Germany: Three Nights, Three Orchestras

 I just returned from a musical journey in Germany and Austria, starting in Berlin and ending in Vienna, seeing three symphonic concerts and two operas over one week. I'll review the operas next week, but will start with the symphonies. My satisfaction with these concerts did not align with my a priori expectations. This is a good thing, and one reason why it is fun to see live music. Otherwise, you could just sit at home with your perfect digital performances. 

First up was the Berlin Philharmonic playing in their home Philharmonie under guest conductor Andris Nelsons, the Latvian maestro who heads both the Boston Symphony and Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestras. The orchestra sounded as great as expected, with particularly delicious woodwind solos in the Beethoven Fourth Symphony. This is not a titanic piece, but Nelsons and the orchestra performed it with a nice mix of virtuosity and classical restraint. Less interesting were the Richard Strauss tone poem Don Juan and the contemporary Violin Concerto No. 3 (Dialogue: I and You), composed in 2018 by Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina. The Strauss is a big, extravagant virtuosic piece filled with hard bits that often serve as orchestra audition pieces for professionals. It should have been uber-exciting, but was not. I have previously noted in Boston and Hamburg that performances under Nelsons often do not turn out as well as expected given his reputation--here the playing was technically excellent as expected from the BPO, but the performances were rarely innovative or challenging. This critique certainly applied to Don Juan, which was well-played, but ho-hum and lacked a dazzling tutti horn climax that should have emerged from these players. The Gubaidulina concerto was a dialogue as advertised, with lots of back and forth between soloist and orchestra, but had little forward momentum. There was lots of moody exploration of instrumental timbre, typical of music of this century. But it had little sense of architecture or climax, also typical of much 21st century composition. I would rate this concert as meh-3/5. 

Next was the illustrious Vienna Philharmonic on tour with an all-Brahms concert at the spectacular Elbphilharmonie, which opened in 2017 in the docks area of Hamburg. It's a striking venue, rising like a sailing ship from the harbor, with snakelike elevators, and snakeskin interior surfaces, and I commented on it a few years ago.  

I heard outstanding Brahms when I visited this hall before, commenting about warmth and depth of sound. However, these qualities were sadly absent this time in the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2 and Third Symphony, conducted by the renowned German conductor Christian Thielemann. The concerto, superbly played by the Russian-German pianist Igor Levit, was refreshing in that pianist and conductor did not go for the usual pounding and aggression that can make Brahms' piano music overwrought and thick. There was a restraint, and even delicacy here that was welcome, and I enjoyed the performance. But the following Symphony No. 3, the most restrained or "autumnal" of the symphonies, never launched and took flight after a gorgeous opening horn solo. Thielemann knows this orchestra well, so provides minimal visible control. Here, he used very restrained, sometimes odd, conducting gestures. Why does he substitute a Parkinsonian right hand quiver for a beat, eg? I get that this orchestra does not need a traditional clear beat to perform this piece, but just letting the VPO play it on their own did not lead to a compelling performance. Also, it seemed to me that Thielemann did not really care about the audience, and was locked into a bubble with his orchestra, performing inwardly for themselves. Conventional conductor gestures and cues do help the audience to know how to listen to the music. While the VPO members may have enjoyed this, I did not--rating 2/5. 

One of the three resident Hamburg symphony orchestras demonstrated how the Elbphilharmonie can be used to much better effect. German conductor Ingo Metzmacher led a well-programmed concert, pairing the New York nighttime spookiness of Charles Ives Central Park in the Dark (1907) with the Germanic nighttime spookiness of the Mahler Symphony No. 7 (1905-6). The two composers are contemporaries, and sometimes are very similar, but did not contact one another to my knowledge. They both liked to put "all the world" into their pieces: Ives with brass bands, patriotic hymns, and ragtime, and Mahler with Austrian folksongs and Germanic military marches. Ives has more of a sense of humor, e.g. the honky-tonk piece that appears midway in Central Park adds a bit of comic relief to the spooky orchestral mist. It was very cool hearing the orchestra transition from the Ives directly into the Mahler Seventh Symphony, which opens with an eerie tenor horn far away in the mist. The solo was a little loud here, but better than the Lisbon orchestra performance I heard a few weeks ago. Metzmacher held together the initial four "night" movements really well, with the birdcalls atmospheric and often creepy, as they should be. I am still not sure how the final movement fits into the mix..it sounds bright and like the old "Mighty Mouse" theme--rather heroic. The conventional explanation is that this is light/sunrise after the night, but the heroism is not quite right for that, and there is no real emerging "sunrise" as in Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathusra. Mahler never explained what he was up to, so this will remain an intriguing mystery.  This orchestra sounded better than did the more renowned VPO the prior night, perhaps due to their conductor's greater familiarity with the hall (or just Metzmacher's greater conducting ability). Great concert ---4/5.