Brilliant Bruckner from Berlin at the Proms
Kirill Petrenko is often said to be the best conductor in the world and his band, the Berlin Philharmonic, the best orchestra. Why is this? For style, pace, virtuosity and true interpretation, their joint rendition of Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony on Sunday night gave a decent answer.
It is the 200th anniversary of Anton Bruckner’s birth this year. Most have avoided the trap of looking for obscure new works and stuck with the core: his nine symphonies. Equal in their intensity, however, are his choral works. Last night three motets were excellently performed by the BBC Singers under Owain Pain. There was thankfully nothing of what you could call a “fake Cambridge sound” in this singing: the slow, soporific singing which is all the rage with conductors such as Anna Lapwood and which owes its debt to the close microphones of King’s College Choir in the last century. Instead, the BBC Singers gave a full-throated version of Os justi, Locus iste and Christus factus est, with a force comparable to the orchestra which succeeded them at the stunning climax of “quod est super” in the last motet. Bruckner’s Catholicism is a complex one – he made great use of seemingly Protestant chorales and supported Wagnerian innovation in his own time. But its profundity is never more clear than in his treatment of Latin text.
Fresh from an exhilarating rendition of Smetana and Schumann the evening before, the Berlin Philharmonic was tasked with the slower pace of Bruckner’s narrative. There is humour in this work, as well as bombast, surrealism and great tension. The peaks and toughs of the opening movement made the most of both the Orchestra’s extraordinary string sound – of which enough has always been said – and the sheer brilliance of its individual players. Perhaps Petrenko’s greatest asset is the composure with which he allows Bruckner’s instrumentation to shine forth unobtrusively, as if the oboe solo in the second movement or that of the clarinet in the last could only ever be the centre of attention.
With these symphonies, patience is the true virtue – but it is a highly intelligent patience, which acknowledges how Bruckner’s musical journey really is unlike any other. You have to sit and listen to the stop-starts and the sudden silences with a view to the larger finish. Petrenko’s interpretation of this mid-life work is a perfect example of that long-range vision.
And Petrenko’s direction is a sight at which to be amazed. The best British orchestras do compare, but do not match the rollicking energy and force of these players under the hand of their highly admired director. Even Sir Simon Rattle never seemed to enjoy the musical respect afforded his Russian successor when at the helm in Berlin. The electric control of the crescendi and diminuendi at numerous points, and the way in which the whole orchestra bought into the gradual increase in triumph throughout the last movement, is a testament to what the great orchestras of Europe most often bring: an old classic in a distinctive new style. It’s a reminder of the utter brilliance of German music-making and the example they set of which the BBC Proms should be annually reminded. If you want to know how to direct any group of highly able people, watch Petrenko taking his band through eighty minutes of tense, complex beauty.
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