Described in the programme as "Austria's most coveted cultural export article", the Vienna Philharmonic is trading on its past reputation, if this dull evening was anything to go by. It would also seem that the fiercely all-male orchestra is travelling light. It usually arrives in considerable numbers for its regular visits to the Festival Hall, together with a programme based around one of the big post-Romantic works on which its interpretative fame now predominantly rests. On this occasion, however, there were no more than 60 players, while the programme - Bach, Mozart and Mendelssohn - was small in scale. None of the works showed the orchestra to advantage.
The presence of Lorin Maazel at the helm didn't help. A great showman, he is at his best with music that is flashily virtuosic, qualities far removed from Bach. He approached Bach's Second Orchestral Suite with reverential awe, trawling through its slower sections with solemn gracelessness and robbing the rest of its buoyancy, poise and subtlety. The Sarabande was interminable. The astonishing central section of the Polonaise, in which a sinewy sparseness of texture undercuts the surface brilliance of the whole, went for nothing. Only the solo flautist, Meinhart Niedermayr, injected a modicum of elegance into the proceedings.
Maazel then careered through Mozart's neurotically edgy 25th Symphony with dispassionate, almost metronomic rigidity. Although the wild outer movements and the angular Minuet can take such clockwork precision, the Andante, with its obsessive, claustrophobic dialogues between strings and bassoons, seemed sluggish and otiose.
A Mendelssohnian travelogue - the Hebrides Overture and the Italian Symphony - came after the interval. Mistaking speed for energy, Maazel turned in a hard-driven, unyielding performance of the overture. The symphony, at least, found him on something like form, generating a feverish excitement throughout. The playing was occasionally scrappy, however, with the VPO's famously sumptuous string tone less in evidence than usual, and some remarkably indifferent brass. Much of the time the orchestra seemed to be on autopilot, with the musicians cultivating an air of aristocratic hauteur on the platform and conveying little sense of pleasure or commitment to anything they were doing.
