ABBADO REDISCOVERED

Previously-unreleased live recording from Vienna’s Große Saal, 31st May 1971: these tapes were recently discovered in the archives of Austrian Radio – the ‘ORF’. Abbado’s long association with the Wiener Philharmoniker began when he first conducted the orchestra at Herbert von Karajan’s invitation in 1965. The orchestra was so impressed by what the young music director from La Scala achieved that they immediately invited him to conduct one of their subscription concerts in the season after next in the city’s Musikverein. The programme included Schubert’s “Unfinished” and Fifth Symphonies. Austrian Radio recorded the concert on the morning of Whit Monday, 31 May 1971, but the recording lay untouched in the corporation’s archives until now. Now, nearly fifty years later, this recording allows us to rediscover the maestro as we would rediscover a Vermeer with every fresh viewing.

“The meaning of each individual note and of the pause and silence between the notes – it was this that Abbado, by his own admission, sought in Schubert’s music.” Wolfgang Stähr

Claudio Abbado / Berliner Philharmoniker THE LAST CONCERT

Claudio Abbado (1933–2014) was one of the outstanding personalities in the history of the Berliner Philharmoniker. In May 2013, their unique partnership ended with Abbado’s last concert with the orchestra. The programme included two of the most important works of musical Romanticism: Hector Berlioz’s visionary Symphonie fantastique and Felix Mendelssohn’s magical, shimmering music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. To mark the second anniversary of Claudio Abbado’s death on 20 January 2016, audio and video recordings of this memorable evening have been released in a hardcover luxury edition. With comprehensive articles, bonus videos and previously unpublished photographs, it documents Abbado’s work with the orchestra whose chief conductor he was from 1990 to 2002.

The recordings impressively convey the special atmosphere of the evening: the great affection the orchestra and the audience had for Claudio Abbado – and of course the enthusiasm for the musical performances. Renowned not least for his clever concert programming, Abbado combined two works here that deal with the theme of dreams in music in very different ways: Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream conveys the multifaceted magical atmosphere of Shakespeare’s original, while Berlioz uses modern means to tell his delirious tale of fateful love and drug-induced hallucinations. Abbado’s performance brings out the full splendour of these scores. It is – as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote – a “wonder, the freedom and youthful-like spirit with which the soon to be octogenarian expends himself, which he radiates and which he presents to his audience from the conductor’s stand.” (Berliner Philharmoniker Recordings)

IANNIS XENAKIS Synaphaï

In 1968 the choreographer George Balanchine made a ballet from two works by Xenakis Metastaseis and Pithoprakta and the following year he commissioned Xenakis to compose an original score for New York City Ballet. Antikhthon turned out to be one of the great might-have-been collaborations: Xenakis completed the score in 1971, but the work was never staged. The concept of Antikhthon Anti-Earth or Counter-Earth was first proposed by the Pythagorean philosopher Philolaus of Croton around 400 BC. He speculated that there was a Counter-Earth a hypothetical heavenly body that revolved with the earth around a Central Fire. This led to Philolaus being credited as one of the first to propose that the Earth was not the centre of the universe, but that it was in an orbit around the Sun (Central Fire), with the other planets.
This idea clearly appealed to Xenakis as the basis for a stage work, though his score has no programme and no scenario. Presumably he intended the notion of the Counter-Earth, and the Central Fire (which he called a beneficial source of creative energy ... a mysterious and unknown source which is still beyond mans conception) as something that would stimulate Balanchines choreographic imagination. Certainly, he regarded music as having something of the same intangible qualities as then Central Fire, but he was more pragmatic about what he thought ballet could achieve: being based on what it was possible for the human body to do, he believed that it was limited to the movements we can make with our limbs, our trunk and our head and thats all. The vocabulary of ballet ... is not rich.
The work plays continuously but falls into five distinct sections perhaps reflecting its original intention as a ballet. The first is dominated by sustained clarinet notes and clusters, interrupted by rapid brass chords, a side drum, and nervous, energetic woodwind chords. The second section is driven by rhythmic string patterns (often played col legno), interrupted by increasingly urgent and extended outbursts from woodwind, brass and timpani, which then gradually fizzle out. The short third section (with wind and brass to the fore) prepares the way for the fourth, and longest, section in which initially delicate glissandos in the strings are periodically disturbed by the wind and brass, the strings seeming to feed off these interruptions, becoming increasingly animated and frenetic. The final section is more sustained, leading to a magical, evanescent close.

Claudio Abbado / Orchestra Mozart SCHUBERT The "Great" C major Symphony

Throughout his career, Claudio Abbado evinced a keen desire to work with young and unspoilt musicians, and it was this desire that led him to gift to the world of music one new orchestra after another. He loved working with his players with the maximum degree of intimacy and in an atmosphere of mutual understanding that encouraged them to listen to each other. In the course of his life more than a dozen wonderful ensembles were created thanks to his powerful initiative. The two most recent ones were the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, which dates back to 2003, and the Orchestra Mozart, which was established the following year as a project of the Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna and financed by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna. It was with the latter that Abbado developed an especially close bond during the final years of his life, its outstanding qualities demonstrated, not least, by the many prestigious awards that it received. In one of his last interviews, Abbado himself stressed that he was never interested in “drawing a distinction between my youth orchestras on the one hand and my elite orchestra on the other. The truth of the matter is that there are few major differences between my orchestras. We are all members of one big family, performing music together and in that way helping each other out.”

