Peter Phillips

How Claudio Abbado bridged old and new

The late conductor trained as a generalist like Karajan, but could also have specialised in Early and contemporary music

Claudio Abbado (Photo: Alfred Eisenstaedt/Getty)

Not long ago the great conductors of classical music were general practitioners. They expected to give satisfactory interpretations of music written from the beginnings of symphonic composition to the present day, and audiences took it for granted that, if they knew what they were doing with Mozart and Beethoven, they could be trusted with Handel and Stravinsky. Their orchestras adopted the same approach and, within a narrow definition that bespeaks a more innocent age, everyone was content. There was little concern that Handel would not have recognised the sound that the instruments of the modern orchestra was making; and no one was disturbed that the big hero figure out front with the histrionic gestures was an anachronism, liable to overblow the delicate textures of both Handel and Stravinsky.

Then came the Early Music revolution of the Seventies and Eighties — preceded by a similar kind of head-scratching in the performance of some contemporary music — and this cosy world was torn apart. Whole repertoires were taken away from the generalists, a new democratic spirit informed the management of the players, and the emperors of the podium found it much harder to convince the world that what they had to say should be listened to as if by divine right. This must have made conducting a Mahler symphony a much trickier task than it had been in the days of directing by imperial edict, and it made performing a Bach concerto effectively impossible. Counterpoint does not react well to over-romanticised grandstanding, and the likes of Toscanini had little option but to accept the fact.

This era effectively ended with the death of Herbert von Karajan in 1989. Although the appointment of Claudio Abbado, who died last month at the age of 80, to succeed him at the Berlin Philharmonic — the first non-German to hold the post — was a sign of the times, there was a lingering sense that what Abbado represented did not suit the great tradition of this orchestra.

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