BPO/Blomstedt - Strauss and Beethoven, 22 September 2023

Philharmonie

Strauss: Metamorphosen
Beethoven: Symphony no.3 in E-flat major, op.55, ‘Eroica’

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Herbert Blomstedt (conductor)  

Images: Stephan Rabold

For me, this was  a concert of two (unequal) halves. Though I understand why it would have been programmed this way round, I could not help but wish, conceptually as well as contextually, that Strauss’s Metamorphosen had followed Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. It could work the other way, of course, Strauss’s elegy for a humanistic Germany and Europe destroyed by barbarism hanging over that very world those very values as expressed Beethoven’s ‘Heroic Symphony composed to celebrate the memory of a great man’. The problem turned out to be that Herbert Blomstedt’s conception of the latter, like so many current conceptions of the symphonic Beethoven, was to prove, considerable virtues notwithstanding, distinctly lacking in heroism whose demise might be lamented, let alone deconstructed. 

Metamorphosen, though, received a model performance, as comprehending and as moving as any I can recall. If one closed one’s eyes, one could imagine it was not being conducted, or indeed that there was no conductor, at all: not in a sense of any lack of direction, quite the contrary, but rather that Blomstedt seemed, however much of an illusion this may have been, to act as enabler of a performance that came from the twenty-three Berlin string players as soloists, as members of a chamber group that expanded into an ensemble of smaller, constantly metamorphosing ensembles and whose frame of reference deepened as the performance progressed. Above all, Blomstedt seemed to enable the players to listen and to respond, to express the idea of the work. What Wagner would have called its melos, and Strauss would certainly have understood as such, was unerringly traced throughout, to the extent that it seemed more spontaneously to evolve than to be traced at all (not unlike the Prelude to Das Rheingold, or indeed the idea of a Beethoven symphony). 

The Berlin Philharmonic offered the most cultivated of sound, without the slightest suspicion of self-regard. Textures were clear, though never ‘neutral’. Chiaroscuro was as sharp and as detailed as in a Caravaggio canvas.  And at just the right times, the ensemble of ensembles became a full (or full-sounding) orchestra, attaining unanimity of voice in Wagnerian-Beethovenian fashion, prior, say, to highlighting a duet between principal violin and cello, or an expression of the most ravishing pain from viola. Harmonic motion and tempo were as one, attendants to a gradual yet undeniable path towards revelation of the theme from Beethoven’s ‘Marcia funebre’, until one could deny it no more—and certainly did not wish to. For the close was resolutely unsentimental and un-milked, and all the more powerful for it. 

A bright-eyed, bushy-tailed first movement of the Eroica shared many of the same virtues. If Beethoven had written, in Brucknerian vein, a ‘Nullte’, or a ‘Study Symphony’, this might have been it. The BPO sounded wonderfully transparent, with very much that sense of chamber music writ large, players listening and responding to one another. Is that, however, all one wants or needs with Beethoven? With Strauss, there are so many masks, diversions, and ironies, even in the apparently personal lamentation of Metamorphosen, that one is rarely if ever sure one is hearing, or would wish to hear, ‘the composer’s voice’. With Beethoven, as with Wagner or Mahler, and whatever the musicological investigations and deconstructions of recent years, a pleasant, non-committal Beethoven remains a strange and, at least for me, an unsatisfactory thing. It flowed beautifully, and that is far from nothing, but what did it mean? 

The ‘Marcia funebre’ fared better, sounding in context as much a response to Strauss as to the first movement, and working well in both ways. It was neither Wagner’s nor my Beethoven, but it would not be, given a very different interpretative framework. Here, the intimacy of Blomstedt and the orchestra’s approach did not overlook the gravity of the oration. It was dialogic, akin to a community of musicians, perhaps even citizens, coming together to pay their respects, but that community ultimately gave rise to something that did, after all, appear to be or at least contain ‘Beethoven’s voice’. Its counterpoint chilled and stirred; Beethoven spoke, before giving way, always in his shadow, to intimations of Mendelssohn. 

Such intimations were to be heard at the beginning of the scherzo too, before a boisterous, ‘early’ Beethoven demanded our attention. If those two tendencies had done battle a little more overtly, this might have been a properly dialectical experience. Alas, here and in the trio, its wondrous trio of horns included, that nagging question of meaning returned. So too did questions concerning a lack of cragginess, obstinacy, and, not least, humour. 

I felt that during the finale too. It was good-humoured, certainly, often (doubtless in a nod to origins) balletic, but the gruffness of Beethoven’s humour, and indeed his and/or his music’s other characteristics, rarely registered. Violas fairly jabbed their early interjections, yes, yet it was difficult in the context of an overriding idea of the symphony to understand why. There was considerable variation of mood, the coming of the minor mode a welcome moment of transformation, yet the emotional vicissitudes on offer in very different ways in, say, Furtwängler and Klemperer, or more recently in Colin Davis and Daniel Barenboim, were never a possibility. Musicianly and beautifully played it was, and the audience seemed not remotely to share my reservations, giving Blomstedt a standing ovation whose genuine warmth was undeniable. 

