Abbado dips into mortality's fierce depths

Claudio Abbado has never been one to shock. Quite the opposite, he's Mr. Conciliatory. When he conducts Arnold Schoenberg, the music looks backward to Brahms. When accompanying Ivo Pogorelich at his most willful, Abbado gamely halted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra while the pianist ruminated over Chopin, maybe striking gold, maybe not. His guest-conducting years with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the pre-Riccardo Muti 1970s, reportedly showed him to be a more adept glossmeister than Eugene Ormandy.

Not recently. At age 74, he conducts Debussy's La Mer like an apocalyptic hurricane. His Bruckner Symphony No. 4 doesn't just knock on heaven's door, it bursts through it, cleanly and decisively. His Mahler dissonances nag at the ear - ones that he, and most other conductors, previously glossed over. The corporate, me-too conductor who turned "playing safe" into an all-too-imitated artistic platform has turned his back on himself.

That's why his cancellation of Carnegie Hall's opening night this month with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra not only takes the wind out of the season's sails but also has many in the symphonic world a-tremble. The fear is a recurrence of the stomach cancer that left him aged and frail about seven years ago - and artistically transformed. Similar sea changes were observed in Leonard Bernstein and Wolfgang Sawallisch. The common denominator is a confrontation with mortality, the situations with both Bernstein and Sawallisch being the loss of their wives.

Suddenly, Beethoven symphony opportunities don't stretch infinitely into the future. No longer can you enjoy having a provisional viewpoint on them. You care less what critics and audiences think. Most significant, sorrow can open up huge, untapped emotional vistas. Giving such concerts must be gratifying, but carries such a price that Bernstein - who likened music-making to possession by an outside force - had to be selective about his concert life. Giving yourself over to music on that level, he said, can't happen constantly.

Interpretive viewpoints inevitably change over the years. OK, there's Van Cliburn, who believes you've either hit the mother lode or you haven't, and once you have, you stay there. The more prevalent model is Artur Rubinstein: That pianist's work is documented through most stages of his career, and can be heard in a decades-long progression from a freewheeling romanticism to Olympian classicism. Not only did phrasing details evolve continuously, but so did the most outward elements of his playing: When he was younger, the contour of the phrase dictated frequently shifting tempos. Later, the tempos became the more formal but not-inflexible frame that enshrined the long-cultivated phrase readings.

But while Rubinstein slowly morphed a stylish bungalow into a monument, Abbado (continuing the house analogy) has maintained the same exterior facade, and at times seems not even to have moved the furniture. Yet what it all says is almost the opposite of what went before.

His famous surface polish was ingratiating during his London Symphony Orchestra years, from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s. The gloss, in fact, gave needed luster to problem works he resurrected, such as Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina and Schubert's Fierrabras, during his late-'80s Vienna State Opera tenure. Not until he ascended to the Berlin Philharmonic in 1989 did the gloss become an end in itself: When his orchestra dropped one of its gold-plated notes, it all but went "clang" as it hit the floor. After a 1992 Salzburg Festival performance of Janacek's From the House of the Dead - in which Abbado succeeded in softening every possible edge of this bleak Dostoyevsky-based prison drama - I dismissed him completely.

Amid the recording industry's late-1990s downturn, Abbado was chief among the culprits: He epitomized all that was posh, meaningless and dispensable. Some of his discs barely sold at all, but their mere presence on the market ruined the territory for others who had more to say.

Contrast that with the 2006 live recording of The Magic Flute - a Mozart opera that in some ways gives the conductor less to do. One critic and listener after another talks about Abbado's magic touch, and I agree. It's still a well-oiled Abbado machine. What's different? Nothing and everything.

Abbado's Lucerne Webcast from Aug. 23 of Mahler's Symphony No. 3 (no doubt similar to what might have unfolded at Carnegie Hall had he not canceled) contained no radical interpretive decisions. Yet all the symphony's famously disparate elements - its quirky marches and eruptive climaxes - had a greater sense of confrontation. The surface polish is there, but timbres are intensified. In addition, there are facets, sparks and highlights that somehow draw you inside the orchestration rather than keeping you on the surface. Abbado was never one to let you hear the gearshifts of complex meters, but that smoothness has taken on such an inexorable sense of movement, you want to jump out of the way.

Less tangible elements no doubt have an incremental effect on the magnitude of the overall impact. The sad part is that for every Rubinstein who enjoys a long, healthy, fruitful relationship with music, there are cases such as Abbado, whose newfound fierceness and unflinching awareness exist like some unstable chemical compound.

Arturo Toscanini, for one, once said that true performances of Tristan und Isolde would be forbidden because nobody would be able to stand their intensity. Much the same could be said about Sawallisch's Shostakovich or Bernstein's Tchaikovsky, which became overwhelming in their widower years. Given how short those periods were - Sawallisch had five years, Bernstein 10 - you wonder if achieving greatness takes years off your life.

Were I to resort to romantic-era thinking, I'd say that a human constitution already weakened by age perhaps can't accommodate being a medium for the godlike force that music, at its ultimate best, can be. That's metaphysical silliness, of course - and it makes a certain amount of sense.