The Orchestra Mozart was never simply a youth orchestra but was a highly qualified large chamber ensemble in which young musicians appeared alongside experienced figures such as the double-bass player Alois Posch, the violist Wolfram Christ and the trumpeter Reinhold Friedrich. Apart from the genius of Abbado himself, it was very much this combination of experience and youthful enthusiasm that lent the orchestra its unique and irresistible colour. It was founded in 2004 against the background of the crisis that beset the whole of Italy, where regional orchestras and opera houses were dying out in large numbers.
As such, it was a sign of the untiring optimism and thirst for action that Abbado brought to art and society right up to the end of his life, for unlike many of his colleagues of a similar age he retained his political beliefs from the 1960s and 1970s, when his work had been inspired by his left-wing sympathies. His conviction that music does not exist in a vacuum but has an emphatically ethical significance alongside its aesthetic importance bore fruit from start to finish. On Abbado’s initiative the Orchestra Mozart also played voluntarily in kindergartens, prisons and facilities for the disabled. (Julia Spinola)

Martha Argerich / Claudio Abbado / Orchestra Mozart MOZART Piano Concertos K 503 & K 406

Recorded live in Lucerne, Switzerland, in 2013, shortly before the death of conductor Claudio Abbado (who must have been quite ill at the time), this pair of Mozart piano concertos stands as a fitting valediction to his legacy. The liquid playing of star pianist Martha Argerich is a major contributor to the success of the performances, it's true. But really this is a Mozart performance shaped by the conductor, and Abbado's subtlety in his old age is remarkable to hear. In the Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466, he generates a great deal of tension without resorting to the Beethovenian mode of expression that is the norm for this concerto these days. The turn to D major at the end of the finale is utterly delightful in the hands of Abbado and Argerich, not a Romantic conceit like sunlight breaking through storm clouds but a quintessentially ingenious Mozartian ornament. The Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major, K. 503, Mozart's longest concerto, offers a lot to chew on, with the framework of the vast first movement and its almost neutral thematic material developed in large motions. The live sound is impressively clear, and in general this is a marvelous statement from the last months of a great conductor's life. ( James Manheim)

Isabelle Faust / Claudio Abbado / Orchestra Mozart BEETHOVEN - BERG Violin Concertos

 The Beethoven and Berg violin concertos aren’t commonly paired on disc. However, in this case it seems like an inspired piece of programme planning, with an account of the Berg that plumbs its depths of melancholy, setting off a radiant, life-affirming performance of the Beethoven.

Berg could be accused of giving too many instructions to his performers, of not allowing enough room for individual interpretation. He certainly presents them with plenty to think about; in the waltz-like second section of the concerto’s second movement, Isabelle Faust is required, within a few bars, to characterise her part as scherzando, wienerisch and rustico. She succeeds brilliantly; one feels, in this and other places, that such precision actually helps her to convey the intensity of feeling that lies behind this concerto dedicated ‘to the memory of an angel’.

Faust’s stylish way with the waltz episodes brings a suggestion of gaiety that renders more poignant the effect of the dark, complex harmony – a bright memory rendered sad and bitter. In the second movement, after the fierce virtuosity she brings to the declamatory opening section, she chooses the alternative version of the canonic cadenza (suggested by the composer) where she is joined by a solo viola, rather than realising unaided the four-part counterpoint. This passage sounds truly beautiful, like an uneasy oasis of calm in the middle of turbulent conflict, and I’ve become convinced it’s the best way to hear the music.

Abbado and the Orchestra Mozart also take careful notice of the score’s myriad directions, and the effect is similarly to liberate the intensity and beauty of the music. After the harrowing climax at the end of the first part of the second movement, where the Bach chorale (whose melody is related to Berg’s 12-note row) makes its appearance, the effect of having the grieving voice of the solo violin answered by the clarinet choir more quietly, but also slightly faster, and so less weighed down, is perfectly realised – we immediately appreciate why Berg wrote it so.

Few recordings of the Berg have achieved this level of detailed commitment from soloist and orchestra. One that does so is Josef Suk’s, made in 1968 with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra under Karel Ančerl, and they manage to stay closer to Berg’s metronome markings – some passages in Faust’s recording are on the slow side, though I can’t see that it spoils the performance in any way. And this new account enjoys more mellifluous recorded sound, with far superior definition.

Beethoven may not give as many directions as Berg, but from the very first bars the Orchestra Mozart’s woodwind choir show the same care over detail, the instruments perfectly balanced and with a commitment to bringing out the music’s soulful, expressive character. This sets the tone for the performance, Abbado encouraging his players to maximise the expressive quality of each theme, while keeping a firm hand on the unfolding of the larger design. He and Faust see eye to eye in wishing to preserve a proper Allegro ma non troppo for the first movement and not to be awed by the work’s reputation into presenting it as a grand, Olympian utterance with little vitality (as on the Maxim Vengerov/Rostropovich recording). It’s not just a matter of tempo, either; to all the running passages in the first movement and finale, Isabelle Faust brings a spirited style that at moments becomes positively fiery. A notable example is her cadenza in the finale (track 5, 6'20"). Faust bases her cadenzas and lead-ins on those Beethoven wrote for his adaptation of the work as a piano concerto. This is often an uncomfortable option: Beethoven’s cadenzas (that in the first movement includes an important role for timpani) take the music in surprising directions – more extrovert and playful – and it’s quite difficult to arrange some passages idiomatically for the violin.  However, by judicious omission, brilliant playing and sheer conviction, Faust finds a solution that’s both authentically Beethovenian and violinistically convincing.

