Musikfest 4: The Preview

Berlin, miércoles, 14 de septiembre de 2016.

Philharmonie. Ligeti: Lontano. Bartók: Violin Concerto No. 1, Sz 36. Strauss: Symphonia Domestica, op. 53. Frank Peter Zimmermann, violin. Bayerisches Staatsorchester. Kirill Petrenko, conductor

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Kirill Petrenko is much loved in Munich, where he has spent several successful seasons as music director of the Bayerische Staatsoper; in Berlin he is less of a known quantity. He has not appeared as a guest of the Berlin Philharmonic since it was announced last year that he would be taking over as their new chief conductor (he is scheduled to conduct in March of next year) and, for this reason alone, his appearance with the Bayerisches Staatsorchester at this year’s Musikfest was highly anticipated. While the programme, featuring works by Ligeti, Bartók and Strauss, would have been worth hearing in any circumstance, the main attraction for many Berliners was the opportunity to hear a conductor who will soon be an integral part of the city’s musical life.

The evening began with a mesmerising performance of an extraordinary work. In Lontano, written in 1967, Ligeti sought to sand and polish the instrumental textures he had introduced in his earlier large-orchestra work, Atmospheres, while simultaneously downplaying any remaining traces of structural drama; several composers of the previous generation had employed oversized ensembles as a means of generating intensity through volume, but Ligeti seems to have been preoccupied with finding out just how little sound a full orchestra could make.

The Bayerisches Staatsorchester were undoubtedly up to the challenge of such quiet playing. The entire woodwind section – but especially the four flautists – were able to achieve an utterly alien tone, even as a slight warmth in the middle strings ensured that Ligeti’s drifting textures remained tethered to the earth. Yet it was Mr Petrenko’s patient reading – which acknowledged that, behind every sound created by the orchestra, there was another, even quieter sound waiting to be heard, a process which continued even after the sounds were no longer audible to the audience – that created the illusion of Lontano being a much larger, perhaps endless piece, of which we were permitted to hear only a small section; the part we did hear on this evening sounded suspiciously close to a masterpiece.

In Bartók’s first Violin Concerto – completed in 1908 but not published until after his death – the distinctive character of his best-known mature works is not quite fully formed, and his unmistakable voice has not yet managed to banish the last traces of romanticism. One can hear the Bartók of the String Quartets in some of the off-kilter melodic lines of the violin part, but the orchestral accompaniment – beautifully handled on this evening by Mr Petrenko and the orchestra – imparts a warm, jovial quality that provides a direct if occasionally oblique connection to the violin concertos of the previous century.

Frank Peter Zimmermann’s performance of the violin part was notable for both its confidence and softness. A slight coldness of tone in the opening section was offset by subtle vibrato that imparted a pleasing narcotic wooziness – rather than any kind of sentimentality – to the first movement; and he was even more captivating in the animated second movement, gliding gracefully over arpeggios instead of slicing into them, and bringing an articulate light touch to even the busiest sections. The delicate refinement of Mr Zimmermann’s playing was further highlighted by a quietly exquisite encore performance of the final movement from Bach’s A minor Violin Sonata, which found clarity and calm even in the work’s rapid pace.

There is a recognisably Straussian irony in the very title of Symphonia Domestica, which formed the second half of the programme: how could a composer whose previous subjects included Zarathustra, Don Quixote and Death possibly reconcile the grand scale of a symphonic work with something as deeply personal (and outwardly banal) as domestic contentment? Yet one need only look at the corpus of later operas – most of which had not yet been written when Symphonia Domestica was first performed – to know that Strauss drew few audible distinctions between mythological passion and household emotion. If there have been fewer great performances of this work than, say, Ein Heldenleben, it is perhaps because there are fewer conductors willing to treat the domestic on an equal footing with the heroic.

The performance on this evening lacked nothing in unrestrained joy. After the great concentration of the Ligeti and the necessary restraint of the Bartók, Mr Petrenko appeared to be genuinely fired up, and his obvious enthusiasm spread to an orchestra who, for their part, were very much at home with the choice of repertoire. While it would be difficult to fault the evening’s earlier performances, the Strauss score seemed to inspire playing of even greater nobility and generosity of spirit. The woodwinds maintained the high quality heard during the Ligeti, while the large string section sounded warmer and more agile, alternating thrilling crescendos with quieter passages of great detail and charm.

However it was Mr Petrenko’s vision of the piece, both its individual episodes and its larger structure that gave the performance its impressive clarity and unwavering momentum. The lengthy nocturnal Adagio at the centre of the work never meandered, and the breathless hyperactivity of the Finale was all the more impressive for the fact that the work’s three principal themes – which are thrown back and forth between instrumental groups with a certain abandon – were never allowed to get lost in the surrounding confusion and excitement. The protracted, yet well-paced and ultimately ecstatic conclusion was not only a crowd-pleasing thrill but a fervent counter-argument for anyone who might still question the symphonic suitability of Strauss’ chosen subject. 

Because one cannot have too much of a good thing, Mr Petrenko and the orchestra brought the evening to a close with the Prelude to Die Meistersinger. Although he recently gave a wonderful performance of the whole opera in Munich, his conception of how the overture might function as the overture to a dramatic work was completely different from his idea of how it should sound as a concert encore. The pace was almost ridiculously quick and the rising brass in the ‘arrival of the masters’ theme sounded excessively smoothed out. Yet there remained a great structural coherence to match the vigour of the performance, and the closing bars were every bit as thrilling as the finale of the Symphonia Domestica. Although Mr Petrenko’s tenure in Berlin does not begin for another few years, this evening’s performance provided ample reason to be excited about the future.