In the Karajan era, London appearances by the Berlin Philharmonic were rare events, with fans queuing overnight to be assured of tickets. Now, the orchestra is an established part of the international musical merry-go-round, alongside the other major European orchestras. This performance of Mahler's Third Symphony, part of the series of five concerts Bernard Haitink is conducting at the Barbican this year to celebrate his 75th birthday, was the BPO's fourth British concert in the past month, and its sixth in a little over a year.
If the pair of distinctly average Proms with its music director Simon Rattle three weeks ago suggested that familiarity was starting to undermine the impact of a once outstanding band, these results under Haitink refuted that. This was the Berlin sound at its most startling, perhaps without the sheer tonal brilliance it had a decade ago, but lustrously vivid and utterly secure, and sometimes almost too big for the Barbican acoustics.
The last truly great performance of Mahler's Third in London also came from this orchestra, playing under its previous music director, Claudio Abbado, at the Festival Hall five years ago. Haitink's performance was equally memorable but very different, set out in bold, uncompromising paragraphs in the first movement, each element firmly in its place, deftly mixing lyricism and rustic humour in the second and third, and providing the most delicate of cushions for contralto Anna Larsson's rapt presentation of the Nietzsche setting in the fourth.
Haitink was happy to take the Knaben Wunderhorn-inspired innocence of the fifth movement (with the female voices of the London Symphony Chorus and the boy choristers from St Paul's Cathedral) at face value, and as light relief before the radiant finale. Every paragraph of that movement became more beautiful and transfiguring than the one before, as if the pages of an illuminated manuscript were being slowly turned, and the Berlin strings dug ever deeper into their tonal reserves,creating an extraordinarily luminous ending to an unforgettable performance.
