Grosser Saal, Konzerthaus
Brahms – Academic Festival Overture, op.80
Widmann – Flûte en suite
Brahms – Symphony no.4 in E minor,
op.98
Dieter Flury (flute)
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
Christian Thielemann (director)
This was a fascinating concert.
I did not always like, or even agree with, what Christian Thielemann did with
the two Brahms works on the programme. It was not only what seemed – although how
much is this a matter of knowing things one cannot, alas, un-know? – to be disturbing
ideological assumptions underlying the reading, but also a matter of what
sometimes came across as self-regard, to be seen as well as heard. On the other
hand, the Vienna Philharmonic was very much at its best, clearly relishing the
relationship it has with this conductor as much as he does. And, whatever one
might think or feel about the results, there is no denying that Thielemann has
a point of view, which he is able to communicate, almost playing the orchestra
as if it were a keyboard; this stood far away indeed from the blandness of much
‘international music-making’.
The febrile urgency of the orchestral
sound (Klang is perhaps better here) at
the opening of the Academic Festival
Overture was something I had not necessarily expected. Moreover, as Brahms’s
invention gathered pace, one heard roots in Beethoven, in German Romantic
predecessors such as Mendelssohn and Schumann; tradition seemed to live. At
times, indeed, the sound seemed close to what one might have heard from
Furtwängler, albeit more often with an edge, even a brutality, perhaps more
characteristic of Karajan. Thielemann proved more theatrical than both,
however, for this was, if you can imagine such a thing, often a darkly,
Wagnerian performance, culminating in the world, so it seemed, of Hans Sachs’s
final peroration. There was something daemonic to it, quite unlike anything I
had heard before: certainly not bland.
Dieter Flury, principal flautist
with the orchestra, was the soloist for Jörg Widmann’s Flûte en suite. (Widmann’s present ubiquity seems quite
extraordinary. I do not ask this in a hostile fashion at all, but wonder to
what it is owed.) Marked as having been written ‘für Flöte und Orchestergruppen’,
that is very much what one hears: movements to a greater or lesser extent
inspired by the Baroque Suite present the solo instrument with a particular
instrumental/orchestral group. Written for Joshua Smith and the Cleveland
Orchestra, during Widmann’s residency with that orchestra, it certainly
received a committed performance here from all concerned. Thielemann, when he
conducts modernist music, broadly construed, is often at his very best. Indeed,
he managed to coax the Vienna Philharmonic into playing as if it were enjoying
itself; perhaps it was.
The first movement, an Allemande,
opens with a slow solo, seemingly full of promise, uncertain quite where it
might lead. Joined by other members of its family – alto, bass, and finally
piccolo – its lines perhaps retain something of a Brahms-Schoenberg tendency,
not so much in style as in idea. The chamber opening of the Sarabande is more
strongly suggestive of the Baroque, likewise its strong sense of dance
character; its solo line, in typical Widmann style, seems to play with
misremembered – or never-quite-having-existed – Bach. A more pointillistic
backdrop, this time from brass, characterised the third movement, ‘Choral I’,
the fifth, ‘Choral II’ sounding much more overtly chorale-like. The latter
chorale is darker in tone, mysterious, uncannily childish woodwind and
percussion (Prokofiev perhaps, or Shostakovich) reacting in some sense against
it, the flute mediating, even commentating. In between, a more refracted
(Berio?), more referential Courante, with ‘busy’ pizzicato strings offered
undeniable contrast. The sixth movement, marked ‘Venezianisches Gondellied
(Barcarole)’, perhaps intrigued me the most. As if a response to Henze’s
mediation between things German and Italian, rhythm and melody speak of the
latter, a darker forest landscape of the former, without the demarcation ever
being quite so straightforward. A cadenza, not entirely unaccompanied,
followed, Flury’s expressive way with the melodic line as impressive as his
technique. I was less sure about the final ‘Badinerie’, which seemed to me to
try a bit too hard to be ‘fun’. ‘Contemporary’ – to us – Bach, very fast and ‘light’,
with perhaps again a hint of Berio, veers down other allies, moves into other
keys, but seems to rely too much upon its basis in that particular Bach Suite.
Widmann’s homages are more persuasive, at least to me, when they suggest, when
they misremember.
Thielemann’s way with Brahms’s
Fourth Symphony once again persistently surprised, the VPO’s excellence of
playing a welcome constant throughout. Its Klang
was very much that of the Overture, with perhaps a still greater translucency
enhancing its ‘traditional’, perhaps more North German than conventionally
Viennese, darkness. Thielemann’s insistence on moulding the score will not have
been to all tastes; yet, even when exaggerated, as sometimes it was, it never
sounded merely arbitrary, as it does, say, in the Brahms of Simon Rattle.
Again, it was a Lisztian, Wagnerian sensibility and method that came to mind in
the first movement: transformative rather than straightforwardly motivic. I
loved the stark sense of difference at the beginning of development; suspense
was as palpable as I can recall. What I missed – and one cannot, perhaps, have
it all in any one performance – is the sense of where this music would lead, of
it being but a stone’s throw from Schoenberg and Webern. The stately
processional opening of the second movement emphasised its roots in its
counterpart in Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. Thielemann built it into something
sonically overwhelming, but is that quite the point? Whatever the answer to
that, there was some exquisite inner voicing, not least from the violas. The
scherzo was fast and not a little brutal, yet far from lacking in lighter
moments. In the great, concluding passacaglia, I longed for a little more
Klemperer-like inevitability. However incandescent the playing, the variations
often sounded a little too characterised, a little too unconnected. Was the
wood sometimes missed for the trees? At least, however, it made me think.
