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.
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