The Larghetto’s initial theme is most sensitively shaped by the Orchestra Mozart strings and, at Faust’s entry, she is accompanied by especially beautiful solo clarinet and bassoon lines. In this movement, Faust finds a particularly wide range of tone colour, twice receding to the merest whisper and in several places practically omitting vibrato, relying for expression on changes in bow speed and pressure, so creating a powerful sense of concentration in the melodic line. It’s entirely characteristic of this performance that the sudden orchestral outburst at the end of the Larghetto, heralding the cadenza that leads to the finale, which so often seems inappropriately formal, here comes as a shocking surprise, a rude awakening from an exquisite dream.

In recent years, there have been several fine recordings of the Beethoven Violin Concerto. Faust’s performance has a grandeur that Christian Tetzlaff’s sweeter, more intimate account doesn’t attempt to match. Janine Jansen has the grandeur but doesn’t quite rival Faust’s expressive range or emotional intensity. Outstanding performances of both concertos, then; I’ll want to return to them often. (Duncan Druce / Gramophone)

Claudio Abbado / Lucerne Festival Orchestra BRUCKNER Symphony No. 9

Claudio Abbado's concerts were life-changing events for anyone lucky enough to hear them. Towards the end of his life, above all with the concerts he gave with his Lucerne Festival Orchestra, which he founded in 2003 and with whom he gave the last concerts of his life – unforgettable, utterly shattering performances of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony and Bruckner's Ninth - Abbado had taken orchestral music into a new realm of possibility and experience.

The Lucerne project was the zenith of a life in music that had as its essential credo a word that you don't always associate with conductors, those supposed tyrants of the podium: "listen". He used that word more than any other in the rehearsals I saw him lead with the orchestra, a hand-picked ensemble of some of the greatest chamber musicians, orchestral players, and soloists in the world, with the young musicians of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra at its core (another orchestra Abbado founded, in addition to the European Union Youth Orchestra, the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, and Orchestra Mozart). The message of listening was about encouraging every player in the huge ensemble needed to play Mahler's symphonies to listen to one another, to know the score as well as he did. Their performances of all but the 8th, which Abbado didn't have the chance to play in Lucerne, are the most revelatory and moving Mahler performances of recent decades - arguably ever. The orchestra played with the subtlety, freedom, and intensity of chamber music, revealing new light on the music from within.

But there was another, deeper kind of listening that Abbado wanted to create, and that was to catalyse his musicians and his audiences to listen, to have contact with the musical substance not merely of the sounds the orchestra makes, but with the silence that comes before and after the music. That sounds ludicrous, paradoxical for a concert of orchestral music, which is all about the sounds, after all! But with those musicians in Lucerne, Abbado was able to lift the veil on some other realm of experience, to put us in touch with a larger mystery even than the notes the orchestra was playing.

And what might seem riddle-like in words is unarguably, tangibly real when you encounter it: watch and listen to Abbado's performance of Mahler's Ninth Symphony (all the Mahler performances, and many of the other Lucerne concerts, are on DVD or Blu-Ray) to hear the most profoundly full, physical silence you may ever experience at the end of the final movement. Mahler's music passes into another world in the closing bars of the symphony; the silence that Abbado, the musicians, and the audience share after the sounds of the orchestra have crossed the border into nothingness actually embodies whatever that place might be. At the opposite end of the expressive extreme, but with exactly the same power to warp space, time, and existence, was the miraculous, massive coda of Bruckner's Fifth Symphony, when Abbado brought the Lucerne orchestra to the Royal Festival Hall in London, a performance that catapulted its audience into the cosmos. 

Abbado's concerts with Lucerne always had these moments of epiphany, of revelation. But last year's programmes in Lucerne were different. That Schubert Unfinished and Bruckner 9 took place in that transfigured state of being from the very first note to the last. The whole concert was a communion between Abbado and his players of devastating intimacy and astonishing emotional bravery, which asked the most profound questions about what the musical experience, and even what life might be about, with its beginnings and unfinished endings, its questions and unfilled answers, its sounds and its silences. Abbado's concerts weren't mere performances of pieces of music, they were searing, transformative existential journeys. That they have come to an end is an unimaginable loss. (Tom Service / The Guardian)

