Announced today by Grammophone, who have also awarded his Bruckner 5 with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra DVD, Performance of the year. Full details below on both awards.
Lifetime Achievement
Claudio Abbado, conductor
Daniel Harding pays tribute to fellow conductor Claudio AbbadoI have known Claudio for 20 years. I’m lucky because I’ve heard him conduct so often – Pelléas in London, Wozzeckin Salzburg, Mahler’s Sixth with the Berlin Phil…Claudio was the reason I wanted to be a conductor. For me, he’s the biggest living inspiration; if I could have anyone’s natural gift, I would have his.
Claudio doesn’t like talking about music – he’s too good at doing it. The classic conversation with him goes something like this: ‘Mendelssohn? Ah yes, Mendelssohn – beautiful music…’ And that’s it. He goes off into a dream and remembers how lovely it is.
But the whole limp, vague impression he gives is such an act. When he starts to make music, he can create the most devastating tension. He can look so floppy and relaxed and yet bring something to the most astonishing, feverish level.
One of the first times I saw him rehearsing – Mahler’s Fourth with the Berlin Phil – Claudio looked completely as if he had no interest in what was going on. And then the concert was completely astonishing.What he does in rehearsals is make sure that people in the orchestra know who they should be listening to. It’s like the Vienna Phil – in rehearsals, the orchestra collect information but their attention is elsewhere. For the performance, it comes back at you tenfold.
I’ve talked to people who played with Kleiber and apparently his conducting was so compelling that the musicians were like marionettes. Claudio is very different. He gets his own way, but I’ve only heard him raise his voice three or four times. It’s something that Karajan was a master at, too – this thing of following and at the same time leading. He gives musicians the space to play – he can nudge the tiniest things without it feeling like he’s strangling anyone. Claudio was never going to be the guy who said, ‘Now I’m grand and can do what I want, so I’m going to play the same five pieces over and over again.’ If you listen to the old recordings of Mozart with the LSO and then the same repertoire 30 years later with Orchestra Mozart, it’s completely different. He’s never pretended to be a period-instrument expert but he’s always wanted to learn from different ideas and adapt. It’s the same with his approach to new music – he can then return to familiar pieces and look at them afresh.
When Claudio founded the European Union and Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestras it was a win-win situation – he is incredibly patient with young people but at the same time he gets to make music with the best young musicians eating out of his hand. It’s astonishing how many of today’s musicians have come through his youth orchestras. In a way, his vision has left an imprint on every orchestra in Europe.
DVD Performance
Bruckner Symphony No 5Lucerne Festival Orchestra / Claudio Abbado
Directed by Michael Beyer
Accentus ACC20243
A rarely encountered and special characteristic of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra is the way communal mastery and shared endeavour never overwhelm personal poetry, as much in the second violins’ sweetly tensile launch of the finale’s fugue as in countless oboe and clarinet solos. In the Fifth Bruckner found such a balance that his music had striven towards and which he perhaps never fully rediscovered. To find, sustain and never surrender a lyrical voice through the block-like construction of the Allegro, and even the contrapuntal stratagems of the finale as it works out how to arrive at a conclusion of now forever challenging, overwhelmingly positive force: this takes a special, even unique band of musicians and friends who (we can see) love what they do, making chamber music on the grandest scale.
Peter Quantrill
