Remembering Giuseppe Sinopoli
By Marc Bridle

April 21^st 2021 marks the 20^th anniversary of the death of Giuseppe Sinopoli. He would have been seventy-four – from a generation of conductors that now includes Riccardo’s Muti and Chailly, Daniel Barenboim, Christoph Eschenbach, Leonard Slatkin, Michael Tilson Thomas – and of conductors who have recently died, Maris Jansons and James Levine.

It appears to be an anniversary that is passing quietly by. There are no new releases of his recordings. Unlike Warner, a label who are happy to issue box set after box set, in new re-masterings, Deutsche Grammophon seem to be on the verge of eroding their back catalogue almost entirely. But it would be wrong to suggest that Sinopoli is the only casualty of this; the mighty Herbert von Karajan is also the victim of a shrinking discography. Unless, of course, you happen to live in Japan where you can stack your shelves with almost every recording ever issued.

Sinopoli’s death was sudden, although the manner of it – what would turn out to be a fatal heart attack whilst conducting Act II of Verdi’s Aida at the Deutsche Oper Berlin – was not. Conducting is a particularly cruel profession, one which has a tendency to take conductors too early: Kirill Kondrashin, István Kertész, Ataúlfo Argenta, Ferenc Fricsay, Thomas Schippers, Eduard van Beinem, Dmitri Mitropoulos, Fritz Lehmann and Joseph Keilberth. Other factors undeniably play their part – Sinopoli, van Beinum and Schippers were heavy smokers. Some deaths were simply tragic: Kertész would drown, and Argenta would commit suicide.

The reputations of these conductors before their deaths – and since – have swung widely. Kondrashin was to have succeeded Rafael Kubelik at the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra; in many respects his reputation is as high today as it was when he died in 1981. István Kertez spent a volatile, tumultuous – and very short – time at the London Symphony Orchestra and left an impression for the wrong reasons. Yet, some of his records are electrifying. Sinopoli was in one sense fortunate in that he left a relatively large number of recordings before his death so it’s easier to assess his legacy – and also easier to be critical of it. In the case of a conductor like Guido Cantelli, who died when he was thirty-six, the number of records he made was exceptionally small and it is more difficult to make a judgment.

In Britain, where Sinopoli spent just over a decade as Principal Conductor, and then Music Director, of the Philharmonia Orchestra, he was often savaged, even vilified, by the British press for his interpretations of the core repertoire. Obituaries at the time of Sinopoli’s death were generally more balanced, and I think today his reputation in Britain is higher than it was twenty years ago, certainly among younger listeners who probably do not understand what an older generation of music critics found so objectionable about Sinopoli’s recordings or concerts.

Norman Lebrecht’s The Maestro Myth may in part be responsible for peddling some of the false perceptions of Sinopoli’s London interregnum – but it is largely as Lebrecht’s book title says: a myth. There is little basis of truth that the Philharmonia Orchestra’s playing in any sense deteriorated during the Sinopoli years; in fact, the opposite probably happened. There is some truth, however, that the sound of the orchestra changed – although not as dramatically as is claimed – but this cannot be entirely laid at Sinopoli’s doorstep. The Philharmonia had a previous decade under another Italian, Riccardo Muti, to move away from the Klemperer sound to something warmer and more Italianate and they did just that; Sinopoli simply built on that although this orchestra retained the strength and tension in its strings that it had nurtured during the 1960s. In fact, the repertoire of these two Italians would end up diverging significantly; they weren’t entirely similar and the Philharmonia became a much more powerful and adaptable instrument because of that. Sinopoli just didn’t record the Bruckner symphonies and Strauss tone poems that were prominent features of his London concerts. With the benefit of hindsight, we should now see the Sinopoli years at the Philharmonia as a seamless preparation for those of Christoph von Dohnányi rather than any continuation of the Muti ones.

Twenty years doesn’t change the view that Sinopoli’s appointment by the Philharmonia was a surprising decision – other than that he was bringing with him a substantial – and what would turn out to be lifelong – recording contract with DG. This was not unlike the LSO of 1967 when they appointed André Previn – another conductor who had a lucrative contract in tow (with RCA). Only one of these orchestras, of course, would be seen to choose the right conductor – albeit for the wrong reasons.

