For the first twenty or thirty years of my concert-going existence, I thought that the composer was everything. And then, a few years back, I began to notice how much difference a conductor could make. But even this realization did not emerge into a fully conscious concert-choosing principle until earlier this month, when events forced it to the forefront of my mind. As a result, my current position (and I understand that this is as foolish, in its way, as my earlier absolutist stance) is that the identity of the conductor is the only reliable factor.
What led me, half-amazed, to this startling conclusion was a pair of concerts at Carnegie Hall. The first, which took place on November 2, involved the last-minute substitution of Lorin Maazel for James Levine as conductor of the Boston Symphony. The second, on November 13, was the culmination of a three-concert appearance by Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic. A certain amount of the difference, I suppose, can be written off to the relative discomfort of musicians faced with an unfamiliar conductor: that is, the Boston players are used to playing with Levine and were suddenly stuck with a pinch-hitting Maazel, whereas Rattle and his Berlin performers have had years to build on their joint and separate strengths. But that alone does not begin to explain the discrepancy in the performances.
Like many other people, I am a Beethoven addict, so I was really looking forward to hearing James Levine conduct the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies, and even when his slower-than-expected recovery from back-surgery made him unavailable, I hoped that the excellent Boston Symphony would be able to stand up without him. I suspected that Maazel might be an irritating presence (a few visits to the New York Philharmonic had been enough to teach me that), but for some reason I figured that even he couldn’t ruin Beethoven. I was wrong.
The Sixth Symphony was bad enough—bad enough so I might ordinarily have left at the intermission, if I hadn’t been drawn in by the ghoulish, train-wreck horror of watching great music reduced to rubble—but the Seventh, which is one of my favorites, was downright appalling. It wasn’t just the sound: those arbitrarily slowed-down or speeded-up passages; the weird intrusions of oompah-sounding beats that were meant to underly the rest, but had been brought too forcefully to the surface; the distressingly cavalier way in which the piece’s normally powerful tension was punctured by something I can only call whimsy. But it was also the sight of Maazel, swinging his arms as if they were an elephant’s trunk, grasping at the protuberant notes with a greedily extended hand, and in general emphasizing with his body the destruction he was wreaking in the music. After a while I found it best just to rest my head against the back of my seat and contemplate Stern Auditorium’s lovely ceiling. I had never noticed before how soothing and helpful all that gold leaf can be when you are trying to lift yourself above the sordidness of your aural surroundings.
Brahms is one of those composers I always forget I like. When I am asked to name my favorites, he never comes to mind. But the three concerts given by Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic—and in particular the third concert, which presented Brahms’s Third and Fourth Symphonies separated by a sliver of Schoenberg—made me realize how fully he belongs with the other symphonic gods. Every subtle balancing act performed by Brahms, every shift of the melody from winds to strings and back, could be appreciated to the full in this concert. What you sensed, listening to these great performers, was how much Brahms understood and loved the symphony orchestra. The different timbres of the instruments, their varying capacities for loudness or softness, the way they could be made to echo and reinforce each other, were all second-nature to him. (Or perhaps not second-nature at all: Brahms threw away a great deal of his work, so the perfection we hear in these two final symphonies could well be laborious experience disguised as natural ease.) And what surprised me in particular at the Berlin Philharmonic concert was that I had never consciously perceived this in Brahms before.
Simon Rattle has occasionally been criticized for letting the Berlin musicians go their own way (mainly by people who valued the autocratic manner of Herbert von Karajan), but only someone who had never watched him in rehearsals could think this. What we see up there on the concert stage is merely the tip of the iceberg, the final moment in which they all bring to fruition what they have worked so hard, together, to create. Sometimes, yes, Rattle seems to rock back on his heels in passive appreciation of his wonderful musicians’ talent—but it only seems that way. In each tiny flick of his fingers, each fleeting expression of his face, as well as in his wilder moments of full-bodied enthusiasm, he is drawing out a performance whose every note has been contemplated and worked on in advance. The orchestra, under him, seems less like a pack of talented individuals than a single multi-faceted instrument responding to his delicate touch. And yet they remain individuals, too, as their piercingly good solos attest. Nothing of Brahms is lost in a performance like this. One could almost imagine, in such circumstances, that he is the equal of Beethoven.
—November 23, 2009