| Zubin Mehta opened the Italian festival The Italian Cultural Festival in Russia, which, as can be seen from the program, presents a wide panorama of Italian music, ballet and photography, opened on Friday evening in the Great Hall of the Conservatory. After a long speech by Svyatoslav Belza, who seemed to recall all the textbook-significant cases of interaction between two cultures, after a laconic greeting from the Minister of Culture Mikhail Shvydkoy and warm words from the Italian Ambassador Gianfranco Facco Bonetti, the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino orchestra appeared on stage with its artistic director - conductor Zubin Mehta .
In 2002, one of the most energetic representatives of the world conducting elite, Zubin Mehta, performed in Moscow with another orchestra - at the Israel Philharmonic he holds the amazing post of “lifetime artistic director.” And in St. Petersburg this summer, at the Stars of the White Nights festival, he played with his Florentine players. Both the Moscow and St. Petersburg visits did not go without a hitch, but they were effective. Both ended with thunderous ovations of the kind that the world star of Indian origin is excellent at causing. His style usually displays a mixture of strength and lightness, movement and picturesqueness that is attractive to the general public. The public's favorite maestro Meta (in addition to the two above-mentioned orchestras, he now heads the Florence Music May festival and the Bavarian State Opera) is not one of the most famous musical intellectuals. But his works do not fall into the ranks of particularly meaningless ones. The repertoire is extensive and balanced. And as far as manners and views on art are concerned, Meta masterfully inhabits that territory of spectacular quality and strong expressiveness that is located near aesthetic lands where pomp and elegance are loved.
The meta is decorative, but not without deep perspective and grace. He cannot be called ardent and poetic, but at the same time, on the one hand, he is a famous master of explosive orchestral technologies, and on the other, he lacks the metal in his conductor’s voice that, say, his predecessor as head of the Florentine orchestra, Riccardo Muti, has. And if with the Israeli Philharmonic these qualities were visible through the peculiarities of the still provincial orchestra and the damp program, now with the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino they appeared brightly and prominently.
The orchestra of the Florence Musical May festival has been listed in the orchestra registers since 1928. During this time, many great conductors managed to stand behind its podium, which is important not from a statistical point of view, but in the sense that, despite its festival status, the orchestra showed good teamwork, technical virtuosity, and individual sound - equally decorative , how multifaceted.
Rimsky-Korsakov's painted "Scheherazade" of the entire program, composed of the heroics of Beethoven, the complex symphonism of Brahms and the sacred rites of Stravinsky, best suited the orchestral sound and conducting style. Another question is that in other hands this very colorful “Scheherazade” may well sound like a scary, modernistically inflated or symbolically loaded massive opus (one can recall at least the recent performance by Gergiev with the Mariinsky Orchestra, which stood out strongly even from a series of similar ones friend of Gergiev's excited interpretations). But here the beautiful and harmonious poem sounded just as picturesque, becoming not only an excellent illustration of the customs and manners of Meta and the orchestra, but also an example of an extraordinary reading of Rimsky-Korsakov’s music.
Meta made “Scheherazade” into a magic lantern, a small, homemade but magnificent theater, glued together from cardboard, fringe and beads. The sound of the orchestra surprised us almost from the first sounds with archaic overtones - as if it were not a modern ideal orchestral array, but the hero of some old, slightly creaking record. A strange balance, arranged as if on the principle of rows of theatrical scenes, revealed, first of all, the winds. Every solo of wood or a menacing replica of brass appeared as if in the middle of the proscenium, which is why the entire musical profile acquired hypertrophied theatrical features. From the touching creak and measured movement of the strings, it seemed that at any moment cardboard Wagnerian swans would begin to descend onto the stage from under the ceiling, or that some tragic veristic hero would jump out from behind the non-existent curtains, with a limp face and covered in cranberries. By the way, it is rare to find so much Wagner in heavy Korsakov draperies. And so many Verdi and Donizetti - even more so. Roughly lightening the pace of “Scheherazadine,” simplifying the movement and shifting the tempos, Mehta played the poem as if it were a champagne aria. But this whole series of tricks made Rimsky-Korsakov's music unexpected and charming. The tricks didn't work with The Rite of Spring. Despite the fact that the lights in the hall were turned off again, the theater never opened. Decorativeness with perspective, strong movements and dense, not too violent, but powerful climaxes were not enough to create wonderful effects in Stravinsky. But even without this, the opening program ended with a stormy ovation. And the venerable conductor confirmed his reputation as a master of disarming the audience with hot extroversion of interpretations, in which theatrical passions jump out from behind the scenes in a strictly measured manner. Yulia BEDEROVA |
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