Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The Vienna Philharmonic’s annual visit to Carnegie Hall was far more than a series of superb concerts. Certainly it was a chance to hear a great orchestra play music fundamental to their heritage, and also to see the relationship between ensemble and guest conductor Franz Welser-Möst. With Bruckner, Richard Strauss, Mahler and others, it was also a living and profound exploration of romanticism flowing into modernism, under Carnegie’s Fall of the Weimar Republic festival.
The story of romanticism’s rise into that fall was argued in Friday’s concert with Bruckner’s Symphony No 9, followed by Alban Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, placed by Welser-Möst as the final movement to the unfinished Ninth. The symphony has been in the orchestra’s repertoire for a century and the sound was wonderful. The Vienna strings managed a gleaming, focused intonation that still was rich and gave each phrase a loving shape. Inner details were clear and every build-up to moments of crisis was organic under the conductor’s clear guidance and light touch.
Welser-Möst stepped up Bruckner’s grand dramatic statements throughout so that each was more intense than the last, and he was more animated than one has seen him previously. Three Pieces felt like an ice-water bath after the profound peace of Bruckner’s Adagio, but the story the orchestra told about the disintegration of 19th-century Europe through Berg’s slanted dance and march patterns, his collisions of tradition and modernism — and the sheer volume — made the whole concert immediate.
The argument expanded on Saturday, with four works from within a 10-year period that were vastly different, though dances and marches were the through-line. Hindemith’s Konzertmusik für Blasorchester showed off how fine the VPO’s winds and brass are this century, with agility and smokey hues. The orchestra’s playing of Strauss’s “Symphonic Fantasy” from Die Frau ohne Schatten was superior, a lesson in both Viennese style and pure ensemble technique, masterly playing that sounded easy.
After intermission, the skilful playing remained for Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra, but couldn’t completely overcome the composer’s stubbornness. The finale was Ravel’s La valse, another story modelling decadence and disintegration. It was special to hear players with an innate feeling for the lilt of the waltz, from the world’s most famous waltz orchestra, Welser-Möst’s brilliant touches of rubato compressing and then launching the explosive energy in the music. The sound was a phantasmagorical emulsification of timbres and shapes, individual instruments shooting out of the fray then dropping back into the glorious tumult.
Sunday afternoon’s performance of Mahler’s Symphony No 9 will stick in the mind and heart for a long time. Welser-Möst’s starting tempo was on the fast side, but still a relaxed stroll. The extreme contrasts between gentleness and fury were bridged by transitions as smooth and subtle as breathing. The opening movement was powerful, wrenching, shaped as finely as Bruckner. The Ländler folk dance was earthy, the Rondo-Burleske had breathtaking savagery. The final sigh glowed with sorrow, regret, acceptance and joy: Mahler.
★★★★★
