When you’re following in the footsteps of greatness, it makes sense to end up in the Musikverein, where Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler conducted and where the world-renowned Vienna Philharmonic calls home.
“Magic!” Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Riccardo Muti declared after Monday’s rehearsal on its pockmarked-with-history stage. “It’s the temple of music.”
Having the honor of opening the fall season at the Musikverein in the city of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert and Johann and Richard Strauss (among many others) represented both the happy payoff and final formidable challenge of the CSO’s two-week European tour. The hall — a long, highly ornamented wood-and-plaster shoe box, or really jewel box, with a single U-shaped balcony, rows of hanging chandeliers, a partitioned fresco-filled ceiling, caryatids (female figurines serving as columns) lining the perimeter and fancy doodads all around — is renowned for its “golden sound” (as the venue’s website puts it).
But the hall, which opened in 1870, also has a notoriously small stage, and the CSO is a notoriously large orchestra, on this tour incorporating a grand piano (borrowed from the venue) and celesta (brought along). So CSO stage manager Kelly Kerins, recovering from a wicked head/throat cold that swept through a cross-section of musicians and staffers, and his stagehands were at the auditorium early Monday to try to cram all of the puzzle pieces into the picture.
“Can we put a sign up saying, ‘Access only stage left’?” Kerins asked CSO operations director Heidi Lukas after shoehorning the celesta and the 7-foot-long grand piano (compared with the standard 9-foot version usually played by CSO pianist Mary Sauer) into the space just in front of the stage-right entrance. “I just don’t see how anybody’s going to get onstage from this side.”
When the orchestra got into position for its morning rehearsal, some of the second violin players raised concern that they were mixed in with the first violinists and couldn’t see their principal player.
No matter. The history, ambience and sound had most of the musicians more than happy to be there.
“It’s the greatest in the world,” clarinetist Gregory Smith said. “There’s no question about it. Acoustically it’s the hall that every other one aspires to. You can’t make an ugly sound in this hall.”
Yet that doesn’t mean the Musikverein is an easy place to perform. The Vienna Philharmonic has a famously refined sound as shaped by the hall. Muti said some American orchestras arrive intending to overpower the venue only to leave defeated.
So although the orchestra already had played its repertoire multiple times, Muti called for an extra rehearsal before the first Vienna performance to fine-tune the balances and textures.
“If you play without a certain musical intelligence, you can offend the hall,” Muti said. “This is a hall that requires from the orchestra taste, elegance and, even in the most loud passages, a certain delicacy.”
After getting the orchestra started on the hushed opening of Richard Strauss’ “Death and Transfiguration,” the conductor cocked his ear toward the seats. He stopped the piece and asked his wife, Cristina, what she was hearing from her seat about a third of the way back on the floor. She suggested moving the two harps out from under the thin balcony in the back stage-right corner. Once it was done and the rehearsal resumed, the harps did have a clearer sound.
When Muti was finished running through sections of the pieces, he invited Arnold Brostoff to the podium and embraced him. Brostoff has been a CSO violinist for 47 years, and these Vienna concerts would be his last before retirement, so Muti paid him tribute.
“When a musician retires, he really doesn’t retire, because his work, what he has done for decades, remains — in the traditions of the orchestra, in the sound of the orchestra and in the musicians that have played with him,” Muti said.
After the rehearsal Brostoff said he wasn’t too melancholy. “It’s OK,” he said. “It’s a nice feeling. But I have to move on to different things.”
The maestro also called up Nathan Cole and Akiko Tarumoto, two younger violinists moving to the Los Angeles Philharmonic after this tour (with Cole taking the first-violin position there), and expressed regret that they were leaving but wished them well with their new “family.”
In a conversation before lunch, Muti reflected on this almost-completed tour — how, when he first toured Europe as the CSO’s guest conductor in 2007, he was just getting to know the orchestra, but now he and the musicians are growing to understand one another more intuitively and intensely.
“A tour is the moment of truth about the relationship between conductor and orchestra,” he said. “A tour can make their relationship tighter, deeper, more beautiful, or can destroy it.”
Clearly the latter has not happened.
“The remarkable thing about the tour is to watch the development of the relationship between the conductor and the musicians and to see how their music-making has evolved,” CSO Association President Deborah Rutter said.
Acting principal bassoonist William Buchman said these concerts have made him more aware than ever of how responsive the orchestra has become to its music director, who, Buchman said, is leading a tour quite different from those under previous conductors.
