Features: The Sound of Muti

BACKSTAGE AT THE ACADEMY OF Music, Muti’s home away from home away from home. He spends more time here during his hectic stays in Philadelphia than in his apartment a block away — which explains why his apartment is still decorated like the Academy House model, with only a few family photos personalizing the rooms. The room backstage at the Academy sees dozens of different Mutis during the maestro’s four months a year here. Against one wall is a black desk with an armchair. This is the chair he sits in while holding court after rehearsals or performances. The rest of his entourage, speaking in Italian and English, generally stand near the walls, giving Muti room for his aura as he greets friends, players, audience members. Across from the chair is the baby grand piano, where Muti sometimes sits and plays. On the other side of the room is a low, white, modem sofa, next to which Muti stood yesterday while talking rapidly in Italian to his wife, Cristina, who has accompanied him on this trip. A beautiful and energetic woman, she is also said to be Muti’s best critic — a former singer with an excellent ear and a perfect understanding of what her husband hopes to achieve musically. They spoke animatedly and seriously about how the rehearsal went, while Domenico, their blond 5-year-old son, crawled on the floor around their legs.

Today Muti takes the white chair at the other end of the couch and talks to a reporter. There is a Muti that his friends in Philadelphia speak about. Those close to him — orchestra people like executive director Steve Sell or concertmaster Norman Carol; transplanted Italians like Dino, his barber, or the owners of some of the Italian restaurants Muti frequents, such as II Gallo Nero or Monte-Carlo Living Room — say the maestro is well-versed in many subjects. He likes to talk about literature, politics, art; he visits the Philadelphia Museum of Art regularly. When he’s relaxed he can be humorous and loose. During a rehearsal break, his wife passes around pictures of the Mutis taken during a recent visit to Sesame Place. But most often Riccardo Muti wants to talk about music, and today is no exception. Demonstrating the same control with which he rules his rehearsals, his performances and his career, he takes immediate command of the conversation, relinquishing it only when he is called away to his next appointment.

"The interpreter is not a composer, but in some way he is a creator," he begins. "Fortunately, with music, we cannot create exactly the same thing every time. One of the most exhilarating experiences is when you are with your orchestra and they play three times the same chord in the same piece and, if you are careful, the chord is never the same. The same players playing the same notes, with the same conductor, but the reaction of each player is different every time. Because maybe one part of the orchestra will be very’ attentive on the first part and the second time they’ll be less interested, or they will play with more vibrato, less vibrato, more bow, less bow, more intensity, less intensity, and the combinations of things give the chord a different quality.

"It’s like the sea. When you see it’s always the same, but it’s never the same, because the wind you have the waves, but always in a different way."

Unfortunately, not every conductor has this sort of appreciation. "Today of conducting is becoming like Muti says. "Everybody today decides to become a conductor the next day. You have a singer, a flute player, a tympanist — they decide they will conduct. But what do they know about an orchestra?

"To beat time is not to conduct. A conductor is somebody that with the help of his arms is able to bring his musicians and to the public. And you can be very spectacular with your but maybe you have nothing in your mind. For a conductor who is a real conductor you do with your arms must be natural. I mean, you must have a good technique on the podium — you must not
do nonsense on the podium — but nothing is prepared 100 percent. I don’t go to the podium knowing that if I want this particular crescendo I’ll do this
movement. The movement of my arm at that moment is a result of what I feel.

"There is a basic language orchestra understands. If I beat in four, I know that I must beat a ceratin way. This a convention so that in Philadelphia, in Milano, in four the conductor does one, two, three, four. But this is just the beat.

"What happens between one and two, two and three, three and four … " be says, shaking his head and grinning slightly, "… that is the music and that is infinita, there is no end. Between one and two there is a space that you need your entire life to make full."

Muti mentions Arturo Toscanini, the great Italian conductor of the ’30s and ‘ 40s, inspired tyrant whose career Muti has studied: in part to emulate the intensity he wrenched from his players, in part to avoid the violent havoc Toscanini wreaked on his orchestras, throwing batons at them, throwing scores at them, even spitting on them in fits of anger. The era of that sort of tyrannical behavior by conductors is over. Some say it ended when Muti took over for Ormandy.
"I remember something Toscanini said about conducting," Muti continues. "He said, ‘don’t disturb the orchestra.’ It is a very difficult phrase to understand. Because when you have rehearsed everything and it is ready. . . there is a natural way that is the right way. With your arm you can create a confusion. Although he was the one who killed his players, the more he needed precision, the less he conducted, because your eyes can be distracted and you need to hear, not to look .

"This is a very difficult phrase to understand," he says again. Then, he suddenly stands up and offers to shake hands with the reporter. In mid-explanation, he is saying goodbye. He isn’t rude about it, just very straightforward and pleasant. He has to be somewhere else; he was supposed to be there ten minutes ago but got interested in what he was saying. Now he really must go.

But Muti expands on the Toscanini point during the performance that evening — silently, in his conducting. During the Gluck Orfeo, there are moments of crystalline elegance, the delicate beauty of the passage when Orpheus walks through the Elysian fields on the way to rescue his true love from death. The music is complex — in a lecture before the performance, Muti had explained how Gluck had layered seven different kinds of orchestral sounds to achieve an effect that could only be described as the musical equivalent of prayer, or perhaps answered prayer. When the orchestra reaches that section, Muti all but stops conducting, simply watching, listening, occasionally cueing a tiny change in the sound. The audience is so taken that they divert their eyes from Muti, from the players, from the gold and red columned interior of the Academy. They are alone, each one of them, with the music. And so is Riccardo Muti.