Eduardo Marturet: The Maestro of Symphony

Eduardo Marturet, the maestro, who, as music director and conductor of the Miami Symphony Orchestra, has composed nothing but beauty from an impossibly rich history of infinite resonance.

Born in Caracas, schooled at Cambridge and a veteran of symphonies ranging from Berlin to Budapest, Seoul to Sao Paolo, the Grammynominated composer and conductor is undoubtedly a master. More though, he knows what makes a maestro masterful. "Charisma is the common thread" to all maestros, he explains, even if they do "all have completely different personalities." Of the most charismatic, Marturet cites Toscanini and Bernstein, both of whom "epitomize the 20^th century conductor," as well as Herbert von Karajan, who was "famous for his control," and fellow Venezuelan, Gustavo Dudamel, now head of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and "by far the best of the young conductors," according to this Miami maestro. But to Marturet, the most important of all charismatists is the Florentine Franco Ferrara, whose poor health knocked him off the podium and straight to the head of the class, where he imparted his wisdom among a very small crowd of up-and-coming conductors. "He was my mentor," Marturet says, "and one of the great conductors/teachers of the second half of the 20th century."

All of which would be nothing but nice if Marturet didn't steer the genre into a radical tomorrow. Sure there's the copious composition (40 works to date), as well as continuous attention to the next generation (Venezuela's National Youth Orchestra), yet the man also maintains a rigorous digging into the more robust elements of an incredibly storied tradition, and he brings it all back to new life.

You want wild? Then consider Marturet's subjects, such as Maurice Ravel, who refused to shake Diaghilev's hand and was then challenged to a duel by the famed ballet impresario and died after some experimental French quack tried to re-inflate the left side of his brain with serous fluid; or Alban Berg, who swung in Vienna with luminaries such as the painter Gustav Klimt and the writer Karl Kraus and whose Five Songs on Picture Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg caused such a riot when it debuted in 1912, they had to halt the performance and shut down the hall; or Anton Webern, another Austrian and the cat the Nazis called "degenerate," who stepped out of his house one night to have a cigar and was shot dead by an American soldier who thought he was a black marketeer (the rifleman, army cook Pfc. Raymond Norwood Bell, was so overcome with remorse, he eventually drank himself to death).

Best though is that Maestro Marturet will be doing all this without the boast one might suspect would come from someone so accomplished. In fact, he prefers that people don't call him "maestro". Yes, it's a "matter of respect," he says, but then again, "so is 'Sir'." Still, it's hard not to call the cat both because, from beginning to end, Eduardo Marturet is at once a master and a gentleman.

Sources:

http://www.miamisymphony.org/marturet.php

http://www.marturet.com