Sometimes I get nostalgic for the days when classical music was very nerdy and very Teutonic.
Here are four renowned conductors – Wolfgang Sawallisch, Fritz Rieger, Rudolf Kempe, and Rafael Kubelik (okay, so Kubelik was Czech) – rehearsing Bach at their respective keyboards, with members of Kubelik’s Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. You get a sense that this is about as informal as these guys ever got! Anyway, it’s a pleasant diversion for a Sunday morning.
Sawallisch, later music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, would have been 100 yesterday. I had my eye on the centenary for the past week, and had meant to post about it, but then I got busy and it just passed me by.
My first exposure to Sawallisch’s musicmaking was in my 20s, during my days in community radio, when I stumbled across his recording of Smetana’s “Ma Vlast,” which I’m happy to say I’ve always retained an affection for. I’ve got it on CD now, but I kind of miss the original overheated cover, when it was issued on vinyl: with its harpist perched atop a jutting reef, assailed by crashing waves, against the backdrop of a diurnal supermoon; its diaphanous, sword-bearing fairy; and its naked women cavorting in a mountain lake, rendered with all the marvelous vulgarity of 1970s airbrushed van-art.
I couldn’t believe it when a friend of mine broke the news over coffee one afternoon that Sawallisch was coming to Philadelphia. This was a more leisurely time, before we were all lashed to the internet.
Sawallisch?!!
That “Ma Vlast” album cover aside, his was a name I had come to associated with Old World integrity and classic (mono) recordings of Richard Strauss. Had he ever even been to the United States? How old was he? I guess at the time he must have been around 70.
His tenure as music director in Philadelphia would prove to be a high-profile capstone to a very respectable, indeed enviable – if not exactly glamorous – career. There was always something akin to this Bach video about Sawallisch – earnest and all about the music. But there’s something kind of reassuring about returning it now, when seemingly everything is all about flash and dazzle.
Sawallisch was music director in Philadelphia from 1993 to 2003. In addition to his directorship of L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, he also held posts with the Vienna Symphony (allegedly turning down offers from the Vienna Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera), the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra, and the Bavarian State Opera. He died in 2013, six months shy of his 90th birthday.
Memorably, his abilities as a pianist came in handy during a ferocious snowstorm in 1994, when Philadelphia Orchestra musicians 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, supporting Deborah Voigt, Heikki Suikola, and chorus, free for the enjoyment of anyone who cared to brave the elements.
Say want you want about stolid Sawallisch, his generous spirit will not soon be forgotten. If only there were more of the spirit of that “Ma Vlast” van art in his musicmaking.
Sawallisch conducts “Šárka” from “Má Vlast” in Japan in 1990
