This month, sparks fly as Lionel Choi reflects on the electrifying career of maestro Sir Georg Solti, who left this world on 5 September 1997 at the age of 84.
Just over a month after the passing of legendary pianist Sviatoslav Richter on August 1st, which the music world is still trying to get over, we discover with dismay that the time has also come for Sir Georg Solti, one of the most important figures in classical music.
It is quite a pity that outside Chicago, a city forever indebted to Solti for having brought more than two decades' worth of energy to its cultural life, the rest of the world was too busy mourning the losses of Mother Teresa and Diana, Princess of Wales. Even in London, where Solti, a naturalized British citizen since 1972, was very active, grief-stricken Britons were too caught up with coming to terms with the passing of a princess in a car crash to remember and honour the Budapest-born maestro.
His most significant contributions to the British music scene was through his close associations with the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden and the London Philharmonic. It was opera that got this piano prodigy's conducting career started. Before he assumed directorship of the Royal Opera, he had already garnered a considerable reputation, having begun at 17 as a conductor with the Budapest Opera, then taking on the Bavarian State Opera (1946) and the Frankfurt Opera (1952) before he made his American debut with the San Francisco Opera in 1953.
But Solti was not to be confined to the orchestra pit in opera houses. As he did to his dying day, he sought to expand his repertoire quickly and widely. Replacing Jean Martinon as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) in 1969 was easily the most important step he had ever taken in his illustrious career. That was the start to a conductor-orchestra relationship so tightly-knitted that even Daniel Barenboim, who, in 1991, replaced Solti and brought the latter's 22-year reign to an end, will find difficult to shrug off as he tries to impose his own style.
Indeed, Solti more or less did for the CSO what George Szell did for his Cleveland Orchestra, and Eugene Ormandy for the Philadelphia. No doubt that the CSO was already a world-class orchestra in the earlier days under Fritz Reiner, but it was Solti who brought it to unprecedented prominence beyond American borders. He was the first to lead it on a European tour in 1971, and also made many recordings with it.
I recall with much fascination Solti's unrelenting drive, brilliance and energy, so evident in nearly all his recordings. The power he possessed as a conductor belied what one saw in his small, diminutive figure. Known by orchestra members as the autocratic "screaming skull", he yelled very often at his players. The uninitiated would undoubtedly have felt terrorized, while the experienced submitted with profound respect and admiration.
Many have tried to explain this powerful Solti
phenomenon in various ways. Perhaps what propelled him was "a
sense of duty and gratitude towards the art that saved his life
in wartime and the eternal insecurity of the refuge", or
so writer Norman Lebrecht speculated.
Whatever the reasons, I
attribute much of his style to his ethnic Hungarian origins, and the influence of his Hungarian
mentors, Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly, and of Arturo Toscanini,
for whom Solti played at the Salzburg Festival in 1937. These
legendary musical giants were themselves very colourful, vibrant
and effervescent servants of music.
It comes as no surprise that Solti is reputed to be a champion of Bartok's music. He had that keen ability to punch Bartok's brilliant, colourful folk-inspired musical ideas across with a panache, bright-eyed alertness, youthful impetuosity and a distinctly Hungarian fervour that still elude many of his Western contemporaries. (I laughed when I heard Karajan's attempt at the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.)
Solti often applied that same explosive, restless style to everything else he conducted, and while the energy he brought to the music was often very infectious and enjoyable, it sometimes posed a serious problem. I recall with some reservation, inter alia, his jarring account of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, his viscerally exciting but superficial Shostakovich Eighth, and a clinical Beethoven Sixth, all with the CSO.
"I wanted discipline, precision," said Solti.
But, for all his zealous quest for exactitude, Solti still managed to surprise us very often. His famous collaboration with soprano Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, for example, has sparked off some really passionate, emotional, mellow music-making. Hear how he relaxes beautifully for her to melt hearts in Mozart's Porgi Amor, or how he penetrates into a whole new realm of emotions as she sings her heart and tears out in Richard Strauss' Beim Schlafengehen from the 'Four Last Songs'.
And there was also much lyrical poise and warmth in his work with violinist Kyung Wha Chung, notably in the Elgar and Berg concertos and Bartok's First.
Back in the 80s, Solti was often placed alongside Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan, both of whom died in 1990 and 1989 respectively, and the trio was hailed as the last three great conductors of their generation. In a way, this association was most apt, for they complemented each other perfectly. While Solti the effervescent octogenarian was the exact opposite of Karajan, who possessed the traditional, cerebral Germanic sense of structure and sound, Bernstein, the highly-charged romantic, stood right in between the two. To put it simply, Bernstein cried out from the heart, Karajan spoke from the mind, and Solti snapped on sure instinct and gut feeling.
As we mourn Solti's death, we all know we can still call on his extensive, award-winning discography, and experience again and again the brilliant explosions and dazzling fireworks that made Sir Georg Solti.
(The writer, who was vacationing in England in June, is still wondering whether he should have invested £250 to catch what turned out to be Solti's final appearance at Covent Garden in Verdi's Simon Boccanegra.)
Solti's Selected Discography
Listen
to Solti conducting the CSO in Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra.
Interesting Fact File
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Copyright © 1997 Lionel H Y Choi