BPO/Petrenko - Reger and Strauss, 25 August 2023

 
Philharmonie

Reger: Variations and Fugue on a theme by Mozart, op.132
Strauss: Ein Heldenleben, op.40

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
Kirill Petrenko (conductor)

It had been a while. The last time I had heard the Berlin Philharmonic had been on 5 March 2020, just four days before public performances ceased in that great, monstrous silence. Now I was here for the orchestra’s season-opening concert of Max Reger and Richard Strauss under music director, Kirill Petrenko. Absence may have had the heart grow fonder, but this was outstanding music-making by any standards.

What a joy to open with Reger’s Mozart Variations, a masterpiece, yet one I had not hitherto had opportunity to hear live. They do not come around that often: Furtwängler gave the Berlin Philharmonic premiere in 1934, 21 years after its first performance in Wiebsbaden, conducted by the composer, and the BPO had not played it since 1995, under Horst Stein. (If you think Hindemith terminally unfashionable, turn to Reger. Schoenberg, though, knew his worth, unhesitantly calling him a genius.) Petrenko and the Berliners brought us a properly backward glance from the early twentieth century, a Mozart both more delicate and, somehow, more robust than we should hear now, Reger increasingly present – as through the set as a whole – in, for instance, his octave doublings and, crucially, our listening. The first variation brought clucking worthy of Haydn, Reger’s voice becoming ever more evident in toy-shop enchantment. The second and third variations sounded almost as if homages to Brahms; in a way, they are. Vertical and horizontal expansion inevitably brought Schoenberg to mind, but also (for me) Elgar too. Reger could do with a champion or two such as Elgar has; maybe he has found one in Petrenko. The third, however, also took a step back to earlier Romanticism, breathing the air of a Schumannesque forest. Why all the references to other composers, you may ask, and it is a reasonable question. Perhaps because Reger, especially when much of his music remains relatively unfamiliar, seems to invite them, but I should stress that he never merely sounds ‘like’ someone else. 

The fifth variation’s scherzo-like quality similarly brought Busoni to mind, whereas the deliciously sly modulations of the sixth reminded us of Reger’s acknowledged mastery in this field. One might think his book on the subject overly theoretical, but it served a point, here painted in vivid colour. A heartfelt slow movement followed, Wagner not a million miles away, nor Elgar, but always Reger ‘himself’. Petrenko seemed always to alight on just the right tempo, giving the illusion of permitting the music to play itself. And the BPO's playing was unfailingly gorgeous. The sly ingenuity of the fugue was brought home with clarity and warmth; detail was scrupulously yet never pedantically observed. Harmony was at least as much king as counterpoint, which returns us to Mozart...

Strauss too owed much to Mozart, though not so much in Ein Heldenleben as many other works. The tone-poem’s initial portrayal of the hero inaugurated a season-long theme of ‘Heroes’. It had everything going for it – depth of tone, the playing of those eight horns, the finest articulation, balances spot on – other than some of the swagger Karajan might have brought to it. Perhaps that slightly vulgar bombast, a necessary tone in the palette of an anything-but-vulgar composer, does not come so readily to Petrenko. This, however, was my sole, fleeting reservation and hardly a major one. Strauss’s critical adversaries were faster on their feet than usual, perhaps making their hot air all the more ephemeral. It made for a powerful contrast, highly dramatic, with the well-nigh Wagnerian gloom of string response. Concertmaster Vineta Sareika-Völkner’s solo playing in evocation of the hero’s companion was of equal excellence, her storytelling as vital as that of her orchestral colleagues. In musical congress of distinction, both sides enabled us to learn more of the other, as doubtless they themselves did too. 

True symphonic coherence, lightly worn, was readily apparent in the transition to ‘Des Helden Walstatt’, and indeed in other transitions. Here was a battle royal, its heat initially erotic, yet turning frankly military, the jangle of the battlefield approaching cacophony at times. (So perhaps Petrenko can do ‘vulgar’ after all, particularly when prepared. The opening's out-of-the-blue, cards-on-the-table stance is extraordinarily difficult to bring off; either that, or difficult to prevent overshadowing everything else.) The final two sections functioned not only as crucial staging posts in narrative and form, but also as a conspectus of Strauss’s art, recapitulating works yet to be written as well as those that had. Don Juan met Die Frau ohne Schatten in a second development actually to rival Beethoven by never tackling him head on, rather than by merely aspiring to do so in the key of the Eroica. And yet, Petrenko and the orchestra never mistook this tone poem for a symphony, still less a mere collection of scenes. Strauss may employ symphonic means, but never exclusively so. Ein Heldenleben is a treacherous work, full of traps for even the most experienced conductors and orchestras. Petrenko and the Berlin Philharmonic did it and themselves proud.

