A hugely distinguished, if not entirely original farewell
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
At the 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 Symphony No 3 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 Symphony No 1. 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 at Festival Hall 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? Watch this space.