Sergiu Celibidache was one of the world’s greatest conductors.
He was a genius of sound, blending and balancing it from within
the music itself and with a profound knowledge of instrumental
frequencies and acoustic science. [From the back cover of
this DVD.]
[Eileen] Joyce said that Celibidache was the greatest conductor
she had ever worked with - "he was the only one who got
inside my soul". [From Richard Davis Eileen Joyce:
a portrait (Fremantle, 2001), quoted in Celibidache’s Wikipedia
entry.]
The fact that in the heyday of studio recording from the 1950s
to the 1980s, Celibidache (1912-1996) resolutely refused to
commit his interpretations to disc means that, like me, many
will have built up extensive collections of recordings while
never including a single one with his name on it.
In fact, my own first encounter with Celibidache was via the
admirable DVD The art of conducting: legendary conductors
of a golden era (Teldec/Warner Music Vision 0927 42668 2)
where we see him, aged 35, conducting the Berlin Philharmonic
in a fiery, passionate account of Beethoven’s Egmont overture
amid, apparently, the ruins of the old Philharmonie concert
hall. Watching that, anyone might have predicted the most glittering
of careers for him, but instead his decision not to play ball
with the recording companies effectively relegated him to the
status of something of a cult figure, revered by many of those
able to attend his live performances but virtually unknown to
others.
This fascinating new DVD presents us with film from the late
1980s and early 1990s. From 1988 we have material that originally
featured in a TV documentary by Klaus Lindemann – a record of
Celibidache rehearsing the Munich Philharmonic and then performing,
to an empty hall and without interruption except for his own
occasional vocal interjections, Prokofiev’s Classical symphony.
And from 1991 we see the 79 year old leading the same orchestra
in a performance of Dvorak’s New World. While I am certainly
no physician, to my layman’s eyes these images appears to record
a marked deterioration in Celibidache’s physical state in those
three intervening years. Surprisingly sprightly in rehearsing
and conducting the 1988 Prokofiev, by 1991 he resembles on the
podium nothing so much as an inscrutable and comparatively undemonstrative
penguin-suited Buddha.
As the quotation from this DVD’s back cover cited above makes
clear, Celibidache considered the pure sound of a performance
to be of paramount concern. That’s also true for many other
conductors, but while their concerns have generally been artistic
ones, Celibidache’s were philosophical and related
to his specific and rather idiosyncratic theories about the
very nature of musical sound and its reproduction. Much of what
he had to say on the subject was, unfortunately, rather abstrusely
expressed, though he did come up with a strikingly graphic image
when he described listening to music on record as the equivalent
of sleeping not with the real-life Brigitte Bardot but merely
with a picture of her! The Wikipedia entry cited above
gives a brief but useful overview of the somewhat complex issues
involved.
Listening to and watching the performance of the New World,
its most immediately obvious characteristic is its spacious
approach. Celibidache’s deliberate tempi make a mighty
contribution to building a performance of real, epic grandeur.
I recently reviewed a DVD that featured Rudolf Kempe conducting
the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a superb – and by no means especially
brisk - performance of the same symphony at the Proms in 1975.
Comparing times may be a somewhat simplistic exercise but it
does, in this case, make its point quite forcefully:
|
Kempe 1975
|
Celibidache 1991
|
|
I. Adagio – allegro molto
|
10:59
|
12:02 [+9.6%]
|
| II. Largo |
12:29
|
17:00 [+36%]
|
| III. Scherzo – molto vivace |
7:42
|
9:25 [+22.3%]
|
| IV. Allegro con fuoco |
11:04
|
14:58 [+35.2%]
|
As Colin Anderson points out in his useful booklet essay,
of big name conductors it is only Leonard Bernstein, in his
infamously lethargic 1989 account with the Israel Philharmonic
Orchestra, who stretches out the largo even further than
Celibidache, clocking up a staggering total time of 18:22. Although
the American conductor’s timings for the other three movements
are within conventional limits at 12:30 [I], 7:05 [III] and
12:09 [IV], the wilful, perverse conception that he adopts for
that one movement self evidently and grotesquely unbalances
the symphonic structure as a whole.
It is not so easy, though, to dismiss Celibidache’s concept,
for he is, at least, absolutely consistent in his application
of that piled-on grandeur throughout the whole work. As a result,
it emerges very much of a piece, if at the same time as something
of a curiosity that many listeners may find rather difficult
to warm to or, indeed, to like much at all.
They, in particular, may be relieved to know that Celibidache’s
performance of Prokofiev’s Classical symphony is, though
once again rather individually characterised, not quite so tendentious.
The opening allegro, notably lacking much in the way
of Mozartean delicacy and skittishness, develops in a rather
deliberate and heavy manner. Similarly, the succeeding larghetto
and gavotte evolve steadily and surely – the former
could easily be the soundtrack to a film of an old train chugging
along! - but once again they lack the spirit of rococo delicacy
and light-hearted wit that might have added some welcome extra
character to the interpretation. While the finale springs a
little more effectively into life (or does it just seem
to after the dull middle movements?), it is too late by then
to redeem a rather run of the mill performance. Prokofiev himself
may have considered his op.25 “a rather simple thing”, but the
finest interpreters, by using, for example, skilled dynamic
control, can elevate even a simple thing into something of far
greater significance. There is, sadly, little evidence of any
such skill on display here.
Celibidache was well known for demanding large numbers of rehearsals
of any orchestra that he was contracted to conduct and more
than a third of the DVD’s total time is given over to a filmed
rehearsal of the Prokofiev. While the opportunity to see the
orchestra taken through its preparatory paces ought to be especially
interesting, it is worth pointing out that eavesdropping on
a single occasion like this - out of context and in ignorance
of the long-term dynamics of the conductor/orchestra relationship
- does have the potential to give a seriously misleading impression.
Thus, Celibidache’s comments to the orchestra can sometimes
seem rather confusing to an outsider, if not positively at odds
with each other. While, for instance, he initially highlights
the importance of the “classical style”, later he urges the
Munich brass to exemplify “Russia all the way! Very domineering...”
Similarly, having stressed the danger of the symphony being
played as “loud mouthed … [with] a bit of a paunch”, he subsequently
encourages the players to bring out some of what he identifies
as its innate vulgarity. At another point he asks them to play
“with lots of fun”, though it is hard to see that that instruction
produces any discernable effect whatsoever.
In sum, this is a DVD that is likely to appeal to those who
are already familiar with, and appreciative of, Celibidache’s
art and characteristic sound. While the conductor’s fanatical
admirers will doubtless be delighted to have an opportunity
to see him in action, many others, I fear, will be inclined
to share Norman Lebrecht’s more cynical verdict (The maestro
myth: great conductors in pursuit of power [London, 1991],
p. 233): “Some worship him as a Furtwängler-figure but
the truth about Celi is less unsullied. He is a showman, plain
and simple, with an eccentric, though effective, mode of self-projection.”
Rob Maynard
Münchner Philharmoniker/Sergiu Celibidache
[112:57] 
