The Elegant Riccardo Muti

The Vienna Philharmonic holds a unique position among the world's major orchestras as the only one legislated directly by the musicians. Made up of the crème de la crème of today's musical artists, the VPO has a radically amount of freedom to chose their conductors in a way that is otherwise unheard of.

Riccardo Muti, the recently-resigned musical director of La Scala, has enjoyed the attentions of the VPO for over three decades. Earlier this year, the players invited him to Vienna to ring in Mozart's 250th birthday. When he led the players in three Carnegie Hall concerts earlier this month, it was more than apparent that Muti and Vienna have enjoyed a long and fruitful open marriage.

In the second Carnegie concert, on Saturday night, Muti radiated familiarly, elegance and effortlessness as he led the players in a program featuring music by Schubert, Mozart and R. Strauss.           

At the podium, Muti cut a dashing and elegant figure. He led with a firm command of the musicians, but there was no room for spontaneity in his conducting. Leading with Germanic precision, he made the music sound very angular and terse. The musicians stayed close to their instruments the whole evening, and showed an astonishing amount of versatility in an ambitious if somewhat lopsided program.

The first piece, Schubert's Overture to Rosamunde was an unmemorable touch on an already too long program that no one would have missed. Muti made the opening three-note figure slow and laborious. On the whole, he imbued the piece with a plodding quality that lent an air of mystery. Slow, methodical and pulsing, the performance was marked by fine work from the strings, who stayed close to their instruments as Muti playfully coaxed them.

The second item, Mozart's delicious Sinfonia Concertante  for violin and viola was among the evening's highlights. The VPO soloists, Rainer Honeck on violin and Tobia Lea on viola, both gave dazzling performances; and while Honeck, swaying this way and that like a puffed-up bird, could be accused of indulging in some overripe showmanship, his ardent and assured playing made for a fitting contrast to Lea's more restrained bowing. Where Honeck exaggerated his high notes to deliberately comic effect, Lea was more reserved, deploying judicious vibrato, for an overall subtler and more satisfying performance. Watching Honeck ham things up with his Stradivarius alongside the no-less-confidant but more earnest Lea was the musical equivalent to Wildean repartee. At other times, it seemed an amusing game of one-upmanship, with Honeck thrilling with his high notes and Lea countering with sharp thrusts of his bow.

For much of the performance, Muti seemed to sit back and watch the players' craftsmanship affectionately. In the blissful andante, Muti was keen on making Mozart sound like a late Romantic. The violins could shift from shrill to lyrical in a flash and the rests were dangerously exaggerated. The result was music that could melt slowly on the tip of his tongue. 

After intermission came Schubert's Fourth Symphony, which seemed to employ a larger fraction of the musicians than the two previous works combined. Nicknamed the Tragic, the Fourth is among the composer's most accomplished adolescent compositions. The 19-year-old Schubert had steeped himself in German Lieder; more than anything the poignant and dramatic melodies of the Fourth Symphony, rendering in clear and rhetorical style say more about his abilities as a composer of Lieder than of symphonies. The orchestration remains unremarkable, and despite some clever turns, represents the youthful strivings of a composer who would write his finest compositions for piano, voice and string quartet. Ever dependable, the strings did grade A work, with the violins sounding especially luminescent in the legato phrases and memorably jagged elsewhere. The winds were routinely too loud and the brass sounded muddled. To his credit, however, Muti made the Menuetto effectively unsentimental and built up nicely to the well-earned crescendos. Echoes of Mozart (Don Giovanni especially) were present throughout, and a careful regulation of dynamic levels ensured that all constituent parts were well heard and accounted for. 

Only for the final piece of the evening, Richard Strauss' tone poem Death and Transfiguration, was the entire orchestra on stage. The Strauss was well worth the wait; but after hearing the VPO at full strength, one was left craving more.

Death and Transfiguration dates from relatively early in Strauss' carreer. It is one of those remarkable pieces that remind us music's emotional core. Muti was well attuned to the music's thunderous, religious and dramatic potential. He clipped the end of the phrases and kept augmenting the tension. Strauss' richly detailed score with its beguilingly ambient theme was well serviced. Wonder-filled flourishes abounded, including a highlighted harp and violin duet. The seven double basses sounded thunderous and clearly articulated the bass line. As the piece wore on, the playing became more successively full-blown and over-the-top. At times had a hard time making it sound like a coherent, holistic whole. Tension built and built but to what end? Muti could have scaled down the horns, for the trombones especially grew too loud in spots. The chaos at the performance's middle was washed away by a grippingly vexing finale. It was a performance that, despite it's shortcomings, would please any Strauss enthusiast. For all the rest in the audience, Muti reminded us how near and dear opera is to his heart by leading the entire orchestra in a muscular encore of the overture to Verdi's La forza del destino.      

The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Saturday March 4, 2006 at 8PM