While many conductors rush to the podium, bursting with energy, 60-year-old Daniele Gatti from Milan strolls onto the stage of the Munich Isar Philharmonic. And then often not to conduct the fabulously playing Munich Philharmonic. Then Gatti, who avoids grand gestures, lowers his arms and listens to the musicians. He knows very well that he doesn’t play the music, but rather, as chief animator, makes it possible for the musicians to surpass themselves. In addition, Gatti loves the quiet (when does an orchestra play a good 80 percent of the program on the piano?), clarity, elegance and a visionary intellectuality. Gatti is not only a modern musician in terms of leadership style, where emotion, insight and skill breathe with the music. Gatti is a laid-back minimalist.
Gatti shows all of this at the start of the two programs with which the Philharmonic are now traveling to Hamburg and Paris, in Wolfgang A. Mozart’s 29th Symphony. Gatti takes the piece seriously with a smile, he lets play virtuoso with understatement, he enchants, dreams, jokes and nonsense. This results in a magical classicism far removed from the approach that asserts importance through austerity, which Nikolaus Harnoncourt made socially acceptable for Mozart. This is how Gatti approaches Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, written in mortal danger following the Stalinist crackdown just before the start of World War II. War and the fear of death are also omnipresent in Gatti’s interpretation, but even more so despair and loneliness. They dominate here, the outbursts and death marches and sound battles are futile attempts to escape the desperate solitude.
This Bruckner combines boldness, desperation and construction frenzy
Max Bruch’s famous violin concerto, played flawlessly traditionally by Renaud Capuçon, looks like a foreign body. Especially since Gatti in Anton Bruckner’s Ninth, which only has three movements because it is unfinished, repeatedly lets the musicians march spectacularly more violently than with Shostakovich. It sounds like a whole world is being smashed. On the other hand, there are the many ominous soundscapes into which Gatti has engraved mathematically calculated short motifs like abstract symbols. This Bruckner combines boldness, desperation and construction frenzy. It fascinates, but is definitely not in the tradition of the Bruckner interpretations of the Philharmoniker and has nothing to do with the esoteric sound incantations of Sergiu Celibidache, to which Valery Gergiev, who had just been sacked because of his closeness to Putin, still worshiped. It is therefore questionable whether the fascinatingly idiosyncratic Gatti has a chance of becoming his successor.