News that Claudio Abbado has had to cancel his tour to Japan with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra "due to reasons of my health" is, most obviously, a major disappointment for Japanese music lovers. I wrote last month about how powerful this year's performances of unfinished symphonies by Schubert and Bruckner were with this orchestra - that astonishing assemblage of musicians, friends of Abbado's from a lifetime of music-making, with its core of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, which he has convened every year since 2003. According to one of the LFO's violinists, Etienne Abelin, the final concert of the Bruckner was a still more shattering encounter with the ultimate questions of musical and human existentialism than the one I saw; "no words, only tears as far as I'm concerned", Abelin told me.
That Abbado recovered from a life-threatening illness at the start of the new century and went to go on to conceive and conduct this orchestra of his dreams is one of the minor miracles of recent musical history. They have created what I've described as a virtuosity not just of playing, but of listening in orchestral music, a charmed circle of musical community that starts with Abbado's relationship with the score, extends to his musicians, and reaches out to his audience, however they're listening or watching.
You don't have to take my word for it: watch Abbado's Mahler, Bruckner, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, and others, on film and see what you think.
Abbado has had the energy also to set up still another orchestral project in the last decade, the young chamber players of Orchestra Mozart, which he conducts in London on the 1 October with pianist Martha Argerich. Here's hoping that Abbado doesn't have to cancel this concert as well; do whatever you need to for a ticket, is my advice.