Claudio Abbado / Orchestra Mozart PERGOLESI Dixit Dominus

These discs complete Claudio Abbado’s three-part tribute to Pergolesi, born 200 years ago.They are most revealing, showing Pergolesi’s sureness of touch as a craftsman, melding together the old-style contrapuntal skill learnt as a student at a Conservatoire in Naples with the elegant tunefulness of contemporary Neapolitan opera. The resulting blend is a remarkably early foretaste of the Galant style. Abbado’s choice of programme emphasises Pergolesi’s versatility and inventive genius, and at such an early age. All this music dates from 1731/36 – he died aged only 26. Not otherwise available on disc is the Missa S Emidio, written after the earthquakes which hit Naples in 1731/2. It’s most attractive and, in the ‘Qui tollis’, highly charged; slow, searing harmonies from the chorus and anguished violin appoggiaturas, lead to a positively perky soloist framing the hushed pleading ‘hear our prayer’. Veronica Cangemi has a bright edge to her tone, a quality rather lacking in the choir, due in part to the spaciousness of the Bolgna church in which they’re recorded, rather distantly. Sara Mingardo is superb, her long first note of ‘Domine Deus’ an object lesson in the subtle manipulation of vocal colour. The high point is Laudate Pueri, a thrilling setting of the Psalm text. Added horns and trumpets add a punchiness to the sound which in turn, inspires the choir. Rachel Harnisch is an exuberant soprano soloist, with an effortless top D. It’s striking that, despite the constantly-changing nuances of the text, Pergolesi’s setting retains a strong sense of structural integrity. and sometimes rather obscured by, lively counterpoint. For the second movement, the choir’s remoteness is beautifully judged, a gentle assurance of the Lord, ‘gracious and full of compassion’ recurring in Julia Kleiter’s radiant soprano solo. Dixit Dominus stretches the forces with double choir and contrasting wind and string groupings in the orchestra. In the secular cantata, Chi non ode…, Pergolesi is at his most Galant as lyrical melody unfolds above reassuringly predictable harmony. Harnisch is superb here, floating into the top register with glorious ease. After a recitative Largo stentato (laboured) as the rejected lover bewails ‘his’ fate, death is welcomed with a sparkling final presto ending with a no-less-sparkling top E flat. A fine tribute to an extraordinary genius. (George Pratt, BBC Music Magazine)

Claudio Abbado / Orchestra Mozart PERGOLESI Stabat Mater - Violin Concerto - Salve Regina in C minor

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi had a tragically short career, living just 26 years, and producing most of his mature works over a period of about five years. This album includes three of the composer's most representative pieces. The most familiar is the 40-minute Stabat mater for soprano, alto, and orchestra, which was the most frequently published composition of the 18th century. This version, featuring soprano Rachel Harnisch and contralto Sara Mingardo, makes a splendid introduction to the work and should be of interest to anyone who loves this poignant music. Both soloists have expressive voices of exceptional purity and intensity, beautifully suited to this alternately serene and wrenching score. Mingardo is particularly striking in the aria, "Fac, ut portem Christi mortem," in which she descends into a baritonal range with startlingly solid, oaken timbre. The cheery, playful tone of the Violin Concerto reveals the composer's versatility and Giuliano Carmignola nails its technical demands with lovely tone and disarming grace. The album includes one of Pergolesi's four settings of Salve regina, with soprano Julia Kleiter. It's a largely somber work, similar in emotional tone to the Stabat mater. In spite of its name, the Bologna-based Orchestra Mozart plays music of all eras, and under Claudio Abbado's leadership it brings just the right fleet agility to this music, which is balanced between the Baroque and Classical eras. The sound of the live performances is clean and well balanced, with a warm ambience. (Stephen Eddins)

Claudio Abbado / Orchestra Mozart PERGOLESI Missa S. Emidio

One could weep to think what great works Giovanni Battista Pergolesi might have composed had he not died from tuberculosis aged just 26. That’s the cup-half-empty view, anyway. The cup-half-full view is that, despite his early death, this 18th century Italian left us a collection of musical masterpieces whose beauty, compositional skill and often-spine-tingling passion discount his youth. 2010 marks the 300th anniversary of Pergolesi’s birth, and Claudio Abbado is marking it with his Pergolesi Project: a year-long, three-album undertaking of Pergolesi’s works, conducting the Orchestra Mozart. The first disc in the series featured the Stabat Mater, the Violin Concerto and the Salve Regina in C minor, and was superb. His second disc, this time all sacred works, is just as good.

In terms of overall musical interpretation, this CD neatly dovetails into the first in terms of overall sound: a cleanly executed period style, rendered luxuriously beautiful thanks to the warmth and easy fluidity of the playing. However, there’s a marked difference in the musical forces. Whilst the previous recording required only solo singers, this second requires a choir, thanks to the inclusion of two large choral works, the Missa S. Emilio and the Laudate pueri Dominum. The Swiss Radio Choir’s performance is a delight: bright yet substantial tone, clean-as-a-whistle delivery of the tricky passagework, and highly expressive reading of the musical lines and the texts. The soloists are also going for gold; the Salve Regina is sung with heartfelt yearning here by Sara Mingardo in its later version F minor for alto. Then, altogether different is the dramatic and little-heard aria, “Manca la guida al piè” from the religious opera that the 21-year-old Pergolesi wrote as a graduation piece. Veronica Cangemi’s honeyed, pure-toned performance plays on every emotional nuance, with wonderfully controlled ornamentation.