Previn would be an artistic success at the LSO, but he was also charming, magnetic and completely likeable. These were assets which the Philharmonia often found lacking in Sinopoli who, having been taught by Hans Swarowsky, seemed to bring many of that conductor’s more problematic traits with him to London, notably his almost obsessive control of the relationship of tempo in music. Sinopoli, a twentieth century Renaissance man, analogised music, too. He saw scores through the prism of history, philosophy and, above all, psychology. It was this highly analytical view which most resembled the Swarowsky approach to conducting; Sinopoli spent less time focussing on what the composer had written on the page and more discussing an interpretation of it. A player in the orchestra who would have perhaps remembered the excessive repetition in rehearsals by Barbirolli or Klemperer may have found this approach refreshing at first; until this, too, became excessively repetitive. But when the pieces fell into place the end result could be staggering. One of the most fascinating and thrilling performances Sinopoli would give would be of a Mahler symphony, the Seventh; the details were luminous, the playing simply ravishing in a symphony often misunderstood. Sinopoli would interpret the Seventh with touches no other conductor could begin to conceive. But it was undeniably controversial. It was also entirely the antithesis of a Swarowsky performance of a Mahler symphony.

You did wonder sometimes how the Philharmonia managed performances of this brilliance; or in his later years, the Dresden Staatskapelle. Sinopoli’s stick technique could be extremely vague at times, and he often conducted using the smallest scores. He rarely, if ever, conducted without one but the very small Eulenburg scores he sometimes used made orchestras nervous. But clearly the Sinopoli years were not as disastrous as history would lead us to believe. The Philharmonia – unlike the LSO – has never gone in for short music directorships: in its seventy-five-year history it has had five principal conductors; the LSO has had nine during the same period. Sinopoli’s lasted for a decade and whether or not the conductor and orchestra clashed over their recordings some reach near perfect standards; time hasn’t altered that view and may have cemented it. I don’t think any recording of Tosca has sounded more exquisite than the Philharmonia one. Their recording of Ravel (an implacably torrential Boléro) and Debussy (a La mer that is as brilliant as a Monet) is one of the greatest on disc. His Elgar is so brutally honest in its willingness to tear up a half-century of English recording tradition it borders on the genius. The critical consensus would be that between Sinopoli and Bernstein in Elgar, the former would be more culpable of laying Elgar’s music to waste. You may well hate it, but it sounds like none other. It is Elgar from the era of fin de siècle absinthe.

Sinopoli’s Dresden years, from 1992 up until his death, were almost reverential in nature by comparison. The repertoire was different, heavier, Germanic, just more European. There would never be any Elgar again. After he left the Philharmonia Orchestra in 1994 Sinopoli would rarely conduct in Britain again – not that he had been a familiar figure at that most British of festivals, the Proms, whilst he had here. He conducted there only three times – 1987, 1989 and 1990 – and two of those programs were of music that he never recorded with the Philharmonia – Bruckner and Richard Strauss.

Sinopoli’s Proms appearances found him to be out of step with the audiences and the critics, something which was rarely the case at either Luzerne or Salzburg where both seemed to praise him. The Mahler Sixth from Sinopoli’s 1987 Prom was rapturously received by the audience (this was issued on a Vibrato CD); it wasn’t by the critics. With the benefit of such a long gap, it might now seem that the parochialism of English music criticism was limited to a much narrower and more traditional Mahler history – in performances from Norman del Mar and Barbirolli to Boulez and Tennstedt none of whom radicalised the Sixth symphony in the same way as Sinopoli. No conductor would suffer more adverse criticism, either, than Sinopoli as he went head-to-head against Simon Rattle as he began his own odyssey through Mahler’s symphonies; more to the point, Rattle would face a level of critical acclaim that bordered on the messianic. The problem for the Philharmonia wasn’t that Sinopoli didn’t make them play superbly – it was that the toxic concert reviews always suggested that wasn’t the case.

