Simon Rattle and his Munich-based orchestra began their European tour in Liverpool and Birmingham this week with music by Schumann and Stravinsky. For London, though, they brought a different programme, in the shape of Janáček, a lifetime Rattle speciality, and Bruckner, a composer from whom the conductor once seemed to keep his distance but whose music he has gradually embraced with greater confidence.
The quality of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra was obvious in Janáček’s Taras Bulba rhapsody. At the start, ardent cor anglais, oboe and violin solos float above rich and shimmering strings before a sudden and more violent call to Slavic heroics: Janáček at his most angular and spine-tingling. The Bavarians’ playing of this quicksilver and fervent score was predictably first-class. Maybe, though, the orchestral mastery was also a notch too technically perfect, missing the ineffable fragility that animates so much of Janáček’s music so brilliantly. No reservations, though, about the excitement of the final movement, in which Janáček’s score catches fire.
Rattle’s Bruckner journey has been a fascinating aspect of his long years in Germany and central Europe. His earlier penchant for making and shaping Bruckner’s symphonies in new and sometimes unconvincing ways has eased now. Traces of that instinct do remain – some questionably dramatic pianissimos, for instance – but the overall result, in this performance of the seventh symphony, is a more illuminating, because more vernacular, approach, to which the Bavarians contributed consistently fine playing.
The vast span of the opening movement was very persuasive, carrying all before it, and avoiding any trace of needless religiosity as it climbed towards its home key resolution. The adagio was equally impressive, both coherent and bold in conception. Transitions were delicately handled, and orchestral balance and colours rich and varied, notably in the sombre Wagner homage after the cymbal climax. The scherzo danced rather than battered, as it surely should, while the finale worked, which it does not always do. All in all it was convincing evidence that Rattle’s Bruckner has acquired greater depth, while retaining the indispensable element of flexibility.
