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Italian Music

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jowcol
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« Reply #15 on: January 13, 2014, 11:38:28 am »

Music of Victor de Sabata-- Continued

Conducting style
De Sabata's conducting style combined the fiery temperament, iron control and technical precision of Toscanini with greater spontaneity and attention to orchestral color.[38] He was exceptionally demanding of his players: according to one musician: "Those eyes and ears missed nothing ... the players had been made to work harder than ever before and they knew that, without having been asked to play alone, they had been individually assessed".[39] On the podium he "seemed to be dancing everything from a tarantella to a sabre dance".[40] Norman Lebrecht describes him as "a musician whose mild manners turned to raging fury whenever he took stick in hand".[41] One critic used the phrase "lull and stun" to summarize his technique.[42]

A violinist in the London Philharmonic Orchestra compared de Sabata with Sir Thomas Beecham, saying that while Beecham made the orchestra "red hot", de Sabata made it white hot.[15] Another player described de Sabata's appearance when conducting as "a cross between Julius Caesar and Satan".[39] Double-bass player Robert Meyer, who has played under many leading conductors including Furtwängler, Karajan, Klemperer, Giulini, Walter, Koussevitzky and Stokowski,[43] describes de Sabata as "undoubtedly the finest conductor I have ever encountered".[36] He conducted rehearsals, as well as concerts, from memory.[44]

A musician who played under both Toscanini and de Sabata at La Scala compared them, saying,

    [Toscanini] wasn't like "Dede" – De Sabata: he, too, was a great conductor, but he was changeable. One day he would be fine and would conduct a certain way; the next day he would be full of aches and pains and would conduct a different way. He was always somewhat ill. He, too, would be transformed, once he picked up the baton... and I must admit that Tristan und Isolde made an even bigger impression when De Sabata conducted it than with Toscanini. Toscanini was perfection: upright, even. De Sabata, on the other hand, pushed and pulled the music. Afterwards, when Toscanini had left, De Sabata was the only one who could take his place. Despite his faults, he, too, was a great conductor and a musician of the highest order. Once, in Turandot, he heard a mistake made by the third trombone, and it was discovered to be a printer's error that not even Toscanini had caught.[45]

Conductor Riccardo Chailly reports that de Sabata would have the strings sing along with the trombone glissandi at the climax of Ravel's Boléro, and that Chailly himself asks orchestras to do the same thing.[46]

Criticism
Toscanini did not approve of de Sabata's conducting style or of many of his interpretations: he considered the younger man's gestures to be too flamboyant.[21] Puccini wrote in a letter dating from 1920 that "although [De Sabata] is an excellent musician of the other school – that is, the modern school – he can't, and does not know how to, conduct my music."[47]

Anecdotes of musical abilities
There are several extraordinary anecdotes of Victor de Sabata's musical abilities.

After de Sabata was shown the score for the first time of Elgar's Enigma Variations, the next day he conducted a rehearsal of the work from memory and pointed out several errors in the orchestral parts which no-one, including Elgar himself, had noticed previously.[48]

During a rehearsal of Respighi's Pines of Rome in London, de Sabata "demonstrated the bowing and fingering of the high cello part in the first movement by playing it—without even a glance at the part. The pianist asked for advice about the solo cadenza, which de Sabata also played by heart. In the rehearsal interval, he asked the flicorni for the final movement to play their brass fanfares. They did. 'What are you playing?' he asked. 'It is an octave higher.' 'Can't be done, Maestro.' ... The Maestro borrowed one of their instruments and blew the correct notes in the right octave."[49] (this anecdote is all the more impressive when one knows that the flicorno (saxhorn) is an instrument usually associated with brass bands and very rarely used in a symphony orchestra).

"A visitor [to La Scala] rehearsing Tristan asked Victor de Sabata to take the baton while he tested the sound from the centre of the auditorium. Needless to say, the sound he heard was totally different from the one he produced. De Sabata, without uttering a word, asserted his dominance of the orchestra just by standing there".[50] When Herbert von Karajan was making his own recording of Tosca in 1962, he would often ask his producer John Culshaw to play selections from the de Sabata/Callas recording to him. Culshaw reports that "One exceptionally tricky passage for the conductor is the entry of Tosca in act 3, where Puccini's tempo directions can best be described as elastic. Karajan listened to de Sabata several times over during that passage and then said, 'No, he's right but I can't do that. That's his secret.'"[51]

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