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Claudio Scimone, conductor and musicologist – obituary
Claudio Scimone, who has died aged 83, was a conductor and musicologist who did much to champion the revival of 18th and early 19th century music from his Italian homeland, particularly the Neapolitan operas of Gioachino Rossini written between 1815 and 1822.
He was the founder in 1959 of I Solisti Veneti, a virtuoso ensemble that has toured to more than 90 countries, often introducing audiences to the rarities he had uncovered. Although they specialised in early music, Scimone would often contrast this with more modern works.
One occasion was in 1962, on their first visit to Britain, when they performed Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht at the Victoria & Albert Museum. “Claudio Scimone, directing without score, was an inspiring conductor,” noted one critic.
Scimone recalled having heard Toscanini at the postwar reopening of La Scala, Milan, in 1946 conduct a modern version of the Preghiera from Rossini’s 1818 opera Mosè in Egitto. Through his investigations he unearthed the original, which was “a much more beautiful, much greater work than the French [edition] of many years later”.
Having edited the composer’s score, he conducted the modern premiere in Lisbon in 1981 and recorded it for Philips with the London-based Philharmonia Orchestra. “It was such a fantastic experience that I kept on investigating the Neapolitan Rossini,” he said.
This included a staging of the composer’s La Donna del Lago at Houston, Texas, in 1981 with Marilyn Horne and Frederica von Stade, and the uncovering of other little-known Rossini works, such as Maometto II and Ermione, and Zelmira, which he described as “the last Neapolitan opera, which closes a very happy period”.
Scimone also attracted attention in 1977 for conducting the first modern recording of Vivaldi’s opera Orlando Furioso on a recording with Marilyn Horne, Victoria de Los Angeles and I Solisti Veneti, a performance they repeated in Verona in 1979.
His recording in 1978 with the Philharmonia Orchestra of four symphonies by Muzio Clementi (1752-1832), a composer once famous across Europe, left a Gramophone critic declaring that he “conducts this music with just the fire and enthusiasm it needs”.
Claudio Scimone was born on December 21 1934 in Padua, the son of a well-known physician whose family hailed from Sicily. He learnt the violin and studied conducting with Dimitri Mitropoulos in Salzburg and Franco Ferrara in Holland. He also studied law and philosophy. “The best way of creating a philosophy is by making music,” he once said.
I Solisti Veneti’s first rehearsals were held in 1959 at his parents’ spacious, old-fashioned house overlooking the Piazzale Pontecorvo. Chamber music was not then popular in Italy and Scimone struggled to secure engagements. Their first overseas tours were well received, however, and in 1975 he took the ensemble to the Salzburg Festival, where they became almost annual visitors.
In 1979 Scimone was appointed conductor of the Gulbenkian Orchestra in Lisbon, a post he held for seven years. Two years later he conducted the Royal Opera’s production of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore at Covent Garden starring Nicolai Gedda, Geraint Evans and Yvonne Kenny, where he “impressed with his musical good manners and sense of a Donizetti style”.
He taught at the Venice Conservatory of Music and for more than 30 years was director of the Cesare Pollini Conservatory in his home town. When the University of Padua awarded him an honorary doctorate he delivered a lecture on “the common threads of historical development of interpretation in law and music”.
Claudio Scimone was married to Clementine (née Hoogendoorn), a Dutch flautist, who survives him.
Claudio Scimone, born December 21 1934, died September 6 2018