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 That might seem like a no-brainer - Italian opera in Italy's
most famous opera house. But outgoing music director Daniel
Barenboim riled some of the famously opinionated La Scala
audience by opening the 2012-2013 season - a joint 200th
birthday year for Germany's Richard Wagner and Italy's Giuseppe
Verdi - with Wagner's "Lohengrin".
Not only that, but the other half of La Scala's new artistic
team, Alexander Pereira, has taken over as general manager on
something of a probationary basis.
Milan's mayor wants to see how Pereira does in his first year
after he caused a row by agreeing - if not actually signing
contracts - to buy four productions from his former opera house
in Salzburg before he had full authority to do so, a spokesman
for La Scala said.
"I'm aware of all that," Chailly told Reuters, speaking of the
politics of La Scala, in an interview after his recordings of
the four Brahms symphonies with his Gewandhaus Orchestra of
Leipzig for Decca won the Gramophone magazine award for best
recording of the year. He and the Gewandhaus tour the United
States, starting in Leipzig's sister city Houston, next month.
But Chailly, 61, and a native of Milan, has what he thinks may
be the magic formula to appease the angry gods of La Scala.
Yes, he will do modern opera, including one of the imports from
Salzburg, Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag's "Fin de partie"
that is based on Samuel Beckett's play "Endgame".
Nor does he quibble with Barenboim having programmed Wagner,
whom he diplomatically described "as a very welcome composer".
"But apart from that, what I think is important is more and more
to focus on the Italian operas," Chailly, a bearded,
craggy-faced man, said in his hotel room in central London,
still basking in the glow of having won the prestigious
Gramophone award, which inevitably boosts sales.
"What made La Scala famous through the centuries? Italian opera,
the way you hear Italian opera performed in that theater...There
is something there you can only hear that way - it's unique," he
said.
"DARKER SOUND"
Chailly could, and does, say the same about the Gewandhaus,
which traces its roots back to 1479 and where he took over as
chief conductor for the 2005-06 season.
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"It's an orchestra you can recognize with your eyes closed after
only a few bars" of music, he said of the Gewandhaus, which he puts
in a league with its nearby compere orchestra the Staatskapelle
Dresden, as having a "Saxon" German sound.
By that he means they have "a dark string sound...also in the
woodwinds and the brass, they all have this tendency to the darker
sound, compared to the European standard".
Perfect for Brahms? The Gramophone thought so, touting Chailly's
Brahms as an exemplar of "classical music's way of reinventing
itself and staying relevant to every generation".
But if the Gramophone thought the approach was fresh, it came, in
Chailly's view, in part from the Gewandhaus's tradition of playing
Bach, on a weekly basis.
"They are very cultivated musicians because every week they play
Bach and there is no modern large orchestra in the world which plays
Bach every week," he said, referring to the orchestra's "second job"
playing at Leipzig's St. Thomas Church.
Chailly's own passion for music, demonstrated to audiences
throughout the world for more than four decades, he attributes in
part to his father Luciano, a composer and arts administrator, who
when Chailly was 10 dumped him in the upper-row seats for a concert
in Rome by the RAI orchestra.
Neither Chailly nor his father knew that one of the pieces on the
program would be Mahler's First Symphony, the "Titan", but it left a
lasting impression.
"I didn't know what kind of music it was and only after I discovered
it was the Mahler First Symphony," he said. "How can you know, at
the age of 9 or 10, but that was an opening to a new universe which
was for me something I would never forget."
And what is Chailly's next recording project? "We are thinking of a
complete set of the Rachmaninoff symphonies, also with the
Gewandhaus, so a major drive into the late romantic repertoire, very
close to the sound culture of the Gewandhaus."
(Editing by Mark Heinrich)
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