With a programme book that allotted almost as much space to singing the praises of the conductor as it did to the great orchestra and the music it was playing, there was no doubt who was the centre of attention at the Festival Hall this weekend. This was Simon Rattle's triumphal homecoming as the conqueror of Berlin, just a month into his 10-year contract as the Philharmonic's music director.
Whether by accident or design, Rattle's two concerts featured symphonies for which his two immediate predecessors in his new post were much admired. Herbert von Karajan set new standards of subtlety and tonal allure in Bruckner, while Claudio Abbado's Mahler was, and still is, quite peerless. Rattle's Bruckner 9 on Friday was a demonstration above all of the magnificent ensemble he has inherited from Abbado, one whose powers are going to grow over the next few years; the average age of the Berlin Philharmonic is surely lower now than it has ever been.
There was a brash quality about the performance, though, an in-your-face directness that was aurally thrilling but finally unsatisfying. The instrumental terracing that is so much part of the work's construction was flattened into a welter of sound, from which only the great landmarks emerged unscathed; Bruckner without that sense of spaciousness and rapt inner intensity is a diminished composer.
Mahler's Fifth Symphony the following evening took the high-voltage treatment far more convincingly. It's the work Rattle conducted at his inaugural concert in Berlin last month, and it is easy to see how such a performance, using a new edition of the score, wowed the Berliners. His ability to energise whatever he conducts and to focus the musical energy very precisely pays big dividends in this work, except in the Adagietto, which needed a much stronger sense of expressive line.
The two monumental symphonies had sharply contrasted pairings. The aperitif to Mahler was a sparkling, effortlessly stylish account of Haydn's Symphony No 88, the best kind of modern-instrument interpretation, while the Bruckner was preceded by Schoenberg's own string-orchestra arrangement of his String Quartet No 2. It has never caught on like his similar expansion of the Verklärte Nacht sextet, perhaps because it is not really successful; music that in its original scoring has an elusive, rarefied quality becomes earthbound and unambiguous, and, rather than looking forward to the uncharted modernist world Schoenberg was about to enter, harks back to Mahler, even at times to Elgar.
The soprano soloist in the last two movements was Dawn Upshaw, whose German leaves a great deal to be desired; the Stefan George poems (no texts provided in the programme) do need to be delivered as if they mean something.
