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本帖最后由 Jwang 于 2013-2-24 07:00 编辑
这是NYT 的一篇评论。特别是我高亮的红字处。很可惜,没听过他的现场。如有人讲他的指挥没张力,读读红字处的文字。
MUSIC: DEBUT OF SERGIU CELIBIDACHE
By John Rockwell
Published: February 28, 1984
IT is not often that a 72-year-old unknown makes his American debut leading a student orchestra at Carnegie Hall and attracts what looked like most of musical New York. Sergiu Celibidache did just that last night, conducting the Symphony Orchestra of the Curtis Institute of Music in what looked like a semi-pops program. The result was about as revelatory an experience, both thrilling and thought-provoking, as this writer has encountered in 25 years of regular concert-going.Mr. Celibidache is, of course, not quite unknown. Rumanian born and German trained, he was chosen as a young man to lead the Berlin Philharmonic in the interregnum between 1945 and 1948, when Wilhelm Furtw"angler was de-Nazified. Since then he has conducted here and there, but his increasingly imperious rehearsal demands, combined with his distaste for recordings, have turned him into a reclusive legend, especially on this continent.
Thus when the Curtis Institute convinced him to come to Philadelphia for an extended period of rehearsal and to make his debut here, at a ''gala 60th anniversary benefit concert'' for the institute, it was an event in advance. But what kind of event? Last night, we found out.
First of all, Mr. Celibidache really makes use of all that rehearsal. He stands on the podium, stolid and blunt, conducting from memory and chopping out the beat with both arms. But for vivid, almost shocking detail, this concert was unprecedented in my experience. Especially in overtly coloristic works like Debussy's ''Iberia'' and Prokofiev's ''Scythian Suite,'' which ended the evening (its second movement was encored), the sheer intensity of aural color was dazzling.
And this was a student orchestra; here and there its inexperience peeped out, as in some sour wind intonation in Wagner's ''Tristan und Isolde'' Love Death, but only against the crystalline backdrop of its playing the rest of the time. It is cliche to report that musicians in any great orchestral concert played like soloists united in spirit, but it really did sound that way last night.
Detail was only the beginning. Mr. Celibidache opened with Rossini's ''Gazza Ladra'' Overture, and immediately pronounced the strength of his musical personality. Tempos were not unusual, a little on the slow side, perhaps, but the dynamic range was astonishing. Most of the time, the music sounded preternaturally quiet, down to the tiny ping of the triangle. But the crescendos built inexorably, and the whole performance was suffused with a striking sense of legato, whole pages rising and falling like waves. Idiosyncratic, perhaps, but this was riveting music-making, and superbly individual.
At times, one wondered if all Mr. Celibidache's concentration on fine points - the consistent subtlety of the voicings, the elegance of even the smallest inner minutiae of phrasing - might vitiate old-fashioned animal energy. Yet the climaxes rang out as excitingly as one might wish, and the concluding Prokofiev positively roared with barbaric splendor. Even here, however, the playing was never needlessly, sloppily vulgar; there was always that wonderfully scrupulous coloration suffusing and shaping the loudest passages.
If, so far, Mr. Celibidache sounds like a songful sensualist, he revealed a different facet in the ''Tristan'' music. Here all the coloristic exactitude remained - never has the altered emotional world between the prelude and the onset of the Love Death sounded so dramatically telling. And yet the arching long line of the music, the fluctuating melodic impulse that lies at the heart of Wagner, propelled the performance forward.
That, then, was the thrilling part. The thought-provoking aspect has to do with the nature of Mr. Celibidache's career, past and future. His kind of loving, fanatical care represents the next logical step beyond such orchestral virtuosos as Mahler, Klemperer and Toscanini. But Mr. Celibidache pushed their perfectionism into the realm of the impractical; the famous conductors of today, those he says he discounts, were willing to make sacrifices for practicality. Of course, their performances nearly always sound as if they made those sacrifices. But the kind of close approach to the ideal that Mr. Celibidache strives for simply will not fit into the businesslike routine of today's musical world.
Or will it? The audience was full of America's musical movers and shakers, and if they chose to do some shaking for Mr. Celibidache, perhaps he could appear here with a professional orchestra - his own Munich Philharmonic or an American ensemble under special circumstances. It all depends, not on musical idealism, but on Mr. Celibidache's market and prestige value as an aging celebrity cult object. But let's not get as picky about motivations as he is about music. It would be tragic if last night's American debut were also his American farewell.
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