italy is split up in factions, it's a centuries-old thang) of their rabid fans would have hoped -- or liked.

So give it up for this pact, in the name of Berlioz, between the two greatest Italian conductors working today, certainly two of the very greatest maestri ever to step on a podium.

Boulez Replaces Abbado @ Carnegie

Pierre Boulez will replace Claudio Abbado as conductor of Mahler's Third Symphony with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra on Oct. 6 at Carnegie Hall. No word yet on the replacement for Abbado's two performances of Oct. 3 and 4.

Claudio Abbado's Sound Of Silence

"I learned to listen to silence"

It's almost here, October 3, in New York. Be there, dear readers. Seriously.

The recent Lucerne performances totally rawked our Fogal tights. Whether it's Beethoven or Mahler,  Abbado is the one who shows you how it's done.

Claudio Abbado Slams Milan, Sends Love Letter to Fidel Castro and Ingmar Bergman

Opera Chic loves Claudio Abbado. Loves him.

She loves Abbado, obviously one of the three best conductors working nowadays -- no matter who the other two are in one's opinion, Abbado certainly belongs in that team: his Simon Boccanegra at la Scala, a most difficult opera to tackle for a conductor, full of pitfalls and incredibly delicate passages, pregnant with drama at almost every bar, is still THE very best out there, ever. Maestro Abbado is arguably the best Beethoven  conductor alive and one of the very very few best Beethoven conductors ever, up there with Von Bulow and Furtwangler and Jochum and one or two others, not more, you add your other faves there -- his Beethoven is not a monument carved in cold stone but a nervous, sinewy tiger full of surprises, of life, a wonder of invention. His Beethoven is a miracle: for lack of a better definition, Abbado's Beethoven is forever young.

Of all the Verdi Requiems (oh how we love Giulini's otherworldy recording, the London one with Ilva Ligabue, that forgotten genius of the art of opera singing, and a youngest Grace Bumbry), Abbado's is the most emotionally hammering: Opera Chic literally  cannot watch that raw-nerves performance too often, because the darkness and the power are just overwhelming (and yes, in this site we mock Roberto Alagna and Angela Gheorghiu a lot, mostly when they deserve it, because they do deserve it a lot, but  even if they had only done this recording in their entire careers, their place in the history of classical music is assured -- just listen to them and be awed, when they deserve praise we're happy to shower them with it).

And so on: his Mahler, his Berg, we could go on for hours -- Abbado is everything you ever wanted in a conductor.

He is also a very, very generous man: he has been sharing his deep knowledge for years, to students all around the world, through his work in Venezuela discovered Gustavo Dudamel,  and we hope we're not disrespectful to Daniel Harding, our sweet young maestro, if we dare say that the crazily talented Harding nevertheless owes an awful lot to Abbado's teaching and his generosity.

How many artists of Abbado's stature would spend months in (musically) remote places such as Venezuela and Cuba, in a world when even so many fifth-rate conductors consider themselves to be Karajan's peers and arrogantly look down on everybody -- audiences, opera houses staff, orchestras, and are mostly good at whining that their four-star hotels aren't swanky enough and they want five stars?

Having said that, Opera Chic has a long-standing policy of ignoring musicians opinions on politics. The great musicians are ipse dixit in musical matters; their personal politics, their likes and dislikes are obviously irrelevant (also, we hear Klemperer was crazy for pistachio ice cream, and Opera Chic hates it: she still thinks Unkle Otto is a giant among conductors).

In today's Corriere della Sera (not on line), Maestro Abbado speaks: last night Abbado conducted the Eroica in Bologna with his Orchestra Mozart crazily talented kids and also spoke to the paper about a few topics.

Among the bombshells:

* He has sent emissaries to Ingmar Bergman's remote Sweden house to ask the great maestro of cinema and the stage to direct an opera that will be conducted by Abbado. No word yet on Bergman's response but as the paper correctly states, this would be the event of the events in music. We remind our readers that Bergman, a rabid classical music fan, has in the past expressed his fanboi status for Abbado's art.

* He'd love to conduct an opera of the German repertorio to be directed by the young Academy-Award winning director of The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck.

* He repeats that, even if Scala General Manager Stèphane Lissner has come to him twice asking him to conduct at la Scala (Abbado, who was once Music director there, has been fired by the orchestra in 1986 and has never returned), he'll never go back to la Scala

* He slams Milan (he was born in the city) as "greedy", "polluted", "uncaring for the future". He now lives in Bologna and spends his winters in Central America.

* He hails Cuba as a country damaged by "clichés and lies spread by the media", "a country where the gap between rich and poor is the smallest in the world, where everybody can feed themselves, and is employed, goes to school and has a right to health care, good quality health care, and free of charge". He mentions a Cuban discovery in the field of oncology that can cure stomach cancer, and is surprisingly frank about his terrible bout with stomach cancer: "Nevertheless, that illnees has been a blessing for me. It changed my life, it made me rethink so many issues. It made me realize what matters and what doesn't, in the end".

Abbado: Bach in Venice

Every time Claudio Abbado conducts, it's a great joy for music lovers.

The maestro will appear tomorrow night at Venice's teatro La Fenice conducting Bach's Brandenburg Concerts with his Mozart youth orchestra (.pdf file here).

Claudio Abbado in Venezuela

"They live to make music. That's the reason I come here".

Claudio Abbado in Venezuela.