Merry Christmas!

Some favourite Christmas music:

Kam/Kiefer - Berg, Reger, Debussy, and Brahms, 29 December 2014

Wigmore Hall 

Berg – Four Pieces for clarinet and piano, op.5

Reger – Clarinet Sonata in B-flat major, op.1-7

Debussy – Première rapsodie

Brahms – Clarinet Sonata in F minor, op.120 no.1

Sharon Kam (clarinet)

Stephan Kiefer (piano)

 

This proved an excellent final concert of 2014: an interesting programme, well performed, with the bonus of my first – and last – Max Reger of the year. First, however, came Berg’s Four Pieces: the composer at his most aphoristic, and sounding very much so in a musical as well as merely temporal sense. I wondered to start with whether the opening of the first piece were a little diffident. It blossomed, however, and soon realised that what I had taken for diffidence had been an interpretative strategy, impressively realised on its own terms – Sharon Kam’s clarinet pianissimi in particular. The movement’s final chord lingered magically. The second piece sounded wonderfully Romantic, languid yet forceful too, phrasing very well handled throughout. A scurrying, will-o’-the-wisp-like third movement found its heart with contrasting central material, which here sounded as if the gateway to later Bergian labyrinths. Likewise the piano’s rocking rhythms in the final piece seemed to look forward to Wozzeck. This movement offered the requisite sense of quasi-symphonic unity to the work as a whole, but its own specific character too: violence powerfully communicated by both Kam and Stephan Kiefer, prior to moving, eloquent subsiding.

 

Reger’s Clarinet Sonata opened in palpably post-Brahmsian style, as it should. The performance of the first movement developed so as not to lose sight of Reger’s still more greatly ‘involved’ method, but crucially traced a clear path through what the composer’s detractors might consider the ‘thickets’ of his music. Kam and Kiefer both offered a degree of chiaroscuro that would surely have astonished such sceptics. (Reger surely suffers more than many composers from poor performances – when indeed he is performed at all.) Kiefer drew a mellow sound from the Wigmore Hall Steinway, to the extent that I might almost have guessed it to be a Bösendorfer. A lively, always harmonically-aware, scherzo followed, revealing rapt, innig trio material at its centre and close. The melancholy of that music prefigured the slow movement proper, which received a powerful performance, again with a very strong sense of greater line (albeit interrupted, sadly, by a lengthy telephonic interruption, the second of the evening). The ‘Idea’, if not the ‘style’, to employ Schoenberg’s distinction, made clear why that composer so admired Reger’s music. As with the Berg Pieces, the fourth movement gave a true impression of uniting differing tendencies in earlier material. Themes were characterised with admirable, even dramatic, clarity, but connections whether of a more ‘developmental’ (let us say, Brahmsian) or ‘transitional’ (Wagnerian?) tendency were conveyed equally well. The essence of the sonata principle was, even at this late stage, served well. A composer still more neglected than Busoni – save, perhaps, by organists – and more unfashionable still than Hindemith gained committed advocacy, and will surely have gained some new converts, or at least adherents.

 

Kam’s breath control, impressive throughout, seemed perhaps even more so in Debussy’s Première rapsodie, given the languid results. That is not to imply the more negative connotations of ‘rhapsody’, for form was perfectly clear. So, again, were the pianissimi. Softer playing from Kiefer was equally apparent – and equally welcome. Contrasts proved just as important as continuity in a fine performance.

Brahms’s F minor Sonata might perhaps have benefited from a heightened sense of drama at times, but there was no doubting the musicality of the artists’ response. The Janus-like quality of composer and music seemed almost a metaphor for the opening of the first movement – or should that be the other way around? It emerged both as an opening and, seemingly, as the continuation of an older tale. Again, musical line was seamless, without exclusion of contrast. Perhaps a little more of the latter might have dramatised the second movement, but again line was impressively present. The third movement touched one as if the light of a beautifully autumnal sun – not as the consequence of a self-consciously ‘autumnal’ reading, but as a faithful, imaginative communication of the material. The piano’s chains of intervals seemed to point towards Webern, which of course they do. Tonal variegation and structure were well communicated in the finale, which again ‘came off’ in the integrative fashion demanded both by the material and by its placing.