If Simon Rattle has a gift as
a conductor it is that he is rarely predictable. Whilst his Mozart and
his Haydn (and to a certain extent his Beethoven) are informed by new
thinking, his Brahms and his Bruckner are massively Teutonic scaling
depths of sonority (with almost old fashioned portamento) that any conductor
from the 1940s would readily identify with. In one sense his performance
with the Berliner Philharmoniker of Brahms’ St Anthony Variations
was exactly this – broad, portentous and bold – and yet the unpredictability
came through the mellifluous way he treated the variations allowing
each one to have a freedom of tunefulness that pitted the sometimes
deliberate tempo against wonderful clarity of phrasing.
In the fourth variation, for example,
taken correctly by Rattle in 3/8 time, it wasn’t just the introduction
of the new melodies that mattered. It was the way he illustrated the
counterpoint (not often evident in performances) that struck home. With
the seventh variation it was the lushness of the Berliner strings that
mattered with the classical polyphony bringing out a wealth of inner
detail. With the eighth it was the brooding darkness of the playing
that gave the variation its mysterious glow. The performance never once
sounded obscure, although I can well accept less well-trained ears believing
this to be the case.
Heiner Goebbels’ Aus einem
Tagebuch and Richard Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben share autobiography
as their theme and yet it almost seems ironic to say that Goebbels’
is the more self-indulgent. Here we don’t have the intimacy of a Janacek
diary, rather the laying out before us of a life that sounds as if it
is in turmoil. The massive sonorities – and they are often deafeningly
so – suggest his diary has been carved into stone with a drill piece,
each of the nineteen movements fragmented by extraneous noises (overseen
in this performance by the composer himself using a sampling keyboard).
This is typical Goebbels – bringing past sounds into the present in
newly defined pitches - and at 22 minutes in length just outstays its
welcome.
Rattle has programmed Ein Heldenleben
in Birmingham before, and this performance with the Berliners was not
significantly different from the ones I have previously heard. Under
Rattle this is a less bloated monster than we usually hear, although
one did wish for greater power in the opening (which does after all
recall the E flat major opening of the Eroica). Yet, he brings
a surging power to ‘The Hero’ that is white hot with energy ("it
seethed on leaving the mouth of the furnace", wrote Romain Rolland)
and the playing was impeccably forceful. Nowadays Rattle seems to bring
greater viciousness to ‘The Hero’s Adversaries’ and the Berlin woodwind
were a seething, rasping group of adversaries spitting their notes out
with shrill menace. Guy Braunstein’s beautifully tempered violin solo
during ‘The Hero’s Companion’ was less languorous than I have heard
for sometime, yet contrasted with the amorous advances from the orchestra
on low horns and strings it was palpably more balanced, a reminder of
the more coquettish traits of Strauss’ wife, the soprano Pauline de
Ahna.
‘The Hero’s Battlefield’ was incandescent,
at once brilliantly virtuosic in its playing but at the same time sublimely
self confident in its ability to differentiate between the torrential
string figuration and knife-sharp woodwind and brass textures. With
Rattle’s clearest conducting of the evening given over to this movement
it was hardly surprising that the music appeared to sound so transparent,
so much like chamber music. The sensuousness that he lavished here pre-empted
a glowing transfiguration in the final two sections where beautifully
sustained pianissimo playing from the strings (and a riveting
cor anglais solo from Dominilk Wollenweber) heralded music making of
unusual beauty of tone. With the most sensuous music taken at a breathtakingly
slow pace – as if to underline this orchestra’s miraculous dynamic range
– it provoked a ravishing sound, marred only by principal horn Stefan
Dohr’s single flat note of the evening.
A beautiful performance then,
and one that showed that Rattle’s Berlin Phil is a very different creature
from the one he inherited. At times, the playing had such depth one
was reminded of Karajan’s earliest recordings with the orchestra, though
with the humanity of the occasional rough edges Rattle’s new orchestra
sometimes betrays. A magnificent instrument it remains, though under
Rattle, I think, one of the more interesting ones to listen to.
Marc Bridle
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