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Met Opera;J.Levine の後継候補 F.Luisi [音楽時評]

The New York Times の Music Review が Fabio Luisi (52歳)が近い将来に James Levine のあとを次いでThe Metropolitan Opera の Music Director に就任する日が来るのではと書いています.もともと,Levine が不調の時の代役として,Principal Guest Conductor の地位に置かれており,彼が最短距離にいるという趣旨のようです.

HE is moving to an apartment off Central Park and paring down his European conducting dates. But never, ever, imply that Fabio Luisi is preparing to take on one of opera’s most important jobs: music director of the Metropolitan Opera. と,現在,たいへん微妙な位置にあるといいます. Just discussing the matter was inappropriate, he argued. Being principal guest conductor was honor enough. “I’m helping Jimmy and whatever they need,” he said of the Met.           It is like the palace of an aging monarch, where courtiers shuffle and whisper behind velvet curtains.

Yet Mr. Luisi is clearly the heir apparent, and many signs point to a Metropolitan Opera someday under his baton.  

Mr. Luisi shares with Mr. Levine the qualities it takes to run the Met: a wide-ranging repertory that makes him equally comfortable with Wagner and Verdi, Strauss and Puccini; respect and admiration from both singers and orchestra players (two constituencies whom surprisingly few conductors satisfy simultaneously); and accomplished pianism, which helps in accompanying and coaching singers.

“He’s like James Levine, an all-arounder,” the German soprano Diana Damrau said of Mr. Luisi. “He loves voices, and he listens and he reacts.”           If you mean, ‘Could he do it,’ no doubt,” Mr. Levine said.

とにかく Fabio Luisi が,今は微妙な立場ですが,数年後のJames Levine の後継者として有力視されているようです.

あとは,長文のなかから,ご自由にご渉猟下さい.

 

On Deck, the Met’s Pinch-Hitter

Ruby Washington/The New York Times

Fabio Luisi is the principal guest conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, where he will begin performances of Verdi's “Rigoletto” on Tuesday.

HE is moving to an apartment off Central Park and paring down his European conducting dates. But never, ever, imply that Fabio Luisi is preparing to take on one of opera’s most important jobs: music director of the Metropolitan Opera.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times                                                      Fabio Luisi, leading a rehearsal at the Metropolitan Opera, has climbed a ladder of conducting positions in Europe.

“It’s a very delicate situation,” Mr. Luisi, 52, said in an interview before a run of performances of Verdi’s “Rigoletto” at the Met, starting on Tuesday. “I ask you really to understand my position, which is not easy.”

How many ways could he deflect the idea?

Just discussing the matter was inappropriate, he argued. Being principal guest conductor was honor enough. “I’m helping Jimmy and whatever they need,” he said of the Met.

Jimmy is James Levine, the Met’s music director and artistic backbone. A barrage of health problems have forced Mr. Levine to scale back his conducting and give up the music director’s job at the Boston Symphony after this summer. That development has given rise to thoughts of his departure from the Met, although any public talk of succession is taboo. It is like the palace of an aging monarch, where courtiers shuffle and whisper behind velvet curtains.

Yet Mr. Luisi is clearly the heir apparent, and many signs point to a Metropolitan Opera someday under his baton. That would be an epochal changing of the guard.

Mr. Levine is celebrating 40 years at the house, and you can hear the hum of the hagiography machine. A coffee-table book about his career is out, and a documentary film is on the way. He has signed a contract for his autobiography.

Mr. Levine is an outsize presence who has come to symbolize a significant slice of the arts in New York, as much a part of the city’s cultural landscape as the fountain at Lincoln Center or the lions at the New York Public Library. He is cherished at the Met and among opera lovers, an effusive personage born in Cincinnati but a quintessential New Yorker, a rotund man given to wearing open-necked polo shirts in rehearsal.

Outwardly, the two men could not be more different. Mr. Luisi is a slim and reserved, almost self-effacing Italian who was formed musically in German-speaking lands and wears ties to rehearsals. He exudes Germanic seriousness and speaks German so well that the language accents his English more than his native Italian does.

Yet Mr. Luisi shares with Mr. Levine the qualities it takes to run the Met: a wide-ranging repertory that makes him equally comfortable with Wagner and Verdi, Strauss and Puccini; respect and admiration from both singers and orchestra players (two constituencies whom surprisingly few conductors satisfy simultaneously); and accomplished pianism, which helps in accompanying and coaching singers.

“He’s like James Levine, an all-arounder,” the German soprano Diana Damrau said of Mr. Luisi. “He loves voices, and he listens and he reacts.”

Musicians who have played with Mr. Luisi praise his crystalline technique, firm ideas about the score and excellent preparation. “In his head there is a very clear idea of how he wants things to sound,” said Gergely Sugar, a horn player in the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.

Mr. Luisi sounds especially at home in the pit, added Mr. Sugar, who has played operas with him. “He owns the stage, “ Mr. Sugar said. “He owns the singers, in a very nice, not aggressive, way but very demanding.”

On the down side, some have noted a certain humorlessness and lack of assertion as a local cultural figure. His last-minute absences to bail out the Met have rankled at other places where he conducts.

For now and perhaps for years to come, Mr. Levine is not going anywhere, and he threw himself into preparations for a new production of Wagner’s “Walküre,” which opens on Friday. He is planning performances, although at a reduced clip, for at least five seasons into the future.

“My body’s still getting stronger,” Mr. Levine said in a recent interview, despite continuing problems stemming from major back surgery last year. If health problems force him to withdraw, so be it. “There isn’t any talk of that yet,” Mr. Levine said.

