This prize-winning documentary by the noted music documentarian Paul Smaczny from 2004 comes very close to a hagiography of Claudio Abbado. There are some very high-toned elements -- among them quotations (read by Bruno Ganz, the wonderful Swiss actor) of poetry by HA A A lderlin, a favorite of Abbado's, accompanied by dreamy landscapes -- as well as some wonderful, simply wonderful musical excerpts, usually too short. Abbado is notoriously shy of interviews and yet there are a number of clips of him talking with an unseen interviewer. The problem, though, is that he doesn't reveal very much in them. Far more revealing are the comments from colleagues like the young British conductor Daniel Harding, and members or former members of the Berliner Philharmoniker such as violist Wolfram Christ, oboist Albrecht Mayer, concertmaster Kolja Blacher. Still, their comments come close to being fluff -- how democratic Abbado is (in comparison to his unnamed predecessor, Karajan), how he wants to be called 'Claudio,' not 'Maestro,' how he enjoys making music, and so on. The most valuable comments, actually, and there are a lot of them, come from Abbado's friend Ganz who actually describes Abbado's platform behavior and his conducting technique. (I will add the Harding also comments that Abbado has 'the most beautiful left hand in the world.')
By far the most valuable parts of this 67-minute film are the clips of performances (with several orchestras including the ones he currently works with a lot, the Mahler Youth Orchestra and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra) of music by DvorA A A k, Mahler, Debussy, Nono, Webern, Stravinsky, Brahms, Beethoven, et al. The title of the documentary seems to be taken from Abbado's comment, in response to a question about what audiences he likes best, that he loves the audiences that hold their applause after the quiet ending of a piece, and an example is shown in a clip of an extraordinarily long such silence after a performance of the Brahms Requiem. (One can't help but notice, though, that the silence is at least partly in response to Abbado's frozen stance, head bowed, eyes closed, at the end of the piece. Applause starts only after he makes a move to relax a bit.)
There are some fascinating glimpses of the young Abbado from the 1960s conducting the Vienna Philharmonic and talking with the doyen of Austrian music announcers, Marcel Prawy, and including the well-known anecdote about how Abbado and his fellow-student Zubin Mehta got to watch rehearsals of the VPO under great conductors by joining the orchestra's chorus.
I found myself just a tad embarrassed by the unrelentingly adoring tone of this documentary; others might not react so. Frankly, as I consider Abbado to be one of the greatest conductors alive, I would prefer to spend my money on his recordings and DVDs of performances of great music, the latter, particularly those from the Lucerne Festival, seeming to be coming out almost monthly these days.
Scott Morrison |
Claudio Abbado - Hearing the Silence dvd movie.