Four conductors who would NOT make my list of "greatest Italian
conductors of the past century" are Giulini, Abbado, Muti, and Chailly,
although the only one I'd dismiss entirely would be Chailly. Giulini's
performances are generally too spineless for me. He lingers
expressively over the local detail at the expense of momentum. (A
friend of mine refers to Giulini as Goo-lini.) Performance after
performance by Giulini has passages that I admire, but there's often
insufficient momentum pressing on from one moment to the next, and way
too much flexibility in the projection of the global governing tempi
for my taste. His EMI Don Carlo is simply dull, deadly dull. I think
he's vastly overrated (in part because he looked like a conductor sent
from central casting and cultivated the image).
Abbado is generally very reliably solid, and he's much more likely to
catch fire live than in his solid but bland DGG recordings, but there
has never been anything terribly imaginative about his phrasing,
especially in Italian opera. I do very much like his (live) Vienna
Khovantschina on DGG and even his LSO Cenerentola and Barbiere, also on
DGG. Still, there are aspects of these Rossini pieces that largely
escape him, things for which you have to turn to somebody like Gui to
discover.
One conductor nobody has mentioned so far is Ettore Panizza, a mainstay
at the Met for many years. On the basis of my limited exposure to his
work, I'd rate Panizza very highly.
The "big name" Italian conductors I greatly admire boil down to two:
Gui, and with certain reservations, Toscanini. My reservations are the
usual ones: Toscanini's whipcrack performances tend toward the
monomaniacally overdriven. Still, all you have to do to see that he
still had a basically gorgeous Italianate sense of phrasing is to
compare him to Abbado or Muti. I don't agree with Mitch Kaufman that
they don't breathe, although they don't invariably breathe quite
enough. Better that than Giulini.
I also have the very greatest admiration for a whole host of Italian
so-called "routiniers," which simply means "conductors who made their
careers conducting Italian opera in the pits of opera houses rather
than conducting German music at the helm of symphony orchestras,"
including especially Antonino Votto and Francesco Molinari-Pradelli. I
never met a Votto performance I didn't like, including, for example,
the Fanciulla with Corelli and the Callas Vestale, both from La Scala.
Votto had all of Toscanini's virtues with none of his vices. Another
conductor in the Votto vein was Simonetto, whose Cetra Schicchi is
brilliantly conducted: he entirely avoids sentimentalizing "O, mio
babbino caro."
As for Molinari-Pradelli, he wasn't invariably "on," but even his
slackest performances reveal a wonderful sense of phrasing, and his
best performances--the Decca L'elisir with Gueden and Di Stefano, the
Philips Don Pasquale with Capecchi and Valdengo--will never be
surpassed.
I even find much to admire in Fausto Cleva. His RCA recording of Luisa
Miller and his Decca Wally are sensationally well conducted. Virtually
all of these guys are vastly underrated, and I've heard thrilling
performances lead by Previtali (the Gencer Vestale), Cillario (the
Gencer Caterina Cornaro), De Fabritiis (the Chicago Mefistofele with
Tebaldi), etc. etc. etc. I find Gabriele Santini a far more
distinctive and spirited conductor in the EMI Boccanegra than the
Abbado of the DGG Boccanegra. Whereas Santini provides an object
lesson in Italianate phrasing, Abbado is smooth, bland,
non-interventionist, and where there is a great disparity in tempi,
Santini's are invariably quicker.
Needless to say, there are performances by some of these conductors
that I actively dislike, including Previtali's studio Traviata with
Moffo, and there's very little from Alberto Erede that has impressed
me, but even in the case of Erede, there's at least one performance
that I quite like, his Decca Rigoletto with Gueden. I have certainly
never heard any performance from Abbado live or studio as distinctively
shaped.
I have ambivalent feelings about Gavazzeni that I don't have the energy
to attempt to characterize. Still, I do understand the enthusiasm of
others.
I have the depressing feeling that with the death of all the routiniers
of the 50's and 60's (and of Gui and Panizza and Toscanini), a whole
performance tradition has disappeared forever. I certainly haven't
heard anything from, say, Pappano, that can compare to the average
routinier-lead performance of the 50's and 60's.
-david gable