Giuseppe Sinopoli

Sinopoli, Giuseppe
(b Venice, 2 Nov 1946; d Berlin, 20 apr 2001).Italian conductor and composer. He combined medical studies at Padua with composition at the Venice Conservatory, where he became professor of contemporary and electronic music in 1972.

Further studies with Bruno Maderna and Franco Donatoni were combined with conducting under Hans Swarowsky in Vienna. In 1975 he formed the Bruno Maderna Ensemble to perform contemporary music, and that year made his conducting début at the Royan Festival. His opera début was with Aida at Venice in 1978. For a time he made his name primarily as a composer, receiving commissions from various festivals in France, Germany and the Netherlands, and writing vocal and orchestral works and some chamber and electro-acoustic music. The influence of Donatoni was prominent, as well as a structural rigour characteristic of the Darmstadt school of the 1950s, but used in such a way as to allow the emergence of quasi-expressionist elements through a seductive tonal hedonism. His two-act opera Lou Salomé, depicting an associate of Nietzsche and Rilke, had its first performance in 1981 at the Staatsoper in Munich, conducted by the composer. After this Sinopoli put aside composition to concentrate on conducting.

His conducting career developed rapidly in the 1980s, taking him to the New York PO in 1983; he made his Covent Garden début the same year with Manon Lescaut, having previously appeared with the London Sinfonietta. He was chief conductor of the S Cecilia Academy Orchestra in Rome, 1983–7, and in 1985 first conducted at the New York Metropolitan (Tosca) and Bayreuth (Tannhäuser). Having conducted the Vienna Staatsoper production of Manon Lescaut in Japan in 1986, he inaugurated the Suntory Hall, Tokyo, the next year with concert performances of Madama Butterfly with the Philharmonia Orchestra from London, of which he became principal conductor in 1984, and was music director from 1987 to 1995. He returned frequently to Japan, taking the Bayreuth Festival company there in 1989 for Tannhäuser and other works.

Sinopoli was appointed general music director at the Deutsche Oper, Berlin, in 1990, beginning with a production of Salome, but because of controversy over his terms of contract (signed a decade earlier) he did not take up the post. He moved instead to the Dresden Staatskapelle as principal conductor in 1991. Among several opera recordings, Manon Lescaut, La forza del destino and Salome have received international awards. His symphonic recordings include Mahler and Schumann symphonies; for the recording of Schumann's Symphony no.2 (with the Vienna PO) Sinopoli wrote his own notes advocating that concern for the composer's psychopathology was an essential aspect of interpretation.

Sinopoli has frequently attracted adverse opinion: orchestral players are apt to resent the lengthy verbal analyses to which they are sometimes subjected during rehearsal, and his interpretations have, on occasion, been criticized for corpulent tempos, unbalanced and muddled textures as well as rhythmic indulgence at the expense of the music's metrical framework. However, at his best, he has been admired for his continued searching after the music's logic and for the wealth of instrumental detail and shading his performances can reveal, as in his 1997 Bayreuth Parsifal and his recording of Die Frau ohne Schatten.