We review the best classical concerts of the month
Bavarian State Orchestra, Barbican ★★★★★
You might almost think they planned it. The day after Simon Rattle’s and the Berlin Philharmonic’s spectacular two-day farewell at the Royal Festival Hall came to end, the mystery man named as Rattle’s successor in Berlin appeared across the river at the Barbican, with the Bavarian State Orchestra. The Barbican Hall was packed with people eager to get a glimpse of the famously shy Russian who never gives interviews. A bigger contrast to the extrovert Rattle could hardly be imagined.
Given that fact, you might conclude the piece Petrenko chose to conduct last night was very unsuited to him. Mahler’s Seventh Symphony is a hugely extrovert piece, even by Mahler’s immodest standards. Everything is taken to excess, especially in the outer movements, where a beery out-door parade, delirious waltzes, and a general air of heaven-storming frenzy are combined. The last movement in particular seems to be permanently drunk, but with the drunk’s conviction that his somewhat ill-focused effusions are the stuff of genius.
What would the fastidious Petrenko make of this wildly over-stuffed leviathan of a piece? At first it seemed as if he would be as cool and analytical as Pierre Boulez. The sepulchral opening with its mournful tenor horn solo was delicately coloured, the heavy string chords touched in with surprising lightness. The hectic fast part of the movement was brilliantly timed and paced, so that when the startling moment of calm arrived, with its “heavenly” off-stage cow-bells, it registered with maximum force. And at the very end, where performances often give way to delirium, Petrenko refused to rush.
In the middle three movements Mahler sets aside bombast and offers two nocturnes of surpassing delicate mystery, with a stealthy, menacing Scherzo in between. Here the delicacy and clarity of Petrenko’s approach gave a glow to the music’s own refinement – and the delicacy of the orchestral playing, scarcely less wonderful than the Berliners of the night before. Here Petrenko’s balletic way of moulding Mahler’s nervously intense phrases was very far from Boulez’s cool refinement. As for that puzzling Finale, he made the music’s excess and constant changes of direction seem winning, by revealing the detail of the Mahler’s incredibly sophisticated orchestration. Great performance is sometimes a matter of playing to a piece’s strengths and persuading us to overlook its glaring weaknesses. By combining analytical clarity, lyrical warmth and canny dramatic pacing, Kirill Petrenko did exactly that, brilliantly.
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra/Simon Rattle, Royal Festival Hall ★★★★☆
At their first of their two farewell concerts in London, the Berlin Philharmonic/Simon Rattle partnership gave us a dose of musical modernism in its most aurally seductive guise, followed reassuringly by a performance of a Germanic masterpiece. The second followed much the same pattern, though the evening actually began with something different, which Rattle is very good at: showmanship. As the audience was still settling itself a louche swing beat from the percussion and basses broke out unexpectedly. he strolled on, seemingly amused at this outbreak of anarchy, but the moment he reached the podium, he seized back control.
This was the beginning of Jörg Widmann’s Dancing on the Volcano, a gift for Rattle on his departure from Berlin which paints an amusing picture of the difficulty of conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. For the next seven minutes Rattle seemed to be only just containing an eruption of hiccups, rude percussive thwacks and rhythmic tics which gradually took shape as music, before seeming to give up and retreat to the wings.
Much more substantial was Witold Lutosławski’s 3rd Symphony from 1983. Like many of the works of this fastidiously impassioned Polish modernist, this one works by throwing out fragmentary ideas and gradually gathering them together, like a spiral collapsing into its centre. At this burning central point the music finds – at last – a definite forward motion which at the end becomes excitingly precipitate. It’s a tricky narrative to make real, but Rattle and the orchestra succeeded brilliantly, especially in the early sections, which were luxuriantly relaxed but with a feeling of purposefulness underneath.
Then came the serious, Germanic part of the evening; Brahms’s First Symphony. This orchestra once gave the world the most intense and individual performances of this symphony ever recorded, under its one-time chief conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, and the most sumptuously grand under von Karajan. Rattle’s and the orchestra’s performance on Thursday night was certainly closer to the latter, but the grandeur was leavened by Rattle’s innate urgency, especially in the contrasting Trio section of the Scherzo, where the music took flight in a burst of gleeful energy that Karajan rarely mustered.
It was a hugely distinguished if not especially original end to these farewell appearances, which have shown a wonderful partnership at its height. Will Rattle’s successor at Berlin Kirill Petrenko be something wholly different? As it happens, he’s appearing tonight at the Barbican in London, with the Bavarian State Orchestra. Watch this space. IH