Italian conductor Riccardo Chailly knows Milan's La Scala opera house, where he takes over as principal conductor in January, is a political and cultural pressure cooker. So he's going to give the public what it wants: Italian opera.
That might seem like a no-brainer - Italian opera in Italy's most famous opera house. But outgoing music director Daniel Barenboim riled some of the famously opinionated La Scala audience by opening the 2012-13 season - a 200th birthday year for Germany's Richard Wagner and Italy's Giuseppe Verdi, both born in 1813 - with Wagner's Lohengrin.
Meanwhile, the other half of La Scala's new artistic team, Alexander Pereira, has taken over as general manager on a probationary basis. Milan's mayor wants to see how Pereira does in his first year after he caused a row by agreeing - if not actually signing contracts - to buy four productions from his former opera house in Salzburg before he had full authority to do so.
"I'm aware of all that," says Chailly, in an interview after his recordings of the four Brahms symphonies with his Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig won the Gramophone magazine award for best recording of the year. He and the Gewandhaus tour the US, starting in Leipzig's sister city Houston, this month. But Chailly, 61, and a native of Milan, has what he thinks may be the magic formula to appease the angry gods of La Scala.
Yes, he will do modern opera, including one of the imports from Salzburg, Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag's Fin de partie that is based on Samuel Beckett's play Endgame. Nor does Chailly quibble with Barenboim having programmed Wagner, whom he describes as a "very welcome" composer, "but apart from that, what I think is important is more and more to focus on the Italian operas", he says.
"What made La Scala famous through the centuries? Italian opera, the way you hear Italian opera performed in that theatre … There is something there you can only hear that way - it's unique," he says.
Chailly could, and does, say the same about the Gewandhaus, which traces its roots back to 1479 and where he took over as chief conductor for the 2005-06 season.