Arts Abroad; A Conductor Paris Didn't Send Back to the Kitchen (original) (raw)
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- May 14, 1998
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May 14, 1998
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Section E, Page
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Audiences at the Paris National Opera may often boo productions and sets, but, echoing the critics, they invariably applaud the orchestra and its American principal conductor, James Conlon.
Mr. Conlon, 48, is returning to his hometown, New York City, to conduct the New York Philharmonic in its first performance, on Thursday, of ''Die Seejungfrau'' (''The Mermaid'') by Alexander von Zemlinsky, a long-neglected 20th-century composer whose champion he has become.
Zemlinsky, a distinguished conductor and teacher in Austria in the early part of the century, fled the Nazis in the 1930's and died in obscurity in the United States at the age of 71 in 1942.
''He was Arnold Schoenberg's teacher, Alban Berg's teacher, he became the orchestra teacher of Anton Webern and Erich Korngold,'' Mr. Conlon said in Maria Callas's former dressing room in the 19th-century Palais Garnier, after rehearsing his own orchestra for a performance of the same work here this month.
''Zemlinsky was too modern for the conservatives and not avant-garde enough for the moderns, but in this piece he bares his soul,'' Mr. Conlon said, hoping he had shown the Paris orchestra how to pour out its own soul in the dense post-Romantic sonorities of Zemlinsky's tone poem.
''Zemlinsky was in love with Alma Schindler, a composition student of his who said she'd put in a good word for him with Gustav Mahler, and a few weeks later, in 1902, told him she was marrying Mahler,'' the conductor said. ''He was crushed, and wrote three operas in a row working out his feelings. This is the first work where he finds his own voice, though he thought of himself as the mermaid and Alma as the prince in the story.'' Mr. Conlon has recorded five compact disks of Zemlinsky works for EMI with the Cologne Philharmonic, his other European orchestra, with which he has a contract until the year 2000.
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