Discovering a New Conductor

Of course, I am very late to the show on this one, since Daniel Harding is already a known quantity in the classical music world. But I had never before heard him conduct live (never, to my knowledge, even heard a recording of his conducting) before last Friday night.

I chose that Berlin Philharmonic program, as best as I can recall, for three reasons. One was that it was the last program the orchestra was giving before they left town on their spring tour, and I wanted to drain that particular cup to its last drop. Another was that I had heard good things about Harding, and this would be a great chance to hear this youngish British conductor (he is now in his early forties) in the best possible setting. And the third was that the program—some Ives, some Berg, and Mahler’s First—looked really interesting.

Programming well is part of the conductor’s job, and I have long since learned to trust my favorite conductors in their choices and arrangements. The Berlin audience, which in this case seemed slightly younger and hipper than the usual Philharmonie crowd, seemed a little dubious about the Charles Ives piece— titled “Three Places in New England”—which opened the program, but after listening to the entire set, I was completely won over.  “Ives is America’s Shostakovich,” I whispered to my seatmate when it ended; “you can never tell when he’s kidding.” And, I should have added, even the kidding is always deadly serious: that too is like Shostakovich. In this case, the aura of celebratory patriotism and nostalgia that marked these three pastiche-filled bits of Americana was infused throughout with a darker, scarier tone that manifested itself mainly in the purposeful wrong notes (again, a Shostakovich strategy, though one that Ives clearly invented for himself, since Shostakovich was only a small child when this orchestral set was written).

When we got to the second work on the program—three excerpts from Berg’s opera Wozzeck, two of them featuring the soprano Dorothea Röschmann in the role of Marie—I realized that military music, ironically treated, was central to Harding’s unifying idea for the evening. Wozzeck himself is of course a badly treated soldier, the lowest of the low, and Marie, his lover, betrays him with a more glamorous drum major—an act for which he, now driven mad by his own mistreatment, murders her. I love this opera and have never seen a bad production, but since it always causes me to sympathize with the victimized Wozzeck to the exclusion of nearly everyone else, it was useful to be asked to contemplate Marie separately: first in her relatively joyful mode, against the background of a military march, and then in the scene when she is being murdered. It was the third section, though—a purely orchestral sequence, in which Harding brought out the immense complexities and subtleties of Berg’s music—that clearly won over this previously dubious audience. I imagine that they, like me, could now begin to see what Harding was getting at in putting these two near-contemporary composers—one American, one Austrian—together in a commentary on the allures and dangers of military music.

We all had a wonderful treat still in store for us, though. In the second half of the program, Harding and the Berlin Philharmonic brought out every echo, every source, every borrowed element in Mahler’s First Symphony (including, of course, the patriotic/military ones) while nonetheless making it feel entirely original. The conductor managed to forge a direct connection between the Berg and the Mahler by, in both of them, sending some of the brass players offstage to play behind the scenes—and he also managed to suggest a link between the dark ironies of the program’s first half and the various pastiches one could hear in the Mahler. Most of all, he made me understand, as I have never understood before, why the young Shostakovich adored Mahler’s music so much. (The affection must have included, for instance, an awareness of their shared passion for Jewish klezmer music, which was particularly noticeable among the other influences in this rendering of the Mahler.)

At this point, if I could only listen to a single Mahler symphony over and over, it would be Daniel Harding conducting Mahler’s First at the Berlin Philharmonic. The daring choices Harding made as a conductor (which he was able to carry out fully, thanks to having a precision instrument of an orchestra at his disposal) caused every sequence of the ambitious work—each delicate solo, each lengthy pause, each booming crescendo—to seem meaningful in a new way. When the long-anticipated conclusion finally arrived, with its clash of symbols sounding amidst the frenzied outpouring of strings, brass, winds, and drums, the normally sedate Philharmonie audience went wild. Their enthusiasm wasn’t just audible in the loud cries of “Bravo!” that accompanied the deafening applause, but also in the non-verbal whoops and yells, the likes of which I have never heard in this hall before. People were clearly thrilled to have witnessed this stupendous performance—and, to judge by the wide smiles on their faces, Harding and the musicians were thrilled to have given it.