“You think of the Chicago Symphony conquering Europe almost by brute force,” Buchman said. “We (usually) bring massive pieces that call for a huge complement of musicians, symphonies that run 90 minutes in length. This time we’re not trying to overwhelm our audiences. Instead, we’re trying to draw them in.”
The tour has had a strenuous itinerary, including the orchestra’s debut appearances in Luxembourg and Dresden, Germany; its first performance in 20-plus years at the Salzburg Festival in Austria; and returns to familiar halls in Lucerne in Switzerland, Paris and Vienna
“This is a very demanding tour, first because of a very tight (travel schedule), difficult programs and important cities,” Muti said. “When you’re playing in very important halls, the responsibility is bigger because immediately the public compares different orchestras, different soloists, different ways of making music. So it’s much more demanding. And they have kept a very high standard every performance.”
Or as violinist Rachel Goldstein characterized the tour, “It’s been very successful, and it’s been a tiring schlep.”
The orchestra’s energy hasn’t flagged, at least onstage, nor has the audiences’ enthusiasm.
“I think the high point of the tour was Paris,” principal harpist Sarah Bullen said. “Unfortunately we only had one concert there, but the synergy between the audience and the performance just caught fire. We won the hearts of the most discerning audience in the world.”
Sometimes the highlights are quiet ones. As Muti slowly lowered his arm at the tragic end of the concert-closing Prokofiev’s “Suite from ‘Romeo and Juliet'” in Dresden, the audience let the silence linger for several seconds as if not wanting to break the spell. It was only when Muti shook out his arms and began to turn that the applause began.
“In that moment you realize the public has received a special message through music,” Muti said.
There have been sweet moments throughout the tour. While taking his bows in Dresden, the maestro received a full bouquet from an audience member and presented it happily to assistant concertmaster Yuan-Qing Yu.
During the standing ovation in Paris, someone tossed a dozen white roses onto the stage, and Muti handed them one by one to female musicians seated near him. When he left the stage, principal viola player Charles Pikler picked up a few stray flowers and placed them atop the podium so Muti could pass them out during his next bow.
Speaking of Pikler, during the ovation following “Romeo and Juliet” in Luxembourg, Muti skipped over the violist, who has a lyrical solo in the piece, while pointing for the soloists to take their bows in turn. Working his way back toward the front of the stage, Muti saw Pikler, and the light bulb went off, the conductor’s wide-eyed, open-mouthed expression reminiscent of Macaulay Culkin in “Home Alone.”
Muti not only gestured Pikler out of his seat but also gave him a long hug, laughing and apologizing in his ear while the audience cheered. When the Prokofiev piece was next played in Dresden, Muti pointed for Pikler to stand up, shook his hand and gave him an affectionate pat on the cheek.
By concert time Monday in Vienna, the stage was crowded and then some. A cluster of audience members was seated in the back stage-left corner behind the brass players, while the rest of the orchestra members, tightly packed onto multiple levels of risers, looked as if they’d topple into the audience if the building received a mild shake.
Among those in Monday’s Vienna audience: Austrian President Heinz Fischer.
Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 boasted a great dynamic range. Muti throughout the evening had been tamping down the volume, but as the symphony transitioned from the delicately played third movement to the robust fourth, the conductor loosened the reins and let the orchestra rip.
The finale prompted five bows’ worth of applause and cheering, and a final wave from Muti after the orchestra had left the stage.
Following the concert many of the musicians gathered in a cafe cellar for a farewell to Brostoff, Cole and Tarumoto. In a brief speech, Brostoff reflected on how the CSO musicians come from different backgrounds and have wildly contrasting personalities, yet here they all were together in Vienna.
“We are unified about one thing, and that’s what we did tonight, and that’s playing,” he said.
On Tuesday the musicians set out for final pilgrimages to Beethoven’s grave site and various parks, museums and stores. Just one more day, one more performance.
“Last night’s concert was great, tonight’s concert will be great, and I’m going to be so happy to get on that plane in the morning,” Buchman said Tuesday.
Come Tuesday night the orchestra delivered its final crisp performances of Hindemith’s Symphony in E flat and “Romeo and Juliet,” and when Muti came out for the third ovation, he made a beeline for Brostoff, who was sitting back by the harps, and gave him his own bow before wrapping the retiring violinist in a bear hug. Once again the audience brought Muti out for an extra bow, this time with the wind and brass sections and some other orchestra members remaining onstage to clap for their conductor.
Muti waved and exited, stage left. The tour was over.
Twitter @MarkCaro
