本帖最后由 Jwang 于 2013-2-25 11:22 编辑
这篇把Celibidache 评的更不好了。
Reviews/Music; The Mystical Celibidache ConductsBy JOHN ROCKWELLPublished: April 23, 1989
One of the exciting aspects of New York's musical life is the event at which everybody who presumes to be anybody converges to check out the latest sensation. If the sensation happens to be controversial, all the better: then the everybody-anybodies stand around during the intermission and afterwards, when the mere audience is bravoing away, and discuss the concert with gushing enthusiasm, heated animation, bored indifference or cynical disdain.
Friday night was one of those events, when Sergiu Celibidache, the 76-year-old mystical authoritarian who has conducted the Munich Philharmonic for a decade, finally brought that orchestra to New York. The concert was the first of two at Carnegie Hall, part of a three-week North American tour.
Prior to this concert, Mr. Celibidache had conducted only once in the United States - a student ensemble from the Curtis Institute of Philadelphia at Carnegie in 1985. Although he has sanctioned no recordings in his maturity, Mr. Celibidache's fame has spread widely - as the last of the absolutist maestros, as one who insists on four or five times more rehearsals than anyone else, as the end of a mystical line of conductors stretching back through Wilhelm Furtwangler to Richard Wagner, as a mannered eccentric, as a fountain of spiritual pronouncements.
Friday's concert was very odd in several respects, but to this taste its virtues far outweighed its faults. The Munich Philharmonic is a big band, but not a great one; by normal reckonings, it doesn't even match the Bavarian Radio Orchestra in its own home town. Even with scrupulous preparation, the strings sounded thin and the ensemble rough. When it came to minute refinements, if not amplitude and confidence of tonal projection, the Curtis students were often better. Yet the Munich winds and especially the brass sounded first-class.
The second oddity was the program itself, almost a pops affair confined to pieces from the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Ravel's ''Rapsodie Espagnole,'' Richard Strauss's ''Don Juan'' and Ravel's orchestration of Mussorgsky's ''Pictures at an Exhibition.'' (There were no encores, despite long applause during Mr. Celibidache's ponderously choreographed bows by solo players and sections.) Odder still were many of the tempos. Occasionally Mr. Celibidache whipped things forward, but on the whole his tempos ranged from slow to slower. At times the music making sounded like the pianist who, as he learns a score, slows down a passage to pick it apart, only in this case Mr. Celibidache never bothered to speed things up again.
Here and there this almost phlegmatic gravity simply sapped the music of forward propulsion and excitement, or even of the pictorial vividness that was otherwise everywhere apparent. The ''Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle'' movement of the ''Pictures'' sounded gorgeous, but was less theatrical in its depiction of the pompous bourgeois and the wheedling opportunist than other performances have been.
To doubters, all this must have added up to mere self-indulgence. Anyone could get those results with that much rehearsal, some have complained. Others lament the willful distortion of the composer's intentions as stated in the scores and especially in the tempo indications.
And yet: Most of us regret the passage of the great Romantic performers of the past. But when one comes along, like some thawed-out dinosaur long frozen in a block of ice, we tend to reject him from the secure bastion of our clean-and-tidy modernist esthetic. For Mr. Celibidache, speed is not the only path to excitement: the subtle gradations of tension through exactly sculpted detail can achieve the same results.
Maybe other conductors could indeed achieve his remarkable sonic effects - most of which are specifically indicated in the scores, by the way. But the fact is, they don't - either out of habit, or a (perhaps false) belief that too much rehearsal kills spontaneity, or a simple capitulation to economic compromise.
Just as the Munich Philharmonic is not the world's greatest orchestra, Sergiu Celibidache is not the world's greatest conductor. But that doesn't make him the world's worst, or anyone else the best. He's just an extraordinarily fascinating musician whose performances - the charged teasing of the ''Rapsodie,'' the surging sexuality of the Strauss and the miracles of orchestral elegance in the Mussorgsky - will linger in the memory for a lifetime.
Sergiu Celibidache (The New York Times/Sal DiMarco Jr.)
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