Underrated Classical Musicians: Vladimir Delman

So let's start with a surprise. Tchaikovsky's best symphony is his first, and he never wrote a greater twelve minutes of music than its slow movement. It's no insult on Tchaikovsky to declare that. The famous last three symphonies are inestimably great, but the first is just that good. The summit of Tchaikovsky's achievement was his ballets, and Tchaikovsky's Symphony no. 1 is practically 'Swan Lake the symphony.'

I know this group is becoming entirely too conductor-centric, and that's obviously entirely my fault. In this time of troubles, none of us have much appetite for adventure, we all have to go back to what gives us comfort. Furthermore, good Russian conductors seem to grow on trees, and there therefore was no seeming hurry to check out Vladimir Delman, just another seemingly fine Soviet-Jewish conductor who never amounted to much until after his defection to Italy. Even in Italy, it took the better part of twenty years to truly gain notice, only for Delman to pass away a year after he founded the orchestra that was to be his claim to posterity - the Giuseppe Verdi Symphony Orchestra of Milan. Thanks to Delman, Milan now has an orchestra that doesn't pale in comparison to its famous opera house, La Scala, but we will never know Delman's thoughts on the standard rep, which as a seventy-year-old barely discovered maestro finally let loose on an orchestra worthy of him, he probably had thousands.

Sometimes, the hype around buried talent is worthless. Nobody can make me believe that Wyn Morris is a titan lost to podium posterity if I find his few recordings boring. But Vladimir Delman, in spite of tempi that are almost uniformly slow, creates a palace of sound. From the moment you hear him, the moment you watch him, you know this is a master with something elemental to say.

This performance, from right near the end of his life, is part of a cycle of Tchaikovsky symphonies done for Italian television. Two of the symphonies (3&5) were done at, of all places, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Delman's performance of the 5th in Pittsburgh is particularly compelling, almost Klemperer-like in its slowness, its detail, and its power - and all the while interruptions between movements to watch him conducting the Pittsburgh rehearsals in Italian with an interpreter who doesn't interpret what he says half the time, and yet he clearly achieves an instant mind-meld with the orchestra. This performance takes place in a hall instantly recognizable to most of the hard-core music public - the Great Hall of the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, and it is a combination of American, Soviet, and Italian student musicians. Did Delman even get a chance to stand in front of more experienced musicians?

Whatever their level of experience, Delman coaches these students to rare passion and beauty, in spite of clearly not speaking English, and how does he? Well, you'll hear at about 11 minutes into the video....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYmxe9G8RwM&t=153s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiLef0EBORk