Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Berliner Philharmoniker

On Saturday night I caught up with the Berlin Philharmonic
at the Philharmonie in a concert led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin of music of
Berio, Chaikovsky, and Ravel. This was my first visit to the Philharmonie and
one of the first times I’d heard the Philharmoniker live conducted by someone
other than their current music director Simon Rattle. My impression of their last performance with Sir Simon (in Carnegie Hall) was decidedly mixed, of technical brilliance
lacking in any perceptible heartbeat. This was also the first time I’d heard
Nézet-Séguin conduct outside the Met, and he, the orchestra, and the concert
hall all left me very impressed indeed.


The program opened with Berio’s Sequenza IXa for solo
clarinet, and odd choice but apparently they are gradually performing the whole
cycle of Sequenze. The Philharmonie’s wonderful acoustics allowed lone clarinetist
Walter Seyfarth to resonate clearly even at the softest dynamics. I know this
piece from, um, playing it (only casually), and Seyfarth’s account was
technically impeccable and extremely clearly thought through. Clarinet
multiphonics (the closest we can get to a double stop) are unreliabe and wheezy
at best but Seyfarth’s were rock solid.  Motives
and structures were clearly defined, but nonetheless it was a bit more an
austere plateau than a collection of giant hairpins.  

Perhaps they chose the clarinet sequenza because the next
piece, Chaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet
Fantasy Overture, opens with a clarinet solo. I don’t know. Anyway, this
Chaikovsky was magical, taken with big ultra-Romantic pathos and rubato and
schmaltz and all that kind of thing that I like in Chaikovsky and occasionally find
suspect in Korngold. Nézet-Séguin took a glutinous approach to the transitions
that made the piece more smooth than exciting, but the orchestra’s considerable
virtuosity and precision in the fight portions was exciting enough. After my
recent spate of neat freak conductors it was nice to hear someone really go for
the emotional payoffs, and the horns’ countermelody was a thing of wonder.

Maybe it was the remnants of jet lag but I have to admit my
attention drifted at a few points during Ravel’s complete Daphnis et Chloe—not that it isn’t very beautiful music but I might
be in favor of performing the suite versions in this case. The orchestra here
sounded more like the one I knew from Rattle, light and precise (even in the
trickiest passages in the winds, including wonderful wind solos and one
slightly wonky violin one), and yet, when required, very very loud.
Nézet-Séguin showed the same flexibility as in the Chaikovsky but also the
needed delicacy. The ahs emanating from the Rundfunk Chor Berlin were also
excellently balanced with each other and the orchestra.

I find many modern concert halls alienating, but the
Philharmonie’s nooks and cranies were fun. It’s like hearing a concert in a
retro spaceship!

This concert is included in the Philharmoniker’s Digital Concert Hall and will soon be available ondemand if you’d like to see it yourself.


Berliner Philharmoniker, Philharmonie, 6/16/12. Yannick
Nézet-Séguin, conductor; Walter Seyforth, clarinet, Rundfunk Chor Berlin.
Berio, Sequenza XIa; Tchaikovsky/Chaikovsky, Fantasy Overture on Romeo and Juliet; Ravel, Daphnis et
Chloe (complete ballet)


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Berlin Phil descends upon New York

I only made it to one of last weekend’s Berliner Philharmoniker concerts. It was the first one, and I wrote about it for Bachtrack.

The composers Debussy, Dvořák, Schoenberg
and Elgar and aren’t often associated with each other, but they
featured together in the first of three concerts in Carnegie Hall with
Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic. The works on the program,
it turned out, all dated from the 1890s and all were program music. But
Rattle and the orchestra, while technically flawless, only seemed to
connect with the material at some points.

Read the rest of the review here. I’ve usually been a big Rattle fan. I went to college in Philadelphia, where he visited the orchestra every other year and we never missed a program. But this one left me in the end less thrilled, much in the same way I found his Salome last spring in Salzburg–flawless but chilly, in a repertoire in which coldness does no favors. But the Enigma Variations, a piece I’ve never been crazy about, was pretty spectacular. I do like the Dvořák too, which is never sugary and always subtle.

Those things could not be said of Jack Sullivan’s program notes. In the note to Dvořák’s Golden Spinning Wheel, he perpetuates the dangerous cliché that the Germanic composers of this period wrote in a generic mainstream style driven by intellectual processes and education, while the “nationalist” composer such as Dvořák (or Chopin, or Glinka, or Liszt) is more “authentic,” unstudied, and instinctual. Sullivan’s Dvořák communes with the Czech spirit at a primordial level, but to get this he distorts a number of facts. While Czech folklore was very important to Dvořák, this did not preclude him being literate and cosmopolitan as well–just like most composers of any nationality.

He describes The Golden Spinning Wheel as one of four “orchestral ballades” that Dvořák “knocked off” in 1896, which he describes as based on a “folktale” and “fairy tale.” “Knocked off” is a condescending way of putting it–would we ever say that Brahms knocked off something? And the second half simply isn’t true. The Golden Spinning Wheel is based on a poem by the Czech poet Karel Jaromír Erben. Its sources are folkloric to be sure, but Dvořák was working from a literary source, not transcribing the spirit of a fairytale from his grandma.

Sullivan describes the form of the piece thusly:

Dvořák often used classical sonata form in his symphonic works, but the structure of The Golden Spinning-Wheel, based directly on the verbal rhythms of folklorist Karel Jaromir [sic] Erben’s text, is as far from Viennese classicism as possible, giving the piece a liberating unpredictability that was later celebrated and built upon by Leoš Janáček.

Oy. So here we have the first mention of Erben, whose responsibility for the source material is never further clarified. Then we have a description of something that sounds like a proto-Janáčekian speech-melody technique. I don’t know this piece enough to say if it’s present or not, but even if it is, “verbal rhythms” work on the local, phrase level, which has nothing to do with whether the piece is in sonata form or not.

But most seriously, what is this form that is “as far from Viennese classicism as possible”? It’s… a rondo. An odd rondo, with a lot of little ternary forms in the episodes, but a recognizable rondo nonetheless. Rondos are one of the foremost Viennese classical forms. Of course, many folk forms also contain similar forms with a recurring section. The stark binary between Czech and not-Czech music just doesn’t exist. Prague is not, after all, very far from Vienna.

Updated to Add: The program note for the Enigma Variations identifies Variation VI (Ysobel) as being a violin solo. It’s a viola.

(By the way, I often write program notes myself. If you need some, call me.)

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