Vienna orchestra takes a rewarding trek
In “An Alpine Symphony,” Richard Strauss used the resources of an extravagantly large orchestra to depict a full day’s hike to the top of a mountain and back home again. Like its subject matter, the 50-minute piece is grandiose, thrillingly panoramic and generally a bit wearying.
The listener (or at least this listener) typically emerges feeling glad to have made the trek, and determined not to do it again until some restorative time has passed.
The performance offered on Tuesday, March 7, in UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Christian Thielemann, stirred up all the old emotions — but this time with a difference. What Thielemann achieved, which so few conductors can, was to provide a sense of narrative cohesiveness to Strauss’ musical journey.
The Philharmonic, in the first installment of a three-concert visit under the auspices of Cal Performances, conjured up a long string of resplendent orchestral episodes. The players gave an almost subterranean thrum to the opening moments, in which Strauss transforms the underwater opening of Wagner’s “Das Rheingold” into a terrestrial sunrise, and balanced it with a darkly luminous close as night falls.
In between, all the composer’s inventive pictorial strokes — crashing waterfalls, verdant meadows, birdcalls, a thunderstorm — came through with all their colors vividly and precisely rendered.
Even the most beautifully done series of such scenes, though, can often feel aimless without some inkling of where the audience is headed and why. And this was where Thielemann showed his full mastery.
Not content with momentary thrills, the conductor — who
has not been seen or heard in the Bay Area since he conducted Strauss’ “Elektra” at the San Francisco Opera in 1991 — linked each vignette with the ones before and after it. He strengthened the formal and harmonic connections from scene to scene, imbuing each transition with clear musical logic.
Consequently, a piece that too often registers as a series of snapshots from someone’s vacation scrapbook emerged with a clear sense of direction. For once, “An Alpine Symphony” felt like a genuine travelogue.
It also helped disperse memories of the concert’s first half, devoted to a raw and blustery account of Arnold Schoenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht” (“Transfigured Night”). Originally composed for string sextet and later expanded to full string orchestra, this is among the most fragrant and evocative effusions of late Romanticism.
Yet there wasn’t much to savor here, as Thielemann drove the orchestra’s string players into a bare-knuckled series of confrontations. Melodies burst across the stage like missile blasts; it was as if any infusion of tenderness or lyricism would be taken as a sign of weakness.
The Philharmonic remains one of the world’s great orchestras, and when the ensemble is on its game the results can be breathtaking.
There is evidence, too, that the organization has begun to reckon with some of the less savory aspects of its history. In particular, the visible presence of about a dozen female musicians onstage came as a welcome change from its long, defiant insistence on maintaining an all-male roster. An admittedly unscientific scan of the stage, conversely, did not suggest that the orchestra’s history of employing predominantly or exclusively white musicians has seen much improvement.
As for the happier parts of the Philharmonic legacy, you had only to delight in the evening’s gorgeous encore, the “Entr’acte-Valse” of Joseph Hellmes-berger Jr., who spent three years at the beginning of the 20th century as the orchestra’s principal conductor.