I always try, when I’m visiting Berlin, to start off the musical part of my stay with something especially good. This is not hard to do, since almost everything Berlin offers musically is good. But this time I appeared to be hitting the jackpot. On my first full day here, November 7, I would be just in time to catch Ivan Fischer conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in Haydn’s Sinfonia Concertante and Mahler’s Fifth.
I have been following Fischer for decades—first when he combined performances of his own Budapest Symphony Orchestra with guest postings elsewhere, and then, after he was exiled during Orban’s regime, at his various appearances in Berlin. Most recently, I heard him conduct a very moving Philip Glass choral work at the Konzerthaus with that venue’s in-house symphony. So I was especially looking forward to what he would do with the fabled Berlin Phil in their own beautifully designed concert hall.
Imagine my distress, therefore, when I learned from that morning’s paper that he had been replaced at the last minute by a youngish (and unknown to me) Colombian conductor, Andrés Orozo-Estrada. In the course of the day I gradually managed to piece together the back story. Fischer, who is used to being in charge, had wanted the players to rearrange their normal seating for the Mahler—specifically, by moving the eight double-basses from the righthand side of the stage to the center, just behind the woodwinds. The musicians, a strong-willed group, had rebelled, pointing out that in their hall there was no back wall at the center to reflect the strings’ resonant notes, and moreover, that the presence of this large group of massive instruments would block the sightlines between the other players. I have seen some of Fischer’s rearrangements before—in particular, an occasion when he memorably put the strings on the outside of the orchestral semi-circle and the brass and winds inside—and I am always up for his experiments. But the Berlin Phil musicians had already tried this particular rearrangement with him in an earlier performance of Mahler’s First, and they resisted this time. Both sides agreed to disagree, and the eminent conductor was replaced at the last minute by Orozco-Estrada.
For about thirty seconds at the beginning of the Haydn, I regretted not hearing Fischer perform. Then I just let it all go. The four soloists in the Sinfonia Concertante, drawn from the ranks of the Berlin Phil itself—Noah Bendix-Balgley on violin, Bruno Delepelaire on cello, Jonathan Kelly on oboe, and Stefan Schweigert on bassoon—were all notably terrific, and they probably could have done their job whoever was conducting. As they wove Haydn’s rollicking melodies in and out of each other’s singular voices, and then combined with the collective voices of the orchestra, I felt entirely at peace and satisfied (just as Haydn always wants us to feel). I may have grumbled at times about the lack of good places to eat near the Philharmonie or its distance from the nearest subway stop, but really, what was there to complain about in this acoustically perfect, surprisingly intimate hall? It was heaven. Oh, and the conducting was fine: a bit antic here and there, yet never intrusive, never disruptive.
But it was in the Mahler that Orozco-Estrada truly came into his own. The motions of his body that had seemed slightly exaggerated or excessively sharp in relation to the Haydn now fitted the music perfectly: his rhythms and Mahler’s blended exactly. The Fifth is my favorite Mahler symphony, and I have heard some great performances, but none better than this. And with an attentive audience—which this one was, thank god—the silences between the five movements can be almost as expressive as the music itself. From my excellent seat, I could see every one of the players, and I could sense how important it was for them to see each other, especially the brass, who would have been blocked by the central double-basses. I could measure, for instance, the way the basses’ pizzicato on the far right echoed and balanced the harp notes coming from the far left. The orchestra was so precisely coordinated that when the eight cellos played on their own—led by the dashing Mr. Delepelaire, and backed up only by the quietly flickering beat of one drum—they sounded like a single instrument. As the final movement rose to its ultimate crescendo (a point at which I always watch the cymbalist, as he doubles and then redoubles his pace), I thought to myself that though it might have been interesting to hear Fischer’s version, this version of Mahler’s Fifth had turned out to be perfect. And you can’t do better than that.