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Riccardo Chailly and the World's Oldest Orchestra at Disney Hall

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The sunny Italian conductor Riccardo Chailly has a knack for landing where youd least expect him and making a go of it. He is music director of what used to seem the eternally starchy Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.

They began a U.S. tour with a Beethoven date in the Walt Disney Concert Hall on Wednesday night. This German orchestra, the worlds oldest, is starchy no more.

Just how old is the Leipzig ensemble, which takes its name from its concert hall, the Gewandhaus?

Mendelssohn became its music director in 1835 and was on hand to celebrate the bands 100th anniversary in 1843. Another way to look at it is to note that in 1835, Leipzigs orchestra was one year older than the Los Angeles Philharmonic is today.

Chailly, who turns 57 Saturday, has an interesting background. From a distinguished Italian musical family, he spent part of a rebellious Beatles-besotted boyhood in Milan as a rock drummer. A quarter century ago, he made his L.A. Philharmonic debut hailed as the next hot young conductor. He was not invited back.

In 1988, at 35 and best known for conducting opera and championing contemporary music, he was appointed music director of Amsterdams fabled Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, where the public happened to be antagonistic to Latin flash and anything very modern. Over the next 16 years, however, he made the Concertgebouw a far more relevant institution to the vibrant Amsterdam cultural scene.

After Amsterdam, America seemed an obvious next step for Chailly, and he was briefly courted by New York, Chicago and Philadelphia. But he wound up instead in the town where Bach had lived and at the epicenter of German musical culture. His immediate predecessors were the traditionalists Kurt Masur and Herbert Blomstedt.

On the surface, the Leipzig Chailly is something of a classicist himself. He has made highly regarded recordings of Brahms, Schumann and Mendelssohn with the Gewandhaus, and he has now turned to Bach. A rippingly good recording of the Brandenburg Concertos has just been released, and the St. Matthew Passion is up next.

His tour programs are about as conventional as can be imagined. At Disney, Chailly offered Beethovens Fifth Piano Concerto, the Emperor, which the Gewandhaus premiered in Leipzig in 1809, and Beethovens Seventh Symphony. Friday at the Rene and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa, he will turn to Mendelssohn and Dvork.

But I am happy to report that Wednesday there was still a hint of the old Ringo in the Old World Chailly. A stately German orchestra the Gewandhaus may be, but young musicians appear to outnumber old ones and there are now many women. A burnished, blended sound could be credited to the orchestras DNA, but so could a Mendelssohnian sparkle. And orchestral DNA is metaphor, anyway, not science. The sound can be changed. No one would mistake this for a bright-toned American orchestra, but Chailly goes for punch, and he gets it.

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