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With their palpable sense of occasion, these live concerts are the best arguments for continuing to record the standard repertoire. Claudio Abbado’s heroic conducting in the sleek Lucerne Concert Hall yielded performances that were well worth capturing for posterity.
The Lucerne Festival had been without a resident orchestra for ten years before Abbado and Michael Haefliger, the festival’s director, brought it back in 2003. The ensemble they created is a veritable dream team of European performers, including the wind ensemble of clarinetist Sabine Meyer, the Alban Berg and Hagen string quartets, and principal players from the Berlin Philharmonic and other esteemed ensembles. The group is filled out by the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, which Abbado also founded.
This five-DVD set gathers discs previously released dating back to 2003 and features an all-Debussy program, Mahler’s Fifth and Sixth symphonies, Bruckner’s Seventh, and Alfred Brendel playing Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto. The only new material is Maurizio Pollini in a sensitive exploration of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, but what an inclusion. Pollini’s ice-cold handling of the solo line matches up perfectly with Abbado’s own leadership.
Following stomach cancer in 2001, Abbado had half of his stomach removed, and he appears weakened on these DVDs. For all the physical frailty he exhibits, though, there’s a tenacious force of will behind his music making.—Marc Geelhoed
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