Word: waart
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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'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 De Waart at the Hong Kong Philharmonic. "So you get a more complete string picture in which the top voice is still perfectly clear, enriched by what's underneath. It's a brilliant idea." A blast of basso profundo - that's the only extra weight the maestro wants to carry in Sydney...
...Ambassador of the Sydney, Australia 2000 Olympic Arts Festival. The November 13 performance at Symphony Hall was also a part of BankBoston's annual Celebrity Series. This year also marks the 10th anniversary of the orchestra's 1988 American debut in Carnegie Hall. Led by Dutch conductor Edo de Waart, the orchestra makes its first appearance since then as they tour 11 U.S. cities, performing the music of Beethoven, Richard Strauss and contemporary composer Graeme Koehne...
...spirit. Conservative in the sense that they played it up-tempo, the Sydney Symphony brought the piece closer to what Beethoven probably had planned and closer in sound to Mozart. Reserved in the sense that the orchestra played No. 2 as a concerto and not as a symphony. De Waart's conducting gestures were never forced, were never angularly abrupt. This added to the fact that the muted vibrations of the orchestra and the sweet mellow tone of the piano actually, at times, cast more silence than resonance. Certainly, it was somewhat harrowing to hear the vast acoustics of Symphony...