Word: gelmetti
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...career has followed an eccentric path. A junior swimming champion, Gelmetti initially studied composition and classical guitar before finding a mentor in the somewhat mystical figure of Sergiu Celibidache, the Romanian-born conductor who famously declared that recorded music was like kissing a dead woman. As principal conductor at the Stuttgart Radio Symphony and the Monte Carlo Philharmonic, Gelmetti later found success - but not fame. Instead, when the SSO's then artistic administrator began telling international arts managers about Gelmetti's appointment in 2002, "many of them had never heard of him," Calnin recalls. "I think it's because...
What they've come to expect is a more expressive conducting style than that of his sometimes stern-faced predecessor, Dutchman Edo de Waart. Gelmetti's performance of Ravel's Bol?ro two years ago has already passed into Sydney folklore. Loose of hip, his stomach thrust forward, he seemed to coax Ravel's rhapsodic wave out of his shoulders. Seeing him perform the same piece with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra a year before, the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel went so far as to say, "Gelmetti conducts with his stomach." Whatever the case, his expansive enjoyment of the music is infectious...
Such is "the Italian sunshine" that De Waart hoped Gelmetti would bring to the technically assured SSO. With his arrival at the orchestra, Rome would seem to come to Sydney, as the Verdi Requiem marketing goes. "He was born in Rome" - to a businessman father and poetess mother - "and he's deeply Roman," Gelmetti's Rome Opera concertmaster Vicenzo Bolognese has said. "Romans can keep the right distance with power - a true Roman can act politically without becoming too involved." As chief conductor since April 2000, Gelmetti has helped revive that city's ailing Opera House, as well...
...Gelmetti likens conducting to erecting a cathedral of sound. "With a cathedral, you must have the right proportions, the right balance," he says. Already he's begun tinkering with the SSO's architecture. Building from the foundations up, he'd like to hold master classes - as he does each summer at Siena's Accademia Chigiana - with young Australian conductors, to fill the ranks left by expat stars Simone Young and Sir Charles Mackerras. "We have a fantastic orchestra, fantastic soloists, good composers - why we have not conductors?" he asks with a rhetorical flourish...
...Gelmetti's pet project is to create a distinctively Sydney sound. For this he'd like to add volume and depth to the strings' middle and low registers. "In orchestras around the world, we have 16 first violins and eight bass. It's a nonsense!" he proclaims. "It's absolutely unbalanced." Gelmetti's quest for a Sydney sound begins in earnest this week. For the Verdi Requiem, he's bolstered both the cello and double-bass desks, as the composer originally intended. "He's played with that a bit in Sydney and it's fabulous," reports Calnin, now with...