Thursday, January 14, 2021

Underrated Classical Musicians - Andre Cluytens

I've been on a Tristan-kick the last few days. Wagner fever is just something you have to get out of your system. Until you do, you can't listen to anything else, you can't read, you can barely work or sit through dinner. I'm convinced Wagner is not a composer anybody truly loves. Everybody knows the cliche 'love is blind' isn't true, but like all cults, Wagner demands you leave your critical distance at the door and you simply surrender every commonsensical you ever had about love, death, philosophy, and freedom. Whatever Wagner's political opinions, I believe Wagner's music, his dramaturgy, his writings, his philosophy, was ample evidence that his is a man incapable of any love but self-love, and like so many psychopaths, he sees right into the soul and longings of others and conjures false hope of their ideals' realization in reality - if Don Giovanni wrote music, he would write it the way Wagner did. As happens with psychopaths, we mistaken our Wagnerian infatuation with an unreality for love. But all seducers know that we cannot bear to part with the dream, and in art, there will always be something achingly beautiful about dreaming those ideals. And that is why the travesty Wagner makes of our humanity is still as magnificent a gift as the world of art ever bestowed on the world.
Andre Cluytens died in his early sixties and consequently never got out from under the shadow of older French conductors like Monteux and Ansermet who seemed to live forever and whose names guaranteed crowds to an extent he never quite did. But he was fully the equal of those great old school Frenchies, who frankly were on the average better than their often better known contemporaries from Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary, and in the repertoire of other countries often excelled the native-born conductors. Keep that our little secret. Cluytens is one of those conductors whom all you have to do is watch to understand what he does. It's not like Leonard Bernstein who throws every gesture maximally into the musical moment, it's like a pre-echo of Carlos Kleiber or Kirill Petrenko before them - every gesture is perfectly chosen and calibrated to the music. The result is almost balletic, every moment has passion, but beneath the passion is a deeper sense of the music: detail and personality.

It's very late and I don't have the patience for a long digression on Cluytens, about whom one can easily expose some Vichy dirt that is not entirely germane to his musicianship. So instead I'll just link to his Wagner....

The singing is not great, the playing is not great, but my god, this is a conductor who knows his business. How do we know? Because of the 'shape.' This is not the excess a Furtwangler, a Bernstein, a Barenboim, who use their gestures to throw themselves maximally into every musical moment, milk every drop of emotion, and trust that their innate musical genius will haphazardly organize the music into meaningful paragraphs. Nor is it the more regimented Wagner of Solti and Bohm, which so organizes everything 'by the book' that you know exactly where every barline is, every beat, every subdivision, every phraselength. This, like Kleiber or Karajan, is a conductor who knows exactly how he's going to shape Tristan und Isolde before he picks up the baton, choosing his moments of personal involvement extremely judiciously. A Furtwangler or Barenboim would never know how to step back and minimize their personal involvement - even the silences and pianissimos are deafening. Cluytens is obviously much quicker than they (Karajan too), but unlike the true romantics, he also has an ability to underplay his hand which makes the build to climaxes all the more exciting. You would have no idea that a performance like this is capable of these pulsating waves of excitement until they happen, and when they do, you're all the more stunned. 


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YQX2FxnZHI

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