But there is an irony in that no matter how persistently insular the British music establishment became in viewing Sinopoli the Philharmonia itself played with less insularity than it had done for decades. The only one of the London orchestras to have never had a British principal conductor it has always looked to Europe – and its sound, in the broadest possible way, has always reflected that. One performance which has come to light – albeit on a private label – since Sinopoli’s death is the 1990 Philharmonia Ein Heldenleben. It may be a combination of the Royal Albert Hall acoustic – and Sinopoli’s famed ear for detail – but rarely has a performance of this work opened its secrets with such astounding clarity. But you might not recognise the Philharmonia either. The sheer heft and muscle of the orchestra is impressive; it’s a mighty performance that’s trenchant, powerful and epic in its breadth. We are now able to see in the years since his death that his Richard Strauss wasn’t entirely honed in Dresden but in London. The same applies to his Bruckner. There are early examples of the Third, the Fourth and the Seventh; majestic, magnificent performances that highlight what Sinopoli would later achieve with the composer in Dresden. A Philharmonia Bruckner Fourth, given on tour in Japan, would be released some years after Sinopoli’s death on an NHK DVD. It is still available, as part of a series of filmed performances of Sinopoli conducting both the Dresden Staatskapelle and Vienna Philharmonic.

We are certainly able to get a more complete picture of what Sinopoli’s performances were like in the concert hall as opposed to in the studio, and this is largely thanks to small independent record labels, or private ones. His live Mahler could be every bit as revelatory as his Strauss, and there is enough of it today to make a complete cycle from live recordings. (This only became possible in 2020 with the discovery of a Mahler Seventh – from 1991 – with Das Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks – the coupling would be typical Sinopoli, some Boulez.) He seems to have had a particular affinity with the Sixth, leaving some three live performances behind: Philharmonia Orchestra, Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR and the Berliner Philharmoniker. All are remarkably similar – each of them has an Andante that goes over eighteen-minutes, for example. A Mahler Eighth was given with the Philharmonia in Tokyo; a Royal Festival Hall Mahler Fifth (again with the Philharmonia), from a concert given in memory of Lovro von Matacic, is electrifying. RAI, in Italy, issued a lavish boxed set of radio recordings of some repertoire which Sinopoli did not record commercially, such as Brahms, but mostly the set is devoted to Mahler. The Brahms symphonies are works it’s difficult to find many recordings of by Sinopoli; in all the years since his death I have never found a complete cycle of them.

Sinopoli could sometimes come off very flat in concert, almost as if he was just uninspired, and this affected his soloists as well. At the Salzburg Festival, with the Philharmonia, and just days after the 1990 London Prom, he did the Vier Letze Lieder with Jessye Norman and yet it is an uninvolved performance. In this sense it is a mirror to the DG recording with Cheryl Studer. On the other hand, he could go to the opposite extreme. At Luzerne in 1996 he would do the same songs with Felicity Lott and the Vienna Philharmonic and the performance is one of the greatest on record. Both orchestras, incidentally, play like Gods for him – something which orchestras tended to do for this conductor. If a Sinopoli performance goes awry it is not usually because of the orchestra.

There are two further performances it is worth mentioning – one because it might have suggested a future trajectory in Dresden. Sinopoli only recorded his Bruckner symphonies with the Staatskapelle, and of the symphonies he did put down on CD the one middle symphony missing was the Sixth. He did perform this work in March 1987 with the Philharmonia at the Royal Festival Hall, and a broadcast exists of it. He takes a massive view of the symphony – almost twenty minutes for the Adagio alone; and yet, he paces it all beautifully. I think it is reasonably fair to assume that Sinopoli would have recorded a complete Bruckner cycle, although this was a conductor who was never in a hurry to put his interpretations down on record. Some conductors rush to put an entire Beethoven cycle on record; I’m not entirely sure at the time of his death that Sinopoli had even conducted all of the symphonies. Certainly only a handful – an ‘Eroica’, a Seventh and a couple of Ninths – exist either on recordings or through concerts.