He said he was thrilled to have Mr. Luisi at the Met but would not plant the “kiss of death” on him by anointing him as a successor when the situation could be different years from now. “If you mean, ‘Could he do it,’ no doubt,” Mr. Levine said.

Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said there was no discussion of Mr. Levine’s departure. “In fact, we want quite the opposite,” Mr. Gelb added. “We want him to continue to conduct.” But Mr. Gelb acknowledged that Mr. Luisi was a “logical choice” to succeed the maestro.

“The fact that we chose him as principal guest conductor is the answer to that question,” Mr. Gelb said. “We wouldn’t have chosen him if we didn’t think so highly of him.”

Mr. Luisi did not shy away when asked about his qualifications to help run a house that gives more than 200 performances a season and has a budget of nearly $300 million. He has been a music director before, he noted, and served as general director of the Saxon State Opera in Dresden, a major company.

“I think I have the experience to take over an opera house, of course,” he said with a characteristic mix of self-deprecation and quiet confidence, “but it doesn’t depend on me.”

Mr. Luisi spoke by telephone from Vienna just after the movers had emptied his home there. He and his wife, Barbara Luisi, a former violinist and now a photographer, and their 13-year-old son are moving to New York in May, to an apartment on West 96th Street. Two other sons are out of the house.

Mr. Luisi has reduced his schedule at the Vienna Symphony and declined to extend his contract as chief conductor past the 2012-13 season. “The orchestra needs someone new, someone fresh,” he said. Moving to New York is purely practical, Mr. Luisi added, since his schedule calls for him to spend the longest periods here and elsewhere in the United States. He has an eight-city American tour next fall with the Vienna orchestra, including two dates in New York.

Mr. Luisi made his Met debut in 2005, with Verdi’s “Don Carlo,” and he has conducted more than 50 Met performances. Among them were emergency substitutions for Mr. Levine, in Puccini’s “Tosca” and Berg’s “Lulu” last season and Wagner’s “Rheingold” a few weeks ago. Along with “Rigoletto,” he has a run of Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos” in May, also previously scheduled.

Mr. Luisi has two or three operas scheduled at the Met for each of the next five seasons, including five new productions: testament to the value that the Met places on him. They include a new staging of Massenet’s “Manon” in the 2011-12 season, when he will also lead a revival of Verdi’s “Traviata” with one of the Met’s current stars, Natalie Dessay.

He feels at home. “The Metropolitan is a little bit like my house now,” Mr. Luisi said. “The relationship is really outstanding.”

Naturally, Mr. Luisi is comfortable with Puccini and Verdi. “As a young Italian conductor, your destiny is to conduct Italian operas,” he said. Years working in Austria and Germany helped him gravitate toward the operas and orchestral works of Strauss, the symphonies of Mahler and Bruckner, and the little-known music of Franz Schmidt, a Mahler rival who is appreciated mainly in Austria.

Mr. Luisi has recorded most of Schmidt’s major works and plans to perform his Symphony No. 4 in New York with the Vienna Symphony. He programmed a Schmidt opera, “Notre Dame,” in Dresden.

Schmidt has other prominent supporters among conductors, like Franz Welser-Möst, Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Neeme Jarvi, but his reputation was tainted by Nazi associations late in his life. He worked on a cantata glorifying the “German resurrection” in the late 1930s but abandoned the project, possibly because it became distasteful. Performances of his music can raise the issue of how to approach the work of a politically or morally tainted artist (as with Wagner, Strauss and others).

“It’s a very, very ugly thing,” Mr. Luisi said of Schmidt’s obeisances to the Nazis. “We have to assume that he had to write it in order to keep his position as an important composer,” he added, referring to the cantata.

Schmidt was apolitical and lived in his music world, Mr. Luisi said, “which is a very naïve position.”

“It doesn’t justify mistakes,” he added. But unlike Strauss, who held an official position in Nazi Germany, Schmidt was not important, Mr. Luisi said. “He didn’t do anything evil, not like other conductors or composers who ignored the destiny of Jewish musicians.”

In planning his Vienna Symphony concerts with Lincoln Center programmers, Mr. Luisi, realizing the potential for controversy, said he raised the issue and suggested a public discussion of Schmidt’s politics and the dichotomy between the person and the music.

Born in Genoa in 1959, Mr. Luisi graduated from the local conservatory in 1978 and moved to Graz, Austria, in 1980 to study conducting. He made his conducting debut there in 1984, founded the Graz Symphony Orchestra in 1990 and became artistic director and chief conductor of the Tonkünstler Orchestra, the No. 3 orchestra in Vienna, after the Vienna Philharmonic and the Vienna Symphony.

Since 1989 he has been a regular presence at the Vienna State Opera, where he made his biggest mark in the city, said Wilhelm Sinkovicz, the music critic for Die Presse, the Viennese daily. “If a conductor like Luisi enters the pit, you really feel something special is going on,” Mr. Sinkovicz said.

And up the ladder Mr. Luisi went: music and artistic director of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in Geneva; principal conductor of the MDR Symphony Orchestra in Leipzig and general music director of the Saxon State Opera and its orchestra, the Dresden Staatskapelle. Mr. Luisi showed a flash of either self-assertion or wounded pride in Dresden. Claiming that his authority had been flouted by management in the appointment of Christian Thielemann to lead a televised New Year’s Eve concert, he resigned in anger.

“It was a very painful situation,” Mr. Luisi said in the interview last week. “They took positions behind my back, and this was the problem.”

The Met musicians seem to have taken to Mr. Luisi. Elaine Douvas, a principal oboist, said his beat was “clear as could be.”

“He conveys so much with gesture,” she added. “He’s very easy to follow. I definitely think he’d be a great music director.”


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