All in all, another Pergolesi disc from Abbado that feels like musical perfection. Just go listen, and enjoy. (Charlotte Gardner 2010)

Viktoria Mullova / Claudio Abbado / Berliner Philharmoniker BRAHMS Violin Concerto

A CD offering less than 40 minutes of music these days is very short measure, but Mullova's is a commanding performance, pure and true throughout, made the more compelling by the spontaneous expressiveness that goes with a live performance. Her admirers need not hesitate, for with one minor reservation the recording is first-rate, and Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic here match the Brahmsian achievement of their DG symphony cycle.
The surprise is that the recording, made at a concert in Japan in January 1992, has taken so long to arrive. Maybe they were waiting for a coupling, but in any case this is a one-off recording, supervised not by Philips's own engineers but by those at NHK, Japan. The reservation I mentioned is that though the sound in generally warm, well-balanced and well-detailed with a pleasant hall-atmosphere, the prominent placing of the timpani means that the many tremolos in the outer movements, notable at first, tend to cloud the texture. The effect is distracting enough to bring home afresh just how many such tremolos there are. Happily, the audience is extremely quiet, except in the brief gap between slow movement and finale.
The first obvious comparison is with Itzhak Perlman's live Berlin recording for EMI with Barenboim conducting this same orchestra. That was made two months after the present one but in the Schauspielhaus, Berlin with a sound-balance typical of Perlman's recordings, with the solo violin in close-up set against full-bodied orchestral sound. The immediate impact of the bravura double-stopping passages is obviously greater, but Mullova consistently compensates in the extra dynamic range that she can convey, with the many reflective passages in the first movement as well as the central Adagio given a rapt intensity. The combination of purity and warmth go with a clear purposefulness, heightened by the degree of freedom Mullova allows herself in linking the different sections of each movement. Similarly, instead of storming through the thorny technical problems of the Joachim cadenza (curiously not identified in the booklet), she again allows herself a degree of elbow-room, giving it more than usual the feeling of a spontaneous improvisation, culminating in an exceptionally sweet and pure account of the coda, bringing the most inward meditation of all.
The violin entry in the Adagio is then open and songful, with full meditative intensity reserved for later in the movement. The clarity of Mullova's articulation in the finale is phenomenal, the bravura most compelling. . . . Mullova's new disc makes an excellent recommendation . . . . (Edward Greenfield, Gramophone)

Yuja Wang / Claudio Abbado / Mahler Chamber Orchestra RACHMANINOV

Recording these piano concertos by Rachmaninov came as a surprise and delight to Yuja Wang, and was a choice spurred on by Claudio Abbado: “I'd worked with him before, but not in these concertos. He plays with very few soloists these days, so it was a particular honour - I'd happily have played anything he wanted me to play."
“I like really to grasp the flow of the Russian soul through Russian literature and understand the emotional ideals, and to touch on that during a live concert is quite difficult. In the Second Piano Concerto the big challenge is projecting myself: the writing is fairly transparent but the melody is overpowering, and cutting through the texture in order to be heard isn't easy. It's a challenge to bring out the harmonies, and the legatos are very special. At many points in this concerto, the piano is almost an accompaniment to the orchestra. The Mahler Chamber Orchestra were wonderful to work with: they listen to each other so well, and they're all really young, about my age. I think the excitement of the live concert is truly present in the recording."
The genesis of Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 2 is almost as legendary as the music itself. Severely depressed after his Symphony No. 1 had been panned at its premiere in 1897, the young Rachmaninov found himself unable to set pen to manuscript paper for two years. On the advice of his cousins, he consulted Dr. Nikolai Dahl, a specialist in neuropsychotherapy who used hypnosis to build up Rachmaninov's confidence towards beginning a new concerto that would be “excellent". The composer indeed emerged ready to set to work with renewed energy, sketching out the piece during visits to the Crimea and Italy in 1900; he gave the world premiere himself in Moscow on 9 November 1901. The piece's immediate acclaim duly established him as one of the most exciting composers of his day.
Yuja Wang has drawn considerable inspiration from Rachmaninov's own interpretation of the concerto, which is controlled and classical as others can be extrovert and passionate: “Instead of sounding very broad in what you might expect to be huge lyrical moments, his sound remains amazingly transparent," she says.
By the time Rachmaninov began his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini his fame was universal, but his life had changed radically. In 1917 he and his wife fled the Russian Revolution, travelling first to Sweden and then to the USA. In Russia he had pursued a vocation primarily as a composer; in the West, though, the need for income propelled him into an international career as a concert pianist. His time for composition was consequently reduced, but the works he did produce showed increasing sophistication and originality and the Rhapsody is no exception.
It dates from 1934 when Rachmaninov was living in Switzerland, near Lake Lucerne. The theme is from No. 24 from Paganini's Caprices for violin, a set of virtuoso variations so difficult that it contributed to Paganini's being associated in the public imagination with the devil himself. Rachmaninov used the theme as the basis for a series of twenty-four variations plus introduction and coda, ingeniously combining the format with that of a three-movement concerto.
The first movement is the substantial, dizzyingly varied section from the start to Variation 15. First, only the barest outline is heard; Paganini's theme comes into focus with the entry of the piano, which soon carries matters away into the fantastical skitterings of the first few variations. The “second subject" appears with the sixth, more reflective variation, and in the seventh Rachmaninov introduces the plainchant “Dies irae" - a reference that appears in many of his works almost as a signature motif.
After a concluding climax in Variation 15, the “slow movement" ensues, building through the expectant No. 16 and nocturnal perambulations of No. 17 to the work's most celebrated transformation of the Paganini melody in No. 18, progressing to a soaring grandeur on full orchestra. No. 19 plunges into a scherzo finale replete with wit, jazziness and a bedazzlement of virtuosity, though the “Dies irae" is never far away. Finally the music evaporates as if in a puff of smoke.
Yuja Wang is full of enthusiasm for this lithe and athletic work. “It's my favourite of the Rachmaninov works for piano and orchestra," she declares. “It's a red-hot work - it suits young people my age because it's so emotional. It's very cleverly written and shows all the different sides of Rachmaninov. There's so much variety in it, so many colours: I think that's where his genius lies, in the invention of all these characteristics that explore everything the piano can do." (Jessica Duchen)

