NEW YORK — Who denies the nimbus of the Golden Hall of the Musikverein, home of the Vienna Philharmonic? Yet it’s a truism among camp followers who hear the orchestra everywhere that the players never sound as good as they do at Carnegie Hall — something to do with the dimensions of the stage — or is it the room acoustic, or are those different ways of saying the same thing?
As for the roster of guest conductors — the ensemble is its own collective music director — a broad consensus agrees that, since the death of Herbert von Karajan in 1989, Riccardo Muti has reigned supreme, a judgment reflected in his record seven New Year’s concerts, reaching TV audiences in some 90 countries. His annual appearances with the VPO at the Salzburg Festival confirm his special standing. Whereas other conductors’ programs rate two performances, his invariably sell out three. The phrase “by popular demand” comes to mind. Vox populi, vox Dei, you know. Since Muti’s first assignment with the VPO — Donizetti’s Don Pasquale in Salzburg in 1971 — the association has continued uninterrupted for 55 seasons.
Thus, Muti’s three-program stand with the VPO last weekend at New York’s most hallowed auditorium was an occasion indeed. On Feb. 28, the hall resounded with Schubert’s Symphony No. 4 in C minor (1816, Tragic) and Bruckner’s heaven-storming Symphony No. 7 in E major. The bill on March 1 opened with Alfredo Catalani’s soulful tone poem Contemplazione, proceeded to Stravinsky’s Divertimento from Le baiser de la fée,and closed with Schubert’s Symphony in C major (Great).
The afternoon finale March 2 brought Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 in C major (Jupiter), and Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 in E minor (From the New World), which premiered on this same stage in 1893. (As it happens, the Dvořák was the first selection on Muti’s VPO subscription-series debut in 1975 — a sheer coincidence, he insists, yet one wonders.) For an encore, he had the overture to Johann Strauss II’s Der Zigeunerbaron up his sleeve. On behalf of himself and the orchestra, he dedicated this New Year’s bonbon to the spirit of amore (love), fratellanza (brotherhood), and pace (peace). He added that Dvořák’s New World today represented not the past but the hope and longing for “the New World we all need.”
As Muti has often said over the years, expressis verbis as well as implicitly, in the way he has gone about his work, “We make music to make people better.” Amen. So, it struck a bittersweet note when he spoke to the orchestra at the sound check before their last program, reflecting on how much their collaboration meant to him over all the years and speculating that the afternoon’s gig would likely be his last at Carnegie Hall.
So much for historic import. But is there a listener alive who could account in full for the weekend’s kaleidoscopic musical riches? If so, I’m not that guy. I’ll attempt as best I can to catch with mirrors (though not with smoke) a few facets that suggest the larger splendor. And for that, the place to begin is at the beginning, which is to say the first heartbeat of the sound check for Friday evening, with Bruckner on the music stands. At the drop of Muti’s baton, a feathery shimmer of strings arose barely at the threshold of the audible, followed by a rush of such intensely saturated yet mellow, blooming color as to throw open new doors of aural perception. Going forward, the entrance of a new section or a second soloist to join another whose part had already begun would reveal the musical architecture with the geometric precision of a blueprint — not for an empty display of form but to contain meanings for which we have no words. In the full performance of the Bruckner, that same dynamic took over in spades, raising in real time a cathedral in sound that reached for the infinite, built not of matter but of an inexhaustible idea.
In striking contrast, the two Schubert symphonies seemed suspended in nostalgic amber, harking back to spiritual events of long ago. The seldom-heard Tragic, a score of Schubert’s 19th year, emerged in its deep strangeness, darting and nervous in its opening movement, gracefully melodious in the second, jaunty in the minuet, only to rekindle — to a more frantic degree and again in the minor key — the agita of the opening movement. The Great evoked a similar sense of emotion recollected not in tranquility exactly, but at an unsettled remove.
Unlike hucksters and some critics who fetishize the sheen of the Philadelphia strings or the brilliance of the Chicago brass, Muti has always sought timbres and colors specific to particular scores. Thus, in the Jupiter, he elicited from the strings something of the vinous, fuzzy, cat-gut sound of period bands — whereas in the Dvořák, those same strings took on a keen, metallic quality, heightened at a climax by the skirl of the piccolos. The violins’ gentlest, most introspective strains were heard in Catalani’s Contemplazione. Managing the audience as masterfully as the players, Muti let us hear the pregnant general pause preceding Catalani’s luminous coda in rapt silence — no coughing, no misplaced applause.
If I were allowed one item on the program to replay at will in my mind’s ear, it would be Stravinsky’s four-movement divertimento from Le baiser de la fée (The Fairy’s Kiss). Based on a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, this one-act ballet pays tribute to Tchaikovsky. As commentators have shown, melodies of Tchaikovsky are threaded through Stravinsky’s score. But the quotations may be beside the point. More telling is a scurrilous, darting narrative quality straight out of Act 1 of The Nutcracker, based on a Biedermeier-meets-nightmare fairy tale by Andersen’s forerunner E.T.A. Hoffmann.
Even if the story of Le baiser de la fée is unknown to you, you sense a familiar busyness from Clara’s dream in The Nutcracker as the wicked Mouse King and her courageous Nutcracker defender cross swords, backed by armies of mice and toy soldiers. In Muti’s performance, it struck me that the rapid cinematic shifts of perspective and pervasive sense of overlapping events converge with — no, can this be true? — the anarchic yet synoptic approach of Charles Ives’ “The Fourth of July” from The New England Symphony, with its clashing marching bands. No need of program notes or a cast of “personalities.” The tang of the winds, the blare of the brass — the whole fantastic carnival mêlée spun its own story.
Among so many centrifugal impressions, perhaps the most distinctive technical constant was transparency of instrumental detail, no matter how dense or intricate the orchestral textures. Think of a score as a tapestry, and it’s easy to pick out principal figures in their major juxtapositions. At the same time, apparently incidental or ornamental detail contributes immeasurably to the vitality of the larger design: cascading figuration, pizzicati like silver or golden pinpricks, the tread or heartbeat of a kettle drum. At every dynamic, from virtual silence to terribilità, Muti never lets it turn brutal. He delivers it all, sometimes in a whisper, sometimes in vibrations that rise through the soles of our shoes on the auditorium floor.
