Lorin Maazel, Brilliant, Intense and Enigmatic Conductor, Dies at 84
Lorin Maazel, a former child prodigy who went on to hold the music directorships of the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Vienna State Opera and several other ensembles and companies around the world, and who was known for his incisive and sometimes extreme interpretations, died on Sunday at his home in Castleton, Va. He was 84.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, said Jenny Lawhorn, a spokeswoman for Mr. Maazel. He had been rehearsing in recent weeks for the Castleton Festival, which takes place on his farm.
Mr. Maazel was a study in contradictions, and he evoked strong feelings - favorable and otherwise - from musicians, administrators, critics and audiences.
He projected an image of an analytical intellectual - he had studied mathematics and philosophy in college, was fluent in six languages (French, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian, as well as English) and kept up with many subjects outside music - and his performances could seem coolly fastidious and emotionally distant. Yet such performances were regularly offset by others that were fiery and intensely personalized.
He was revered for the precision of his baton technique, and for his prodigious memory - he rarely used a score in performances - but when he was at his most interpretively idiosyncratic, he used his powers to distend phrases and reconfigure familiar balances in the service of an unusual inner vision.
'He is clearly a brilliant man,' John Rockwell wrote in The New York Times in 1979, 'perhaps too brilliant to rest content with endless re-creations of the standard repertory. He is also, it would seem, a coldly defense man, and perhaps that coldness coats his work with a layer of ice.
'The only trouble with this line of thinking is that it doesn't take all the facts into account. Mr. Maazel, when he's 'on,' has led some of the finest, most impassioned, most insightful performances in memory. When he's good, he's so good that he simply has to be counted among the great conductors of the day. Yet, enigmatically, it's extremely difficult to predict just when he is going to be good or in what repertory.'
Perhaps because he grew up in the limelight, conducting orchestras from the age of 9, Mr. Maazel was self-assured, headstrong and sometimes arrogant: when he took a new directorship, he often announced what he planned to change and why his approach was superior to what had come before. He knew what he wanted and how to get it, and if he encountered an immovable obstacle, he would walk away, also with a public explanation.
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