Seckerson's Choice: Riccardo Chailly
Seckerson's Choice presents a regular series of playlists curated exclusively for IDAGIO by the broadcaster and critic Edward Seckerson. Here he celebrates the career of the great Italian maestro Riccardo Chailly, presenting personal choice of recordings – ranging from Brahms and Beethoven to Berio and Varèse – that reflect the conductor's great range, versatility and intellectual curiosity.
Read more…The Music Director of La Scala, Milan and no opera on this playlist? Put that down to the extraordinary diversity of Riccardo Chailly’s repertoire and the profound curiosity which has seen it grow exponentially. Of all the conductors I have encountered, both as an audience member and in person, Chailly is among the most engaging and interactive. His appetite for musical debate is second to none and the enthusiasm with which he initiates it - usually over good food (well he is Italian) - is wholly infectious. His musical intellect, his nose for style and context, his inquisitive approach to the letter of every score and how that squares up with its spirit, is second to none. He’s a great listener, too, and be it a formal interview about preparing the Beethoven symphonies for his Leipzig recordings or a casual conversation about this or that aspect of Gustav Mahler he is always open to another viewpoint. I remember the greater part of one lunch being given over to discussing a single bar in the development section of the first movement of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony and how tricky (but ultimately electrifying) it was to take Mahler at his word. My view was ultimately his view: that the risk redoubles the impact.
Speaking of Mahler’s Second, some of you may recall how its third movement evolved from a song - "Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt" - only to evolve further into the hallucinatory stream-of-consciousness at the core of the Berio ‘Sinfonia’. How could I not include that iconic piece in this playlist? So we have the best of Chailly’s eclectic taste here. From the most all-embracing and pantheistic of the Mahler symphonies, the Third, in a performance as searching and stunningly recorded as any on disc to the mad collision of the antique and defiantly contemporary in the ‘polystylistic’ Alfred Schnittke - Symphony No 5 “Concerto Grosso No 4” and Edgard Varese’ stonking ‘Ameriques’ which comes on like a cosmic invocation of the West side of Manhattan (the ‘Rite of Spring’ on steroids) in climax after climax of percussion-driven (11 players) soundscapes replete with ubiquitous police sirens. There’s another Manhattan soundscape in here, too, albeit transported to the boulevards of Paris - George Gershwin’s ‘An American in Paris’ - which might seem unlikely for Chailly but finds him managing a mean Charleston with the super-slick Cleveland Orchestra.
I’ve included a live performance of the Rachmaninov Third Piano Concerto with the great Martha Argerich quite simply because it’s hard to imagine that this is the work of ten fingers and because Chailly is SO in accord with her every rubato. And I love Chailly’s recording of Cesar Franck’s lone D minor Symphony with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra for its relish of the grand tunes and its “organ loft” majesty, again in marvellous Decca sound (though I won’t be discarding the classic Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony).
Brahms preoccupied Chailly towards the end of his tenure with the venerable Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and as part of his revitalisation of this marvellous band it was good to see him re-evaluating what one might call the traditional view of Brahms. The early ‘Serenade in D for small orchestra’ is the best kind of rosy and rustic with singing tunes and ebullient rhythms - an innocent Spring-like reverie - but when we jump to the magnificent Fourth Symphony (as throughout his recorded cycle) Chailly offsets the music’s richness with a muscular imperative. He reminds us of this music’s headstrong radicalism and how wrong 19th Century commentators were to pit Wagner against Brahms in that regard.
There was, of course, re-evaluation aplenty in Chailly’s fine Beethoven Symphony cycle with the same orchestra - much scrutiny of those sometimes seemingly breathless metronome markings. The capricious Eighth Symphony (which Stravinsky felt so in tune with) is an explosively exhilarating thing in Chailly’s hands. There are one or two jaw-dropping surprises - and that’s how it must always be, surely?
- Edward Seckerson