But this was the Zaterdagmatinee (Saturday matinée) at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, a heavily subsidised and subscribed series of concerts, all of which are broadcast on Dutch radio. For this performance, Rattle was able to offer a more ambitious and eclectic programme in the knowledge that it would be sold out, no matter what they played. Top price at the Saturday matinée is about £40, less than half the cost of the tickets for the two evening programmes promoted by the concert hall.
It is a rare luxury to be able to encounter Rattle and his orchestra in three consecutive programmes. In Berlin, the subscription system means you would need to stay almost a week to hear two different Philharmonic concerts, so this Amsterdam mini-residency provided a welcome opportunity to experience the Rattle-Berlin partnership in a variety of music. Word from Berlin has it that all has not been smooth-running between the conductor (who doesn’t speak the language) and his mostly German musicians.
Their London appearances have provoked equivocal critical responses, but, as I wrote at the time of their last concerts at the Proms, these are still early days in a conductor- orchestra relationship, and all the signs are there that things are improving. Last Easter in Salzburg, they programmed Britten song cycles and Mozart symphonies — playing to Rattle’s strengths — and their Schubert Ninth (just out on CD from EMI) suggests a growing authority in the central Austro-German classics on Rattle’s part.
Certainly, I doubt the Berliners ever played Haydn or Mozart as irresistibly for Karajan or his successor, Claudio Abbado, as they do for Rattle. The British conductor has taken on board the stylistic practice of period-instrument bands, fleeter of foot, more transparent in texture, but he meets the Berlin orchestra on its own terms in the expressively moulded, “singing” legato in the slow movements.
The third of the programmes was an early all-Mozart birthday offering, including the piano concerto in B flat major, K595, the “Prague” symphony in D major, K504. Rattle conducted the Berlin wind and double-bass principals in the majestic Gran Partita in B flat, and they were joined by Alfred Brendel, in sovereign form, for the piano concerto. Many of the Berlin wind, of course, are soloists in their own right — the orchestra’s French star flautist, Emmanuel Pahud, made his presence felt in the Prague symphony — and Mozart’s soloistic writing for their instruments was grasped like the richest of gifts. I don’t think I have heard more enjoyable big-band Mozart, full of operatic drama and wit, in years.
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The first programme was less satisfactory. It opened with Noesis, a complex 20-minute piece for huge orchestra by the 45-year-old Swiss composer Hanspeter Kyburz, who writes with evident virtuosity and an ear for interesting textures, alternating between extremes of fast and slow, loud and soft. The title is apparently taken from the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, but whether that means any more to the average concertgoer than it does to me, I can only guess. The audience applauded the composer politely.
They weren’t much more enthusiastic about Rattle’s account of Mahler’s Fourth, arguably his most amiable and carefree work in the genre, but here given the heavy-handed, neurotic, Bernsteinesque treatment, with exaggerated rallentandos, almost interminable Luftpausen (pauses for breath) and every musical t crossed and i dotted. I hated nearly every minute of it, but one of the Dutch critics described it as a performance in the vein of the eccentric Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg — a friend and champion of Mahler, the man who put the Concertgebouw Orchestra on the map, but notoriously subjective in his interpretations. Let’s hope this was Rattle’s homage to his hosts, not a “fixed” interpretation.
On the afternoon of the Berliners’ Mozart evening, I caught the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and their new chief conductor, Mariss Jansons, in the Shostakovich symphony — No 7 — they were due to play at Barbican Hall last night. In the Amsterdam concert hall’s benign acoustic, this potentially clamorous and mock-militaristic music sounded more distinguished than I had ever expected. And rarely has the “victory” of the finale sounded more hollow. I can’t wait for the Amsterdammers and Jansons in Haydn and Richard Strauss at the Barbican this afternoon.