Claudio Abbado / Wiener Philharmoniker ALBAN BERG Wozzeck

Wozzeck, Alban Berg's first opera, is the ultimate representation of German Expressionism. The lurid libretto, based on a fragmentary play by Georg Büchner, tells the tragic tale of impoverished soldier Franz Wozzeck, his unfaithful girlfriend Marie, and their illegitimate child. Each scene is extremely concise and the story progresses with the sure swiftness of a nightmare. Berg's music is gnarled, acrid, and sometimes violent, expressing the ghastliness of Wozzeck's pathetic existence. But shock value isn't the only thing on the composer's mind. For one thing, every scene is written in a different strict classical form (passacaglia, sonata, rondo, invention), so there's a strong sense of structure as well as plenty of musical variety. For another, Berg adds glimmers of tonality and abundant lyricism to the dissonant and knotted score, emphasizing the story's pathos. Despite its horrific aspects, Wozzeck is a very moving, very human tragedy. This electrifying performance led by Claudio Abbado -- recorded during live performances at the Vienna State Opera in 1987 -- conveys the music's brutality and poignancy with equal force. Hildegard Behrens is an unusually sympathetic Marie, and Franz Grundheber makes Wozzeck's strange neuroses seem almost ordinary, a portrayal that's all the more harrowing for its believability. There's a bit of audience noise, but the up-close-and-personal recording has tremendous impact. (Andrew Farach-Colton)

Claudio Abbado / London Symphony Orchestra GEORGES BIZET Carmen

Prosper Mérimée who wrote the original story Carmen, placed Don José at the centre of its action. Mérimée's novel is a narration whitin a narration. His storyteller is a scholarly French archaeologist who has his repeater watch stolen from him - shades of Die Fledermaus! - while he is on his travels in Spain. He is asked to testify against the thief, demurs in a gentlemany fashion, but after being assured that the villian, Don José, is going to be hanged anyway for other crimes, goes off to see him in the interest of research into the Spanish character. The archaeologist takes along in his hand a number of good cigars. Encouraged by this act of generosity, José obliges with an account of the events which led up to his imprisonment and his execution on the morrow.

José's narration is brief - little more than 40 pages - but it is direct and totally unsentimental. It is a soldier's tale of a man who has lost everything, his rank, his livelihood and now his life itself, because of a sudden infatuation with a woman. José asks for no sympathy but simply requests the archaeologist to make a detour to Pamplona on his return journey to France and give a small silver medallion to a good woman in that town. She is to be told that José is dead, but not how he died ("... vous la ferez remettre à une bonne femme dont je vous dirai l'adresse. Vouz direz que je suis mort, vous ne direz pas comment.") It was from these two sentences that Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy were to invent the character of Micaëla when they came to construct the libretto for Bizet's opera.

Mérimée's Carmen may be more of a liar and a cheat, but the fascination she exerts in the novel and the opera are identical. The José who sings about the way he has been struck and overcome by a sudden passion for a gypsy girl is the same man - or almost the same man - as the one who tells a passing archaeologist just why the gallows await him in the morning. (WOLFGANG DÖMLING.- Translation: ADELE POINDEXTER)

This is a super performance, slightly outside the common mold. In 1977, when this was recorded, Claudio Abbado was a great opera conductor, filled with sharp insights and a nice sense of the architecture of whole operas. He always seemed to know where he was going, and his ability to build to climaxes was second to none. Abbado has a rather elegant Carmen here in the smallish-voiced, introspective Teresa Berganza, a gorgeous singer who patently refuses to force her voice or her character into vulgarity. It's a fine reading. Placido Domingo is at his best in both intimate and maniacal moments, and Ileana Cotrubas's Micaela almost makes us care about this happy little gal. Sherrill Milnes's Escamillo has plenty of swagger and voice. Berganza's subtlety combined with the wild passions of those around her make this a very good Carmen indeed. (Robert Levine )

Maria João Pires / Claudio Abbado / Chamber Orchestra of Europe / Wiener Philharmoniker MOZART Piano Concertos Nos. 14 - 17 - 21

The combination of Abbado and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe has to be my dream ticket for modern-instrument Mozart. The qualities are irresistible: cultured, characterful woodwind playing (so important in Mozart piano concertos), an expert string section which carries no passengers, and an alertness of response to a conductor who, with years of experience in this repertoire, nevertheless shows no sign of going stale. Maria João Pires is an excellent partner in all this: her stylistic approach is similar, in that she also favours a light touch, but there is no danger of over-preciousness. The expressive Andante in K453 – one of the first of Mozart’s slow movements to make a major feature of the woodwind section – is done especially well, as is the bustling Haydnesque finale; indeed, the orchestra’s articulation of the Presto coda is quite breathtaking. The C major Concerto, K467, is, of course, among Mozart’s best-known works in any form. Abbado and Pires take the work at face value: clipped and martial in the first movement, perfectly poised in the central Andante, and fast but clean in the good-natured finale. Both works were recorded in the Teatro Comunale in Ferrara, though only K453 was recorded live. But there is no perceptible difference in sound; indeed the production values throughout are well up to DG’s high standards. (BBC Music Magazine)

