The Big Sound

Anyone with a record player and a stack of old Deutsche Grammophon LPs will almost certainly have their own Platonic ideal of what the Berlin Philharmonic should sound like. Of course that famous sound, opulent and detailed, startlingly immediate yet completely refined, may never have existed – perhaps it was just an elaborate myth constructed by the Tonmeister and their well-placed microphones – and, in any event, there seem to be few conductors in the present day with an interest in coaxing such dated sonics from the orchestra. 

Yet the Berlin Philharmonic is still very much capable of summoning something close to that mythic sound, and when it appears – which it did during a recent guest appearance from Bernard Haitink who led the orchestra in a programme of Mozart and Bruckner – it can be genuinely invigorating. In this instance, the…