I shall give the last word to Wagner, the pre-eminent Beethoven interpreter of any age, and the most crucial link (still more so than Mozart) between Beethoven and Strauss. In his 1851 ‘programmatic explanation’, born of direct experience of conducting the work and of considering where it led, he wrote: ‘The term “heroic” must be taken in the widest sense… . If we understand ‘hero’ to mean, above all, the whole, complete man, in possession of all purely human feelings — love, pain, and strength — at their richest and most intense, we shall comprehend the correct object as conveyed to us by the artist in the speaking, moving notes of his work. The artistic space of this work is occupied by … feelings of a strong, fully formed individuality, to which nothing human is strange, and which contains within itself everything that is truly human.’ Such thoughts are deeply unfashionable; and yet…

Prom 59 - Schiff/Gewandhaus/Blomstedt: Beethoven, 29 August 2016

Royal Albert Hall

Overture: Leonore, no.2, op.72a

Piano Concerto no.5 in E-flat major, op.73
Symphony no.7 in A major, op.92


András Schiff (piano)
Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra
Herbert Blomstedt (conductor)


Never having heard Herbert Blomstedt live, I rushed to buy a ticket for this Prom as soon as tickets went on sale. The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra was not an unattractive proposition either, of course. András Schiff: well, whatever has happened to him…?

Before coming to Schiff’s contribution, though, I should say something about the Leonore 2 Overture. Try as I might, I cannot hear it ‘in itself’; I hear it almost as a sketch for no.3, fascinated, but unable to hear what might be preferable in it. Insofar as direction can be afforded it, Blomstedt certainly did. The Gewandhaus Orchestra immediately announced itself with deliciously dark string tone – ‘old German’, if ever there were such a thing – and equally outstanding solo woodwind. Digressions were given time to speak, and sounded less digressive than they usually would. 

My reception of Schiff’s performance in the Fifth Piano Concerto was not unique, but it certainly did not seem to be shared by the greater part of the audience, which roared with approval. What I heard in Schiff’s first entry was what I heard more or less the whole way through: something that somehow married pedantry to mannerism, incapable of evenness in passagework (or at least unwilling to play evenly), either unphrased or with phrasing that was bizarrely unmusical, and peppered with equally unmotivated articulation. He did not seem to listen to the orchestra, with whom he fell out of sync more than once, leaving Blomstedt to put things right, and indeed seemed utterly (and undeservedly) self-regarding throughout. The orchestra sounded splendid on its own terms, and Blomstedt proved a sure enough guide, insofar as he could, although I found his handling of the first movement’s tutti passages a little foursquare at times. The slow movement started better; indeed, it almost sounded recognisable; it was not long, though, before Schiff’s perversities set in again. The finale offered more of the same, a terrible pity, given that the orchestra’s playing exhibited all the virtues it had in the overture. His piano, it seems, was a Bösendorfer; maybe so, but it did not sound like one. Is it perhaps the case that he is now more at home on period instruments? A recent Schubert disc sounded far more successful than his recent work with modern pianos. And, although strangely flashy, the Schubert encore (Impomptu, D 899/2) was considerably more convincing.

With just the orchestra and Blomstedt, the performance of the Seventh Symphony proved much more successful. The first movement introduction sounded full of tonal possibility, a worthy successor to Haydn. Orchestral clarity and tonal depth were revealed to be two sides of the same coin, the one enhancing the other. If I have heard more exciting transitions to the exposition proper, this was eminently musical, a proper continuation. Blomstedt’s way was not the knife-edge approach of Carlos Kleiber; indeed, it proved more Apollonian than Dionysian throughout the symphony. If it were not necessarily the way I think of the work, it was a perfectly valid alternative, from which much could be learned. The slow movement – yes, I know it is not a slow movement really, but it annoys the right people to call it that – was taken swiftly, and indeed almost without a break. That ‘following on’ intrigued, and proved highly successful; if only the bronchial brigade had been listening. A processional that might have fascinated Birtwistle ensued: played pretty ‘straight’, but certainly none the worse for that. The depth of string tone – depth, not necessarily volume – was truly a thing of wonder, but there was nothing narcissistic about this: all was at the service of the music, as the cliché goes.

Blomstedt took the scherzo very fast indeed; I am not sure I have heard it faster, although doubtless some ‘authenticist’ will have managed to cross the line in half the time, having ‘discovered’ that Beethoven’s dog had eaten his metronome. Or something. If I missed the darker urgency, the sense that the future of the world was at stake, one would hear from, say, Daniel Barenboim, there was no doubting the accomplishment of the playing; and, as I said, it is a good thing to hear alternatives, so long as they are not unutterably perverse. I found the lack of relaxation for the trio a pity – one does not have to go to the lengths of a Leonard Bernstein here to feel that some such response is helpful, even necessary – and felt puzzled by a subsequent ultra-slowing for the transition back to the scherzo the second time around, but it made me listen. The finale worked uncommonly well, I thought. Too often, it comes to sound harsh, inhumanly driven: what could be less Beethovenian? Here, though, it proved almost graceful. Lower strings and timpani proved ample harmonic grounding, whilst above, the dancing continued.

What seems to be a genuinely sunny disposition on Blomstedt’s part displayed itself also in the encore, the Egmont Overture. Not at the beginning, of course, in which the Gewandhaus Orchestra sounded still darker than it had earlier; perhaps more to the point, each note in that extraordinary introduction was invested with meaning. Here we moved closer to a ‘traditional’ reading. The rejoicing that followed returned us, howeverm to that earlier Apollonian disposition. And what playing we heard from the orchestra: to match any in the world!