BBC Proms 2022: Prom 65 - Schnittke: Viola Concerto; Bruckner: Symphony No. 4 (Zimmermann / BPO / Harding)

4th September 2022
Royal Albert Hall, London, United Kingdom

SCHNITTKE Viola Concerto
BRUCKNER Symphony No. 4 (Korstvedt)

Tabea Zimmermann (viola)
Berliner Philharmoniker
Daniel Harding (conductor)



Going to a Bruckner symphony concert is always a gamble. Given the monumental and repetitive nature of the music, it has a 20% chance of being a transcendental experience and 80% being complete mental torture. So, it was Bruckner's birthday, and we had Berliner Philharmoniker fresh from M7 the day before. Petrenko suffered from a foot injury and had to pull out, so the original DSCH 10 was changed to Bruckner 4 (Korstvedt) conducted by Daniel Harding. No. 4 is one of the few Bruckner symphonies I can stand (literally), but I am not so much a fan of the conductor. BPO playing was exemplary as always, Stefan Dohr throughout in particular, but I struggled to listen to it from beginning to end. As a casual Bruckner audience, I found the performance an hour of sonic bombardment with very limited dynamic and tempo ranges, and it was almost impossible to discern the formal structure or any shape of the work from this massive invariant block of sound - I would go as far as saying, unless you know the work already, you can't tell the four movements from one another. That was my little, insignificant experience. Most other reviewers seem to have enjoyed it, however. I only braved the Bruckner to hear the viola legend Tabea Zimmermann playing the Schnittke "Viola Concerto", a work that was written for another viola legend Yuri Bashmet. Schnittke's polystylism fusing the serious with the vernacular might not be everyone's cup of tea, but the sheer emotional range of the work, and especially one realised so spectacularly by the soloist tonight, was well worth the effort to hear. I would have enjoyed more penetrating orchestral involvement. One could only imagine how the performance would have been with the original conductor and curator of the programme.

BBC Proms 2022: Prom 62 - Mahler: Symphony No. 7 (BPO / K. Petrenko)

3rd September 2022
Royal Albert Hall, London, United Kingdom

MAHLER Symphony No. 7

Berliner Philharmoniker
Kirill Petrenko (conductor)



Berliner Philharmoniker. Kirill Petrenko. Mahler 7. Holy mama, how do I even begin? Spoiler alert: full house standing ovation. In 2016, Simon Rattle and the BPO performed M7 here at the Proms. I decided to give it a miss because I did not understand the work and feared it would give me a lasting wrong impression. Immediately after that, I made the effort to listen to it every day for a month and then finally a crack opened. Today, it's a full circle moment that the BPO returned with M7 and their new chief. It's the most puzzling of Mahler symphonies, not only because of the unusual orchestral timbres that call for cowbells, guitar and mandolin, but primarily because it's a work of irony and ambiguity. Taken on the surface, it's a nice depiction of the night - the joy, anguish and mystery of it, ending with a triumphant welcome to the morning - but the merrier the waltz is in the middle, the more tragic it gets. Putting everything in context and consideration, it's an emotionally complex work. The BPO cannot sound more different under the baton of Petrenko than his predecessor. He is an animated conductor with mannerisms like Carlos Kleiber. He virtually danced through the whole symphony and there was no evidence supporting the fact that he recently suffered from a foot injury. He had total command over the silvery sound of BPO and made a consistently fluid account of the symphony. There was this childlike purity in the Nachtmusik movements and deliberate banality in the Scherzo that added to the irony and made it haunting. The celestial middle movements made you want to stay in the moment forever. There are so many spectacular moments in the solos, dialogues and generally throughout it's impossible to list them all. Some probably think the finale is too fast, but the virtuosity of the orchestra was something to behold. The BPO is really the best orchestra in the world. For £6 I got to have the entire BPO first violins blasting in my face for 90 minutes. That's the magic of the Proms.