SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Nino Rota, Franck: Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Riccardo Muti (conductor) Gasteig, Munich 6.12.2007 (JFL)

Rota: ”Il Gattopardo” Symphonic Suite
Rota: Piano Concerto E-major ”Piccolo mondo antico”
Franck: Symphony in d-minor

Riccardo Muti

Just seven weeks after Riccardo Muti had presented choral rarities by Schubert, Petrassi, and Berlioz he was back with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in a concert of music by  Nino Rota and César Franck. In between,  the BRSO had toured Japan with Mariss Jansons and Richard Strauss – and judging from the reviews with their usual, extraordinary success.

With Arkadi Volodos occupying the Herkulessaal on Thursday, the BRSO played in their secondary home, the Philharmonie at the Gasteig. (This choice between the smallish 1300 seat Herkulessaal and the too-big, acoustically challenged 2400 seat Gasteig is the reason why Mariss Jansons is so engaged in the BRSO getting a new, dedicated 1800 seat concert hall, tentatively planned at the former royal stables, right behind the opera.)

Despite the draw that is Riccardo Muti’s name and most likely because of the lack of familiarity with either the name 'Nino Rota' or the association of him with film music egs. The Godfather, 8½, La Strada, the BRSO played to a less than sold out house.

A shame, because those who stayed away missed a spectacularly bold concert of music that only the most hardened music-snobs would not have embraced wholeheartedly. Perhaps it is part of the irony of the concert business that people stay away  both when the fare is too difficult but also  when it is not ‘serious’ enough. Even Claudio Abbado can’t fill the Gasteig when he adds as harmless a piece as Pelléas et Mélisande on to a Mahler program, just because the name 'Schoenberg' is also astutely avoided. Similarly, if it isn’t 'Beethoven',  'Strauss' or 'Mozart' on the program but ‘only a film composer’, large swathes of the audience won’t think it classy enough.

Il Gattopardo, (The Leopard)  Luchino Visconti’s 1966 melancholic film about the decline and fall of Italian aristocracy with Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale, and Alain Delon, had some of  Nino Rota’s most romantic and wistful music. The story is a throwback to a bygone - allegedly better – time, full of romantic melancholy and reminiscences and that’s exactly how the music sounds too. Listening to it, the argument that Nino Rota was happy to compose this music under the guise of making it suitable for the film while really yearning to write exactly that kind of music anyway, sounds unassailable. Here, he did not need to hide behind irony or hints of a modern idiom – he could brazenly wallow in all the schmaltzy, lush, thundering, glory-touting, somber, introverted, and pensive instincts that came to him; and which he was not able to put into the abandoned symphony sketches on which the Il Gattopardo  music  is based.

There was not a moment in which it did not sound like a matter of luxury to have this music played by the BRSO under Riccardo Muti’s caring leadership. That Muti, not known for frivolities of any kind, thus champions Rota not only has to do with the better-than-suspected music of the Milan-born composer who taught at the South Italian conservatory in Bari, but also with Rota having been Muti’s teacher whose recommendation got the then 17-year old conductor-to-be into the conservatory in Naples.

Muti seems to pay back his dues with enthusiasm and passion: swelling and moving, the orchestra dug into this score, as well as the following Piano Concerto, with fury. The brass boomed, the timpani thumped, and the strings swooned.

Usually, there’s little I find more tiring than the typical conductor’s platitude of every piece of music, regardless of inherent worth, having to be played like it is the “best piece ever written”. On Thursday with the BRSO and Muti though, the statement finally came true. This shows how much  respect Muti wields with the players – and his ability to share his passion with them:  both of these Rota works were played as if they were the finest Beethoven.

Not that they are, mind you, but this is certainly not to say that we shouldn’t hear either the suite or the concerto more often. The Piano Concerto E-major "Piccolo mondo antico" is clearly the more archaic and romantic of the two and is  a pianistic showpiece that starts out like Rachmaninov, then moves through a slow movement of clouded joy and longing smiles, to  sound more like Ravel than anything else. The work  ends with a flashy bang after much of its third movement reminded of the Prokofiev of Romeo and  Juliet and The Love for Three Oranges (as well as more Ravel). Seeming as it does, to travel though all the more harmless romantic styles of the 20th century, there is an almost obscene deliciousness here, with so many swells and climaxes that the irony in the piece is scarcely noticeable - at least not in Muti's confident rendition. He seems to think that this music needs no irony for self-defense.

The young French pianist David Fray, whose recent album of Bach and Boulez on Virgin found the warm praise of Anthony Tommasini in the New York Times, played along with Muti, milked the concerto to the hilt, and his perfectly placed last chord coincided with the thundering applause of the audience.

The second half of the concert was reserved for a dominating, all-stops-pulled, Symphony in d-minor by César Franck. I don’t blame the audience of the work’s premiere for not having quite understood it. After founding the Société Nationale de Musique with Fauré, Bizet, Saint-Saëns, Massenet, etc. to open a new, decidedly French front against the dominance of Wagnerian music, to champion a music that breathed the spirit of ”ars gallica”, and after being a teacher to d’Indy, Chausson, Pierné, Dukas, and the brilliant, mad Duparc (to whom the symphony is dedicated), it would seem odd to present a symphony that could not be any less French. In fact, this is a work that seems to combine ideas and themes of Wagner, Bruckner, Brahms, Liszt, and even Beethoven, but just not an ounce of French idiom. A few very simple motifs are turned into a grand symphony of three movements which sounds to me like the very rejection of everything Franck had worked and fought for... but instead like..., well, like Bruckner  vacationing on the Côte d'Azur.

No complaints from me  though. And Muti  too, seemed to be uninterested in adding anything dainty or croissant-flavored to this symphony. This was a militaristic and swift performance of complete cohesion and sonority, impressive at every point, though driven too hard in some places: not only bold and muscular, but blaring and not much concerned with subtleties either. A particular delight amid all this,  was the pizzicato-burdened Allegretto with its famous cor anglais solo where the instrument gets to snarl like depressed, moaning duck beside the harp’s diligent plucking.

Jens F. Laurson