Musikfest 2: Restlessness

Stefan Dohr con miembros de la Orquesta Joven de Galicia © OSG/ Lucía Sández

Berlin, lunes, 1 de septiembre de 2025.

Philharmonie Berlin. Berio: Requies. Salonen: Concerto for Horn and Orchestra (2025). Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 in E-flat major, op. 82. Stefan Dohr, horn. Orchestre de Paris. Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor. Musikfest Berlin 2025

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Over the past few decades Esa-Pekka Salonen has managed to balance an international conducting career with his increasingly-prominent activities as a composer. For his recent appearance at Musikfest Berlin, he led the Orchestre de Paris through a programme that paired works by Berio and Sibelius with the German première of his own Horn Concerto, written for and performed on this evening by Stefan Dohr. If the first half of the programme was driven by the thrill of hearing a new work for the first time, the second offered the familiar pleasures of hearing one of Sibelius’ finest scores directed by one of his most devoted twenty-first century interpreters.

The evening opened with Requies, a brief but highly focussed work written by Luciano Berio in memory of his frequent collaborator (and ex-wife) Cathy Berberian, the vocal whirlwind who both inspired and performed many of Berio’s finest works for voice. The piece, scored for a smallish orchestra, is unsurprisingly sombre, propelled by a restlessness that never quite breaks free from the prevailing mood of introspection. Mr Salonen kept the work’s flurries of activity in check resulting in an unsettling placidity. Even the subtly animated running commentary from the marimba or the moments of agitation that percolated through the strings could not upset the work’s rapt concentration.

Mr Salonen’s work as a composer has been gaining steadily in recognition since the beginning of the current century, and performances of his most recent works have taken on the air of an event; his works for soloist and orchestra, especially, have received high-profile premières and have been toured rigorously throughout Europe and North America, often with the composer himself conducting. Mr Salonen’s new Horn Concerto was no exception: commissioned in part by Musikfest Berlin and written for Berlin Philharmonic principal horn Stefan Dohr, the work had its première only two days earlier at the Lucerne Festival, and is already scheduled for numerous performances in various cities in the season to come. For many in the audience, the chance to hear a new work by an established composer would have been the evening’s main attraction.

Although the horn has never challenged the popularity of the piano or violin as a solo instrument in the concerto, it has had some persuasive champions over the centuries, of whom Mozart and Strauss are only the two most prominent. Mr Salonen’s own contribution to the genre was an intriguingly exploratory work, interested in the limits of the instrument’s technical capabilities, but never to the point of inaccessibility. In the opening of the first movement the solo part alternated between lyrical passages and a variety of hand-muting techniques that squeezed the instrument’s lofty tone into something barely recognisable; and the coda of the third movement – more a dialogue with the orchestra than a traditional cadenza – was notable for its rapid-fire timbral alternations seemingly designed to test the virtuosity of the soloist. Such moments of conspicuous difficulty were, however, more the exception than the rule; often the horn was simply the most prominent voice in an extended conversation.

The concerto was in three movements, all without title or tempo indication. The first, which laid out the terms of the piece, was perhaps the most searching of the three, never quite building to anything as obvious as a climax, but covering a lot of ground on its journey. If Mr Salonen has undoubtedly absorbed the musical lessons of the post-war decades, the shimmering string fields and gently fluttering woodwinds often seemed to draw inspiration from the impressionist tendencies of the early-twentieth century. However it was the second movement, darker in mood and more sombre in texture, that emerged as the most immediately striking of the three. The horn part became a cryptic lament that was eventually answered with a forceful outburst from the orchestra; yet even the movement’s greatest moments of high drama had an edge of elegance to them. The third movement, although driven by a subtle rhythmic restlessness that recalled Berio’s opening piece, had a reticence that even the complexities of the coda couldn’t quite dispel, although the piece did arrive at an unexpectedly just conclusion.

Mr Dohr delivered the solo part with considerable assurance, approaching the complex muted passages with great agility and producing a consistently beautiful tone in the higher-lying passages. But if the horn tended to dominate the musical conversation, Mr Salonen’s string writing was equally essential to the work’s textural appeal. In the most intriguing passages, Mr Salonen seemed to treat the strings as a single instrument, conjuring masses of sound that recalled the monolithic concentration of the organ far more than the variegation of a traditional string section; many of the concerto’s finest moments arose from the tension between the searching of the horn and the deceptive stasis of the strings.

The chance to hear Mr Salonen conduct Sibelius is never unwelcome, and in the second half of the evening’s programme he led the orchestra through a richly detailed performance of the Fifth symphony. Although Mr Salonen was not afraid to heighten the work’s contrasts, both in tempo and dynamic, his reading rarely seemed forced or mannered. Rather his insistence on articulating the details in the score – especially the understated woodwind writing – was always secondary to his sense of each movement’s natural flow.

The first movement opened at a pleasingly slow pace that accentuated the grandeur of the horns. Although things began to accelerate with the arrival of the woodwinds, the first section of the movement maintained an elemental quality driven largely by the tidal pull of the strings. The lofty mood eventually gave way to joyous animation in the movement’s final section although the majesty of the trombones, who gave such breadth to the full-orchestra sound, maintained a link to the solemnity of the opening. In the second movement Mr Salonen moved back and forth between moments of monumental calm and quiet excitement; the sudden premonition of the final movement that intrudes near the end of the second emerged with all the necessary gravity, although the pizzicato strings that followed were equally hypnotic.

The final movement began briskly with a heightened sense of anticipation, although everything slowed down for the first appearance of the celebrated horn theme; and a captivating passage of pianissimo violins provided the introduction to a triumphant finale. The symphony was so well received that Mr Salonen returned for an encore – the final movement of Ravel’s Ma mère l’Oye – which provided the audience with a final chance to luxuriate in the sound of the string section and, in the final bars, the thrilling force of the full orchestra.