Anna Netrebko SEMPRE LIBERA

The story of her success requires no further recounting here: beginning with a sensational Salzburg début in 2002 as Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, she's become an almost unrivalled presence among classical artists. Her first aria recital entered the German pop charts, and with the video clips for this album she stands to become the first opera diva for the MTV generation. The clips have already provided her with a key to the gates of Hollywood. It is in the scene from the Traviata that Anna Netrebko will be making her feature film début in Garry Marshall's Princess Diaries II with Julie Andrews.
Anna Netrebko knows what she can do and where (at least for now) her limits lie. Most of all, she knows what the others can, or could, do. With the greatest respect she speaks of Callas (“She is and will remain unique, there's no one else like her"), of Mirella Freni (“After I've listened to her, I sing better"), and of Renata Scotto, from whom she has learned the essentials for interpreting bel canto roles.
The young Russian soprano's new album seems to invoke comparisons with those legendary singers: anyone who takes on roles like Violetta in La traviata, Amina in La sonnambula, Lucia or Desdemona in Otello has to reckon with being measured against Callas, Scotto, and Freni. Initially Anna Netrebko's new recording was to be a pure bel canto recital, but then Claudio Abbado suggested adding Desdemona's great scena. At first she was sceptical: she had never sung the part before, and, moreover, it lies considerably lower than her bravura bel canto roles. On the other hand, she felt so secure with Abbado and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra that she decided to take the plunge. In the recording, it sounds as though Desdemona has been a fixture of her repertoire for years.
Branching out from lyrical parts (like Susanna in Mozart's Figaro), Anna Netrebko has gradually taken on some heavier, prima donna roles. She made headlines in Los Angeles as Lucia (in a new production by Marthe Keller) and in Vienna and Munich as Violetta, which she has called her most demanding part to date: “First of all, in terms of vocal technique it's incredibly demanding, because you basically need four voices - a different one for each act and scene. And dramatically you need to give everything you've got. You have to love with her, suffer with her, and die with her. Whoever does that, however, will always have to pay a price with the voice - just ask anyone who's surrendered her heart and soul to this role."
Every interpreter of the Traviata must also completely surrender heart and soul to the audi-ence - especially in the crucial scene of Act I, the heroine's internal monologue. Violetta is confused. Is it really love that she feels for Alfredo? She yields to the emotion for a moment, but then pulls back. No, it's all an illusion! What's left of her life she will devote exclusively to the pursuit of pleasure. “Sempre libera!" - Ever free, ever free for new adventures.
“Sempre libera", this desperate hymn to sexual freedom, requires much more than a convincing actress: it demands a vocal virtuoso who has mastered all the fine points of classical bel canto. Verdi decorated the whirl of desire that Violetta evokes here with lots of little notes, and many a world-class diva has stumbled over them. Something else that makes this scene such a bugbear for every singer: at the end it goes up to top E flat. Although Verdi didn't actually notate the part with that extreme high note, it quickly became part of the performing tradition and still remains, despite all arguments against it, a “matter of honour".
Anna Netrebko has taken on this challenge as well. “I don't think I've sung as many high Eflats in my whole life as I did in these recording sessions. But Maestro Abbado and the wonderful orchestra helped me to sing better than ever before." (5/2004)

Hélène Grimaud / Claudio Abbado A RUSSIAN NIGHT (RACHMANINOV Piano Concerto No. 2 / TCHAIKOVSKY The Tempest / STRAVINSKY The Firebird)

When Claudio Abbado conducts the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, he feels, by his own admission, to be “among old friends" and has “the special sense of being back home". This familiarity is due above all to his close links with Lucerne, for it was here that he chose to revive the idea of an elite orchestra similar to the one formed by Arturo Toscanini for Lucerne Festival in 1938. The result was the Lucerne Festival Orchestra that Abbado helped to establish in 2003, drawing on a select band of hand-picked musicians and realizing his vision of an orchestra close to his ideal of an enlarged chamber ensemble: the nucleus of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra is the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, which is complemented by members of other international orchestras and by outstanding chamber musicians, with soloists of the calibre of Sabine Meyer, Wolfram Christ, Clemens Hagen and Reinhold Friedrich on the front desks. The orchestra's concertmaster (leader), Kolja Blacher, has sought to account for the uniqueness of an ensemble which, under its artistic director Claudio Abbado, is characterized by friendship and respect: “What is so special about our orchestra? We don't have to play together, we want to!"

During the summer of 2008 Claudio Abbado conducted a concert with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra that threw light on various facets of Russian life and music. Two works - Tchaikovsky's symphonic fantasia inspired by Shakespeare's The Tempest and Stravinsky's concert suite from his fairytale ballet The Firebird - depict the dramatic struggle between the forces of good and evil and the ultimate triumph of the former. And Hélène Grimaud was the soloist in a performance of one of the classics of the late Romantic repertoire, Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto.

