I remember being told by a friend over coffee, back in the early ‘90s – still a few years away from the brushfire circulation of news on the internet – that Wolfgang Sawallisch was to be the next music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Sawallisch?!!
It was a name I associated with Old World integrity and classic (mono) recordings of Richard Strauss. Also, a fabulous, underrated recording of “Ma Vlast” I had discovered while doing college radio, with the Suisse Romande Orchestra, of all things.
Had he ever even been to the United States? How old was he? I guess at the time he must have been around 70. In the event, he died in 2013, only six months shy of his 90th birthday. Philadelphia would prove to be the high-profile capstone of a very respectable, indeed enviable, if not exactly glamorous career.
Still, after the intensity and flash of Riccardo Muti, it would be a nice corrective. And I offer that as a Muti fan. This was Philadelphia, after all, where Ormandy roosted for 40 years.
While Sawallisch was not the most thrilling music director (the word
“kapellmeister” was bandied a lot), he provided solid leadership and proved on more than one occasion that on a good day he could still surprise.
I remember a concert on which he programmed works by Kodály and Miklós Rózsa (the rarely-heard Viola Concerto), which were interspersed with performances by a traditional Hungarian band, complete with cimbalom. He may have to some degree drained Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Symphony No. 8 of some of its Finnishness, but at least he secured its premiere. When a severe snowstorm meant the orchestra couldn’t make it in for a scheduled concert of scenes from Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” and “Die Walküre” (including all of Act I), he made the impromptu decision to throw open the doors of the Academy of Music and play the accompaniment himself at the keyboard, with Deborah Voigt, Heikki Suikola, and chorus, for the enjoyment of anyone who cared to show up.
He was generally all about Beethoven and Bruckner and, yes, Strauss – a concert performance of “Ariadne auf Naxos” was a highlight of his tenure (with Werner Klemperer, Colonel Klink, as the Majordomo!) – but he could also turn around and play the tar out of something like Bohuslav Martinu’s Symphony No. 4. All in all, not a bad legacy.
I hope you’ll join me – once again over coffee – as I remember Wolfgang Sawallisch, with a selection of his recordings, as conductor and pianist. They’ll be among my featured highlights on this, his birthday, this afternoon from 4 to 7 p.m. EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
