Unvarnished Symphonies

By Michael Walsh

Conductor Carlos Kleiber makes old works sound fresh

His concentration is so intense that when conducting Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier at La Scala, he never noticed the earthquake that rattled the giant chandelier. He suffers from such crippling stage fright that he vomited onto the score of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde during a performance in Stuttgart. He is such a perfectionist that he demanded, and got, 34 rehearsals for Berg's Wozzeck in Munich. He is so much the misanthrope that he can terrify performers; "I like it very much," he once told a blushing soprano. "I like it very much if you would not sing any more." Clearly, Carlos Kleiber is no ordinary maestro.

Eccentric, surely; demanding, assuredly. But, above all, brilliant. Like an expert art restorer who clears away centuries of grime to reveal a painting in its native, pristine glory, Kleiber, 52, strips away the varnish from some of music's most tradition-encrusted masterworks to expose the vital creation still lurking beneath. His infrequent performances have become events in Europe: Tristan at Bayreuth, Wozzeck, Die Fledermaus and La Traviata at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, Otello at La Scala. Last week, for only the second time, Kleiber came to the U.S. for a series of three orchestral concerts with the Chicago Symphony.

Kleiber's performances are broad, expansive and sometimes ferociously radiant. For him the musical line is paramount, colored and heightened with innumerable fine details. In the English Idyll No. 1, a rarely heard pastorale by George Butterworth, a British composer killed in World War I, Kleiber captured the gentle work's Constable-like air with tenderness and restraint. Yet a brief, Tristan-like phrase in the strings did not go unremarked; at one stroke, the piece became darker, more complex and emotionally deeper.

In the Mozart Symphony No. 33, Kleiber again strove for a seamless quality, but his insistence on lyricism at the expense of rhythmic vitality made the music overly reflective. The Brahms Second Symphony, however, was masterly. Here, the conductor's quest for the telling detail paid off in a performance of striking subtlety, yet one infused with granitic strength. "Under him, every note comes alive," says Concertmaster Victor Aitay with awe. "That's why we are here, not to play the Brahms Second Symphony for the 2,000th time, but for the first time."

Probably no other major conductor has built an international reputation on as small an output as Kleiber's. This is due to his fierce, even frantic, insistence that conditions must be perfect or he will cancel. Unlike most musicians, who thrive on the cheers of the crowds, Kleiber is indifferent to the glamour of performing. He prefers to stay home in suburban Munich with his wife and two children, savoring his large collections of literature and recordings. Interviews are out. Says Peter Jonas, artistic administrator of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, who handled the delicate negotiations with Kleiber: "He has never worried about his position in society. He is a perfectionist, and he does what he thinks is right, regardless."

As rare as his personal appearances are, Kleiber's recordings are even rarer. There are only nine releases, comprising four operas, five symphonies and a piano concerto with Soloist Sviatoslav Richter. His most recent album, a Tristan with a vocally splendid Margaret Price as Isolde, is vintage Kleiber: a sharply focused series of violent encounters, whose accumulated tension is finally dissipated only by the glorious release of Isolde's Liebestod.

The disc that first brought Kleiber widespread renown was his 1975 recording of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. With the musicians of the Vienna Philharmonic following his baton as if their lives depended on it, which perhaps they did, Kleiber fashioned a performance that unfolded with the clarity of a Euclidean proposition, yet had the intensity of a hammer blow. Hailed as a revelation, it was, more accurately, a literal re-creation of what the composer put down on paper: it was as if Homer had come back to recite the Iliad.

It is rare for children of famous performers to be successful in the same field, but Kleiber appears to have inherited his gifts from his father, Conductor Erich Kleiber. Yet Carlos has achieved his eminence almost in spite of, not because of his father. "What a pity he is 'musical,' " lamented the elder Kleiber to his wife in 1939. Born in Berlin, but raised in South America when the family exiled itself from Nazi Germany, young Carlos was sent to Switzerland to study chemistry at first. His talent, however, proved irresistible, and in 1954 he made his conducting debut in Potsdam. He worked his way through the ranks of provincial opera houses, stopping in Duesseldorf, Zurich and Stuttgart. Since 1968 Kleiber has confined his activity to only a handful of major cities.

Despite his fearsome reputation, Kleiber in Chicago was affable, even humorous in rehearsals, often illustrating his musical goals with an apt visual image (an adroit polyglot, he speaks six languages). Requesting a brief ritard in the Mozart, he told the musicians that the passage should go "like a parent tugging a child away from a toy-store window as they walk along the street." After the first run-through of the Brahms finale, Kleiber turned to the sea of sober faces before him, put down his baton and inquired, "Don't you ever smile?" The next reading had just the quality of exultation he was seeking.

Such an unorthodox approach was not universally admired. Some players found Kleiber difficult to follow, his beat unclear. "He has a rather poor communication technique with the baton," complained a cellist. But it is part of his method not to beat time relentlessly; any traffic cop can do that. Rather, Kleiber strives for a chamber music ideal, in which each member of the ensemble must listen to his colleagues. "He is leading the players to a conception, rather than simply giving a beat to follow," notes Jonas. Alas, those conceptions from Kleiber are far too few in number. All the more reason, then, to prize them for the marvelous moments they are and to wish, however futilely, that music could be like this more often.

--By Michael Walsh. Reported by Franz Spelman/Munich

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