Rachmaninov's piano works have long featured in Hélène Grimaud's repertory. She devoted her very first recording to solo works of the Russian composer in July 1985, and his Second Piano Concerto of 1900­01 was the work with which she made her debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker under Claudio Abbado in 1995. Since then this dark, soulful and “most Russian" of Rachmaninov's works has continued to haunt her: “It was love at first sight," Hélène Grimaud enthuses, even today. “Afterwards, it's true, I rather neglected the work, but that neglect was intentional because at one time I played it often." Today, however, the Second Piano Concerto again accompanies the pianist on her concert tours all over the world: “It's a work that is noble, pure and of very harmonious proportions, but it also involves a certain risk, because you must stay focused on the structure of the piece, on the line, and on the overarching form."

For Hélène Grimaud, to rehearse the concerto with Claudio Abbado at Lucerne Festival in August 2008 was, as she put it, “a dream". For her, the conductor is “a man of great depth and kindness, yet he also has a very special aura to him". His love of the music, the pianist goes on, communicates itself to the players and audience and fosters a wordless agreement between conductor and soloist. “You really don't need to speak or to translate an emotion or a sentiment into words", because Abbado himself already expresses all that is necessary. “You can read it all in his glance, in his face. There's a great clarity about it all, the way in which he conducts and his intentions are absolutely clear". It was also a stroke of good luck for Hélène Grimaud to work with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, “an orchestra that has a magnificent commitment to the music, one that has density and lightness at the same time". In this way, “pure music" could be produced in an atmosphere far removed from the usual routine of rehearsals. Perhaps it was the intensity of her work with Claudio Abbado and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra that ultimately helped Hélène Grimaud to approach the concerto afresh: “The piece continues to develop within you, even when you're not actively involved with it, so that when you return to it, it has clearly become a completely different work. That is always fascinating but sometimes more complex than developing a new relationship with a new piece."

The extent to which vivid characterization depends on orchestral playing that is alert, vital and at the same time subtly balanced with chamber-like translucency is clear from the three characters that inhabit Tchaikovsky's symphonic fantasia, The Tempest: the radiant lovers Miranda and Ferdinand and the monster of the darkness, Caliban. When the composer's patron, Nadezhda von Meck, first heard the work, which had received its triumphant first performance at a Russian Music Society concert in Moscow on 19 December 1873, she summed up its impact on her as “magnificent sounds, capable of filling the whole world and affording a person happiness, enjoyment and delight". With its atmospheric reminiscences of Wagner, its thrilling account of the sea and the storm and its lyrical love themes, The Tempest was long regarded as Tchaikovsky's best-loved concert work.

But the most striking demonstration of an orchestra casting aside all sense of routine was afforded by the final piece in Claudio Abbado's Russian programme, Stravinsky's The Firebird, a score that made its composer famous overnight when it was unveiled in Paris on 25 June 1910. Lucerne's listeners were regaled with pianissimos that grew more intense, the quieter they became. No less impressive were the subtlest transitions and shadings, which none the less emerged with the most thrilling sense of drama. For the performance in Lucerne, Claudio Abbado opted for a composite version of the score, taking over the sequence of movements from the second, five-movement concert suite of 1919 but eschewing the reduced orchestra of twenty players that Stravinsky, taking account of post-war shortages, envisaged for this second suite. With its sumptuous forces, this performance was entirely in the spirit of the programme as a whole: firmly rooted in the Russian tradition - after all, Stravinsky originally wrote the piece for the famous Ballets Russes. But the forces of good and evil confront one another in richly colourful and exotic sounds, forces embodied, on the one hand, by the young Prince Ivan, whom the liberated Firebird helps with a miraculous feather, and, on the other, by Kashchei, the prince of Hell. But perhaps Claudio Abbado's decision to opt for the full orchestral version was motivated simply by his desire to feel “among old friends". 

(Susanne Schmerda)

Maria João Pires - Abbado MOZART Piano Concertos Nos. 27 and 20

 It's a recording that just a few years ago would have been mainstream: a "name" pianist (albeit one much less well known in the U.S. than elsehwere), who has been playing Mozart's piano concertos since childhood, joins forces with a name conductor with whom she has frequently collaborated, leading a modern-instrument orchestra of some 70 players, with the results released on a major international-conglomerate label. Now it's distinctly unusual. But lo, there's value in the old ways. Portuguese-Brazilian pianist Maria João Pires is a lifelong Mozart specialist, but she still has new things to say in two of Mozart's most popular piano concertos. You can chalk it up to her Buddhist outlook if you like: her readings of the Piano Concerto No. 27 in B flat major, K. 595, and Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466, might be described as detached without being lifeless. Her approach is most startling in the Piano Concerto No. 20, where her no-drama shaping of the material runs sharply counter to type. Sample the piano's entrance in the first movement, where it offers a twisting, tense elaboration of the main theme that is far removed from its source material. Generally pianists use this to raise the tension level, but Pires lets the unusually shaped, chromatic line speak for itself with fine effect. In the Piano Concerto No. 27, Mozart's last, Pires emphasizes the music's evanescent quality in a really lovely, gentle performance. As for Abbado, he apparently failed to get the memo about how proper balance in Mozart's concertos is impossible with a large modern orchestra, for the interplay between Pires and his Orchestra Mozart Bologna is subtle and detailed. The only problem comes with Deutsche Grammophon's engineers, who give Pires' left hand too much prominence, perhaps more so in one of the recording's two locales (we don't learn which concerto was recorded in Bologna and which in Bolzano) than in the other. In general, an absolutely distinctive release of the old school. (James Manheim)