Rattle majestic in Berlin
Classical Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra/rattle Royal Festival Hall
Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra – a “dream team” for sure, but in truth it’s been a tumultuous 16-year partnership, and it’s soon to end. The concert they gave on Wednesday night, the first of a pair at the Royal Festival Hall, are to be Rattle’s last in the UK as the orchestra’s artistic director.
As always, Rattle has programmed the visit with strategic shrewdness. Three of the five pieces are contemporary, the other two bang in the centre of the Germanic tradition that has always been this orchestra’s lifeblood. We do both, better than anyone, is the implicit claim.
The evening launched with abrupt and startling energy, in the first of the three pieces by Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen, written at Rattle’s request. It was a two-minute vaulting ascent, etched in hectic rhythms, always renewing itself from below like a film of a waterfall played backwards. The following two pieces were in Abrahamsen’s more familiar territory of delicate inwardness, the first outlined in high piccolo and silvery percussion, the second in ponderous double-bass harmonies set against ticking percussion, creating a sense of something vast moving in a weightless world.
In Bruckner’s unfinished Ninth Symphony, which came next, the players had to forego weightlessness and magic and conjure a sound of maximum expressive density – which they did, with staggering effectiveness.
The eight double-basses made the floor shake, the horns’ burnished sound seemed to press against the walls. But rather than sheer volume, it was the finesse of the sound that made it so penetrating. At one point, the timpani player rolled the same note on two different drums in alternation. The difference in sound was barely perceptible, but clearly it mattered enough to Rattle to bring the extra drum all the way from Berlin.
As for Rattle’s shaping of the symphony, it had the stamp of total authority. The tempos in themselves were perfectly standard; what was extraordinary was the way Rattle made Bruckner’s vast paragraphs vibrate with inner tension, so that each led to the next across cavernous silences. Rattle made sure we noticed the sheer modernist strangeness of the third movement, and led it to a climax that was completely shattering. The turn to a peaceful major key at the end was so moving and felt so final that the fourth movement – a recent speculative completion of Bruckner’s sketches, of a curiously restive mood – seemed entirely redundant. What lingered was the majesty of the whole, and a sense that this dream team really is something utterly extraordinary.