Claudio Abbado, 1933-2014: A life of listening

CLAUDIO ABBADO, 1933-2014

If there is one activity that sums up Abbado’s musical life it is that of listening. Throughout his career, Abbado maintained that listening lay at the heart of all music-making, a philosophy reflected equally in the extraordinary wordless communication between the players who worked for him, as in his own quiet and humble rehearsal manner. In Claudio Abbado, we have lost not just one of the greatest conductors of the last century, but one of the most attentive and generous musicians that ever lived. A far cry from the hackneyed stereotype of the oppressive, self-serving conductor, Abbado was forever encouraging others to grow around him: during his career, he founded an arts festival ( Wien Modern ), three professional orchestras ( Lucerne Festival Orchestra, Orchestra Mozart, Mahler Chamber Orchestra), and two youth orchestras (European Union Youth Orchestra, Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester); he worked tirelessly to promote the music of the composers around him, including Luigi Nono , Bruno Maderna , and Franco Donaton i; an outspoken supporter of the Italian Left, he worked tirelessly to promote classical music to the disadvantaged. The generative power of Abbado’s work is extraordinary, and it ensures that his legacy will remain for decades to come, not only in memories and recordings, but in the beating heart of musical life throughout the world.

A KEY RECORDING

Luigi Nono: Il canto sospeso; Gustav Mahler: Kindertötenlieder (Claudio Abbado/Barbara Bonney/ Marjana Lipovsek/Berliner Philharmoniker) Sony, 1993

A miraculously realised pairing of works for voices and orchestra by two composers very close to Abbado’s heart. There is no doubt that the conductor saw a kind of musical kinship between Nono and Mahler: in the final part of the wonderful documentary, A Trail on the Water Abbado likens Mahler’s music to Nono’s as “that circular music that disappears into silence”.

However the political importance of this recording is not to be ignored. The texts of Nono’s beautiful Il canto sospeso (The Suspended Song) derive from an anthology of letters written by captured Resistance fighters shortly before their execution by the Nazis; Mahler’s Kindertötenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children), is a (German) expression of grief, utilising poems taken from a collection of the same name by Friedrich Rückert. This pairing, loaded with immanent political meaning, was inspired by the rise of racial violence during the disintegration of Yugoslavia during the early 90’s, aches with the horror that Abbado and his colleagues felt during that time. So palpable is the emotion in this recording that composer Mark Berry has described it as a “cry for help”. Every bar brims with feeling: the a capella second movement of Il canto sospeso, beneath Abbado’s immaculate control, possesses an extraordinarily rich emotional spectrum; the opening bars of Kindertötenlieder feel as if they are being sculpted into existence by the conductor’s hands.

With its sensitivity, technique, and its betrayals of a passionately held political consciousness, this recording is simply essential for anyone interested in hearing exactly what Abbado’s craft brought to the musical landscape of the twentieth century.