Remembering Abbado

Claudio Abbado – my favourite conductor, and one of my favourite musicians – has died at the age of 80. Only last June, I wrote in tribute as he entered his ninth decade, with several highly anticipated performances ahead of him. But now, shortly after hearing the news of his passing, I’m sitting in an airport lounge, struggling to find words to express the feeling of losing one of my earliest musical heroes. For me, Abbado’s art represents a rare balance of mind and heart – his conducting was informed by scrupulous scholarship, yet had the ability to change water into fire, igniting the concert experience when it really counted. His ‘sound’ was characterized by a leanness and lucidity (and sometimes a lightness) that is to my taste but admittedly not to everyone’s. Opinions of conductors are often sharply divided, especially amongst musicians. We all think we know exactly how Bach should sound, or Beethoven or Debussy should be interpreted, but the arguments seem rather futile when one considers that all great Maestri must have reached such rarified status for possessing at least something special to offer. This is my modest, personal reminiscence of Abbado’s inspiration. My views are subjective for sure, but I hope to encourage the reader, or the many young musicians I work with today, to look more closely at the recorded legacy of a truly great artist. He was also a champion of younger talent. We have much to learn from musicians and educators like Claudio Abbado.

I encountered his work from a distance, and never first-hand. Growing up in Dubai in the ’80s and ’90s, I didn’t have access to live music-making of the kind that people enjoy here in the West. To compensate, I would satisfy my voracious musical appetite by spending all of my pocket money on CDs and monthly issues of BBC Music magazine. And so it was that my first introduction to the music of Mahler was in the form of a recording: an excerpt from the Scherzo of the Resurrection Symphony. Albeit brief, it was long enough to blow me sideways, as the saying goes. I rushed out to the CD shop, eager to purchase my first full-length Mahler recording. With no recommendations at hand, I suspect I chose this particular album purely for its sun-yellow label (the Deutsche Grammophon logo) and for the intriguing photo of an introspective man, deeply engrossed in some musical manuscript:

Listening to the recording, it goes without saying that I had the typical awestruck reaction to Mahler’s 5th Symphony of any classical music aficionado….but there was something else present in my experience. Despite being a young teen, ignorant of this music, I still sensed something powerful behind Mahler’s personality, behind the sounds of the expert musicians playing his music: I felt aware of a powerfully unifying, interpretive force that was pushing and pulling the music in the most subtle, natural way. Realizing that this must be the ‘silent’ personality of the conductor, I immediately cemented my reactions to the name ‘Claudio Abbado’. The link had been made and I was a fan from that day on, without really knowing it.

I went on to study music exclusively, at the RNCM in the UK, and it was a wonderful environment in which my friends and I would talk endlessly about music. Abbado’s name came up often, and I learned a lot (first-hand) about the regard that many great European musicians had for him. I was starting a little Jazz library too, but Abbado was the most represented artist in my ever-expanding collection of classical albums.

Unusually, it was in the United States that I was to attend an Abbado performance for the first (and only) time. The circumstances were quite precious: immediately after the 9/11 attacks, visiting artists were cancelling their US dates in droves, for reasons of safety and heightened security. The Berlin Philharmonic tour of October 2001 was definitely hanging in the balance, slated to open Carnegie Hall’s 111th season. New York City was desperate for some high-octane music-making, and so the orchestra and Abbado came. In what proved to be an historic gesture, they inscribed this message in all the NY concert programs: “We have come to America at a time of great anguish and sorrow. We come as a reaffirmation of our common humanity, which is so deeply expressed in the music of these concerts. John F. Kennedy once said at a critical moment in Berlin’s history, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ At this terrible moment, we are the ones who say with you, ‘We are all New Yorkers.’ ”

As you can imagine, the atmosphere at these events was electrifying. I attended rehearsals. I fell in love with the playing of the Berlin Phil. I was already an ardent Abbado fan, but until this time I only enjoyed his work through his recordings. From the student seating of Carnegie Hall, seconds away from watching and hearing him conduct in real-time, I quietly challenged him in my mind to live up to the high standard I had come to expect from his many recordings. He surpassed them absolutely – I was hooked from the first downbeat to the very last chords of a searing performance of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony that drove the audience into a wild frenzy. The conducting, to my mind at least, was the most elegant, sophisticated, balletic upper-body display of gesture I’d ever seen; the visual coefficient of an orchestral sonority of transparency and translucency. It was, after all, the Abbado sound. Don’t take my word for it, decide for yourself. Check out the DVDs of the BPO Beethoven cycle in Rome, all of which have a multi-angle feature called ‘Conductor Camera’ (a dream for conducting enthusiasts!).

Recommended listening and viewing

I will extend this post in due course, but for now here are some Abbado interpretations I could never do without:

Mozart – Piano Concertos 17 & 21 w/Pires & the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. One of my desert island discs, despite exceptional instrumental playing I am always drawn to how Mozart, my favourite composer, sounded in the hands of my favourite conductor. Gorgeous. Abbado’s Mozart changed drastically over the years leading up to this recording, however. I always respected the fact that he never rested on his laurels.

Mahler – Symphony no. 5 w/the Lucerne Festival Orchestra. Abbado and his super-band in a live performance of Mahler 5 that is superbly well-paced. The famous Adagietto is a staggering display of his skill and vocabulary of gesture: