Masters were ahead of their times: Caetani

Oleg Caetani will conduct Thursday's The Great Tradition. Photo / Supplied

There are familiar names on the bill for Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra's Thursday concert. A return visit from cellist Torleif Thedeen is always welcome and many will remember conductor Oleg Caetani for his thrilling Shostakovich Eleventh with the orchestra in 2007.

When I catch up with Caetani, he seems to downplay the significance of being the son of a celebrated conductor, Igor Markevitch, stressing instead his studies with names like Franco Ferrara ("an enormous talent") and the Russian Ilya Musin.

Working under the legendary Kirill Kondrashin was less rewarding. "Kondrashin gave me good advice rather than helping my development as a conductor," he shrugs. "He was a strong personality and an interesting man but not a refined musician."

And refinement is what it's all about, Caetani adds. "Rough musicians don't bring much".

Spending some years on the German opera and concert circuit found the young conductor focusing on the orchestral, as the East German singers were, as he puts it, "not so good".

"I wanted to make contact with the traditional sound of the German orchestra," he continues. "A big tradition with a particular dark sound and a way of playing."

Now Caetani finds himself on the other side of the globe, having been at the helm of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra since 2005. Even in Melbourne, there are strong European connections.

"The string players, many of whom come from Eastern Europe, have that rich, dark sound while the wind players, who very much follow the French tradition, have a more transparent sound - the perfect combination for Tchaikovsky." Last year Caetani and his orchestra were responsible for the first complete set of the composer's symphonies to be recorded Downunder.

I remind him that Tchaikovsky was on the programme for his 2007 APO concert, with John Chen playing the Second Piano Concerto. Caetani has just worked with Chen again, doing Gershwin with the MSO and praises the pianist's "very beautiful sound and incredible technique".

Thursday's concert is titled The Great Tradition and Webern's Orchestral Pieces of Opus 6 can be traced very much from late Mahler, says Caetani. "Webern's first works were very much in the Late Romantic style but by 1910, in these pieces, we're in a new world, more purified, more sensual."

He draws parallels with the painter Kandinsky's move from the figurative to the abstract and, as for Webern's legendary conciseness and compression, "if you gather together all of Webern's works, they would still be shorter than the shortest Wagner opera".

Caetani, who has recorded the music of such obscure names as Alexandre Tansman and Rudi Stephan, despairs at the difficulty of placing even Bartok and Schoenberg on concert programmes. "The public, instead of getting more and more adventurous, is getting more and more traditionally minded," he sighs. "They always want to hear the same things. Too many these days still consider Bartok, Webern and even Janacek to be modern music."

Yet, as he points out, Thursday's Haydn Cello Concerto, with soloist Torleif Thedeen, was "modern for its day, with elements that look forward to Weber and Mendelssohn".

Thursday's programme will end with the First Symphony of Brahms, a composer who Caetani insists "has more links with classical Vienna than with the later romantic composers".

Even Brahms had his modern side. "We shouldn't see Brahms as a conservative composer, but as one who was truthful to his own feelings and worked independently of the fashions of the time."

Performance

What: Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra
Where and when: Auckland Town Hall, Thursday at 8pmConductor says concert goers are becoming too traditionalist.