Maestrissimo Claudione

OPERACHIC reports that Claudio Abbado and his handpicked Lucerne Festival Orchestra (comprised solely of friends and musicians around the world which he mentored when they were younger) gave a performance of Mahler's Ninth Symphony this weekend which so stunned the audience that they sat in silence after the ninety-minute piece was completed for three whole minutes and subsequently erupted into a twenty-minute ovation.


(Youtube recently took Abbado's Berlin performance down, so now all we have is the promotional reel of Abbado's third recorded performance: with the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra in 2004. The first is with the Vienna Philharmonic, the second is with the Berlin Philharmonic and is for my money the best Mahler 9 I've ever heard.)

Abbado already conducted my favorite recording Mahler 9 with the Berlin Philharmonic, so I just can't wait to hear a relay of this concert. Perhaps even more now than Lenny, Claudione is the King of Mahlerians. Together it's possible they bookend the Mahler Revolution. Lenny marks the beginning, milking the music for maximum character, exploring its every narrative facet, stretching his interpretations to the music's breaking point (and occasionally beyond). Perhaps Claudio Abbado marks the end, in which every detail of Mahler's scores are painstakingly mastered and frozen into something nearly-definitive. After Abbado's performances (though let's not forget the other Golden Age Mahlerians (1960-20?: Walter, Klemperer, Horenstein, Mitropoulos, Barbirolli, Kubelik, Kondrashin, Haitink, Gielen or even Zubin Mehta), there's not much new which an interpreter can say. When he goes, perhaps the Golden Age of Mahler performance will leave with him.