The other is one of his very final concerts, a Verdi Requiem given on 13th February 2001, as part of the annual Dresden Memorial Concert from the Frauenkirche. The performance is almost overwhelming in its grief although this is a reading of the work which doesn’t travel through unbearable darkness; rather it is guided by a kind of spiritual glow which could only be achieved from the event itself. The fact the performance has never been issued – except on limited edition CDs in Italy and Germany – has always been puzzling since it may have been a more accurate reflection of his final work than the one we were to get, the DG recording of Ariadne auf Naxos. Profil would eventually release a Dresden/Memorial Day Concert performance of the Verdi Requiem almost twenty years later; it would be with Christian Thielemann, however.

Profil would be one of the very few record labels to fill the gap in the Sinopoli discography. In one sense, the performances were well chosen: the Strauss Tone Poems were superb, even if Profil almost washed out the details in the orchestra by heavily filtering the sound. If you can find the original German broadcast of both the Heldenleben and Tod und Verklärung you will be considerably better served. The Dresden Mahler Ninth – considerably different in tone, structure and detail from his Philharmonia recording – is magnificent but of such length and intensity it requires patience to get through. Sinopoli was exacting, and this is very much a posterity version which the conductor may well have never authorised for release: the Dresdeners are imprecise. But then maybe it is this infallibility that is the whole point, about both the performance and about Sinopoli himself. Perhaps this Mahler Ninth is analogous to the Sinopoli question.

Up until his death, Sinopoli packed a huge amount into his reasonably compact musical career. Even today one could look back on it and describe it as meteoric. For over twenty years he had been principal conductor of two of the world’s finest orchestras; he had conducted opera at all of the major opera houses – including Bayreuth for over a decade. He had just renewed his contract in Dresden before his death; indeed, his relationship with the orchestra was said to have been extremely close. Had he lived it could arguably have gone one for a considerable number of further years. He was to have conducted another Ring cycle at Bayreuth in 2002. His career would seem to have been unstoppable.

At the time, all of this seemed improbable in some circles inevitable in others. This was how divisive Sinopoli was in his lifetime. Of all of the conductors of Sinopoli’s generation only Christoph Eschenbach has achieved a similar level of controversy; few, however, would suggest that Eschenbach has achieved the same musical distinction despite their careers following on rather similar parallels. The gap of twenty years between Sinopoli’s death and the current careers of Muti, Tilson Thomas, Slatkin, and even Barenboim is much narrower than one might think – narrow enough to come to the conclusion that Sinopoli would have out-paced all of them. When Maris Jansons died in 2019, he was, in my view, the greatest living interpreter of Richard Strauss; Giuseppe Sinopoli was already close to that in 2001.

But would Sinopoli even be conducting today?

Sinopoli’s life is a series of coincidental circles. His musical career began with a performance of Aida – and was cut short by one. His early life began not with music but with science. He began with composition at Darmstadt under Stockhausen; two days before he died he was to have received his degree in archaeology from Sapienza University. His conducting mentor Hans Swarowsky wrote one of the single most influential books on conducting, Wahrung der Gestalt; Sinopoli, entirely embracing his everyman credentials, would write Masterpieces of Greek Ceramics from the Sinopoli Collection. Nothing about Sinopoli was either conventional or predictable. And what would have happened during these missing twenty years is as unpredictable as the previous years of his unpredictable career.

The Europeans and Japanese were always more passionate about Sinopoli than the British were. That hasn’t changed much. Some of his recordings have attained some kind of classic stature – notably his Strauss operas; others still have some notoriety, but he certainly wouldn’t be the only conductor that has happened to. As with many conductors the discovery of live recordings after their death provides a different and more complex picture of their artistry. We can assess their art in a new light; reach new conclusions. That has happened with Sinopoli, just as it happened with Karajan, Cantelli, Carlos Kleiber and many others.

Giuseppe Sinopoli was many things and the gap of twenty years since his death has amplified these. He was the most complex, intellectual, and fascinating conductor of his generation. He was a Renaissance figure of extraordinarily wide learning who was probably not born to be a conductor at the time he was; he may even have been suited to an earlier century. He would likely have become the greatest conductor of his generation – or he may well have simply left the profession altogether. He was as unpredictable as he was misunderstood. Unconventional when conductors were the opposite. It is a career which is seen as incomplete but given Sinopoli’s genius for surprise it may well have been complete after all.

Marc Bridle, April 2021