Review – Berlin Philharmonic at the Salzburg Festival: Two conductors, one orchestra News and criticism | BR CLASSIC
Review – Berlin Philharmonic at the Salzburg Festival
Two conductors, one orchestra
08/30/2022 by Fridemann Leipold
Despite a foot injury: Kirill Petrenko has not isolated himself. On Sunday he stood at the podium of “his” Berlin Philharmonic. However, Daniel Harding enters the second Salzburg evening for him. Also no damage. Two concerts at world-class level.
Image source: Salzburg Festival / Marco Borelli
The opening acts are still a little spongy, which is also due to the tasty beginning of Gustav Mahler’s Seventh Symphony. But delayed with the striking triumphant melody of the tenor horn, the Berlin Philharmonic are right in the middle of Mahler’s gigantic Seventh, which undertakes a journey through his revolutionary sound world in five stages. He boldly collages in art and trivial music, natural sounds and herd bells, happy hay day idyll and leathery fairground hustle and bustle. Mahler may have praised his Seventh to concert organizers and publishers as a supposedly “cheerful” and “humoristic” work – the funeral march-like beginning of the multi-layered, possibly cumbersome first movement shows that this is not a symphony to lean back on.
Petrenkos Mahler: Precise and packaged
Kirill Petrenko’s analytical penetration of highly complex scores pays off with such a monstrous work. He masters Mahler’s art of transition perfectly, he disposes of tempo relations in an extremely harmonious way, slows down or the musical flow. As one has come to expect from him, his interpretation has been meticulously worked through down to the last detail. As always, he animates his orchestra with precise and emphatic signing. There is hardly anything to be seen of the foot injury he has survived. Petrenko obviously doesn’t take it easy – he rarely leans back on the stool at the conductor’s desk or rests his right foot on a bench, as guitarists use it.
click tip
A shimmering, sparkling summer of music! Read our summary of the Salzburg Festival 2022 here.
Speaking of the guitar: Mahler actually uses a guitar and a mandolin in the second of his two interspersed night musics. There are also idyllic harp sounds and enchanting violin solos. Such a distinguished concertmaster as the Berliner Philharmoniker has to offer with Daishin Kashimoto is rare to find in other top orchestras. In general, during this magnificent performance, a colleague’s statement comes to mind that the Berliners are an orchestra of soloists. Especially if you have previously experienced the Vienna Philharmonic with Bruckner, the differences to the Berliners become all too clear: compared to the dark, warm sound of the Austrian colleagues, Germany’s top orchestra distinguished itself on this evening with cutting, fast American brilliance and brass-heavy radiance.
Little secret: Petrenko is not completely convincing
However, the notorious affirmative final movement invites you to do so, and it still irritates Mahler fans today with its surprise furor in “Meistersinger” C major. In this imposing bouncer, Petrenko flees forward, with speed and guts – rapid, razor-sharp articulation, jagged, but never hollow pathetic or just noisy. Yes, that’s how you can get at this sentence, ironic refraction would be another possibility. In the end, this unquestionably brilliant interpretation of Mahler leaves you somewhat perplexed. Admittedly, in the pastoral first night music, Petrenko has a rogue on his neck. Or he sends shivers down your spine in the demonic waltz deformation of the scherzo. But it is precisely the three surreal middle movements that seem more mortal on this evening, remaining strangely unmysterious. Impressively played, but not really touching.
click tip
No Biedermeier! Read our review of Igor Levit’s Salzburg Soloist Concert here.
Seamlessly, albeit in a completely different way, Alfred Schnittke’s viola concerto follows the next evening, a – as he himself called his composition – a “polystylistic” kaleidoscope of the most heterogeneous sounds. Completed a few days before Schnittke’s first stroke in 1985, the visionary concert foreshadowed the coming disaster. Elegiac tones of the viola and painfully dissonant sound cascades of the violinless orchestra lead to the wild rush for life of an over-the-top waltz whose contours are becoming increasingly blurred.
At the limits of playability: Schnittke’s viola concerto
The solo part pushes the limits of playability – a rewarding challenge for Tabea Zimmermann, who plunges into Schnittke’s bottomless world with her own intensity and virtuosity. But there are also unreal islands of beauty that she savors with her sonorous tone. In the end only composed cardiac arrest. No consolation anywhere. Munich can look forward to Tabea Zimmermann when she helps shape the coming season as Artist in Residence with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.
click tip
Photoshop Daniil! Read our review of Daniil Trifonov’s soloist concert at the 2022 Salzburg Festival here.
Of course, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony would have perfectly rounded off the second program of the Berliner Philharmoniker. But the stand-in for Kirill Petrenko, Daniel Harding, just had Anton Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony on it – and why not end the evening after Schnittke’s catastrophe scenario with a ray of hope? Stefan Dohr took the dreaded horn solo at the beginning so flawlessly that nothing could go wrong.
Impressive: Daniel Harding’s Bruckner
The performance of the popular “Romantic” was far from any kind of routine. Thanks to Harding, who favors an extremely smooth, “airy” Bruckner sound, flexible in tempo, always organically phrased and heard finely. And thanks to the Berlin Philharmonic, who clearly enjoyed Harding’s unpretentious interpretation of Bruckner. In contrast to the previous evening, he gives space to the piano culture of the orchestra and thus ensures unprecedented dynamic contrasts. After fulfilling moments in the melodic Andante and the irresistible drive of the hunting scherzo, the forces then gave way a little in the strangely disparate finale of the second version. Nevertheless: An exemplary Bruckner performance. Not only Thielemann can do Bruckner.
Show: “Allegro” on August 30, 2022 from 06:05 a.m. on BR-KLASSIK