Everyone takes notes when the Berlin Philharmonic is in town.
On Tuesday night, Chicago Symphony musicians — scores of them — were, for once, part of the audience rather than the main attraction. Giancarlo Guerrero, the baton apparent at the Grant Park Music Festival, and former Chicago Opera Theater music director Lidiya Yankovskaya could also be picked out of Orchestra Hall’s near-capacity audience.
Hope they’re all quick writers. When the Philharmonic and its chief conductor Kirill Petrenko go deep on a single symphony — as they did this year with Bruckner’s Fifth, as they did here two years ago with Mahler’s Seventh — the revelations come fast and furious.
During Tuesday’s concert, the last in the Philharmonic’s two-week American tour, it took hardly any time at all for memories of 2022’s Mahler to float to the surface. There are many ways to “do” a Bruckner symphony, but one of the first decisions an interpreter must make is whether to sand out its breaks or lean into the non sequiturs.
Petrenko went for option two. His Bruckner, like his Mahler, was a group discussion, not a monologue. When ideas returned — and in Bruckner, they sure do return — they repeated under different guises. The tiptoeing pizzicati that opens the movement becomes, at turns, a locomotive chug, a bardic accompaniment, and even, at the end of the Adagio, a departing peck on the cheek.
Once again, the Philharmonic proved that the sheer detail of its interpretations are peerless. Without uttering a word, this orchestra conjures images that would require a page of prose to recount. The cellos’ plucks opening the work were so quiet as to sound like a figment of the imagination. But even once all the string chorale voices had entered, I could hear people in my aisle breathing. That’s the kind of pianissimo this group can muster. So can hornist Stefan Dohr, his two-note refrain in the same movement wafting like a whisper.
The Adagio was every bit as inspiring. Tuesday’s builds and releases seemed to reimagine the symphonist’s repetition as waves surging onto shore — each iteration washing away the memory of the last, and no two identical. Like waves, too, loud spots pulled away to reveal fragile pianos under the surf.
Different symphonies, different fruit, but Christian Thielemann’s Bruckner 8 from two years ago more or less represented the “monologue” approach to Bruckner, and compellingly so. But the Fifth and Eighth both cast their finales as best-hits movements, resurrecting melodies from all over the symphony. Like Beethoven’s Ninth, Bruckner chases his reveries away with a rowdy interruption, cast in the clarinet (here played almost humorously by Wenzel Fuchs). Later, that interjection was taken up by the whole orchestra in a meteorite staccato.
There was a lot more Beethoven in this movement, the Philharmonic’s charged tackling of its first fugue statement carrying the Grosse Fuge’s intensity. But the intricate double fugue at its climax sang, legato and lyrical, as though discovering some kind of inner peace.
“You can work on this symphony until eternity,” Petrenko enthused in a presser earlier this month.
One could listen to his interpretation about as long. With a rooted posture, Petrenko often felt like the calm eye of the Philharmonic’s storm. His minimal gestures court dynamite responses, especially, on Tuesday, from a very burly low brass section. In some repeated phrases in the Scherzo and Finale, he stopped beating, instead leading the orchestra through radiant emotion alone — bobbing, leaning, smiling.
There tends to be something phony about when conductors drop their arms, a show of brute authority rather than musicality. This was not that. This was a couple pumps on a bike, then letting — trusting — the wheels to coast the rest of the way.
One movement was not like the others. The Scherzo is marked “molto vivace” (very fast), but Petrenko took it at such a dash that gritty bedlam reigned for the first few minutes. Howling low brass and timpani gave it a certain Mahlerian grotesquerie — an interesting, if oddball, interpretation. Ultimately, though, the lack of balance and clarity gave the impression that the Berliners were, for a time, playing past one another.
That’s uncharacteristic for this orchestra. More than any other ensemble in the biz, the Berlin Philharmonic looks as much to one another for musical cues as to Petrenko. That can be as consequential as flutist Emmanuel Pahud and oboist Albrecht Mayer coordinating on an entrance, or as subtle as two stand partners drawing towards one another, like magnets, at the back of the viola section.
The Berlin Phil doesn’t just play like they love music, which is rarer than one would hope. They play like they love each other, which is somehow rarer still. After Tuesday’s performance, about a dozen musicians stood and embraced each other in gratitude for a tour well-traveled. We, too, are so thankful.
In the rotunda after the performance, clusters of concertgoers buzzed with the same question: How do the Berliners do what they do?
It helps when your civic value is not up for debate. European orchestras receive generous government subsidies that would be a fever dream in the States. The Berlin Phil embodies everything a cultural ambassador should be, because it’s treated like one.
At least, it was until recently. While on the road, the Philharmonic was rocked by news of a severe public funding slash of €2 million. The shortfall is a sliver of the city’s total proposed €3 billion in cuts but possibly crippling to the Philharmonic. A spokesperson told the Tribune that the timing of the cuts, effective Jan. 1, puts the Philharmonic in a particularly awkward position, having already signed artists’ contracts for 2025-26 and beyond.
Great orchestras don’t fall from the sky, even when they strike like lightning. They must be maintained — and never, ever taken for granted. The 2,452 people who nearly sold out Symphony Center on Tuesday didn’t.
Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.
The Rubin Institute for Music Criticism helps fund our classical music coverage. The Chicago Tribune maintains editorial control over assignments and content.
