A great deal of what I know about music, it turns out, has accrued to me over the years through my attendance at Simon Rattle’s performances with the Berlin Philharmonic. When I first arrived in Berlin in 2003, Rattle had only recently taken over the orchestra. He was already something like a rock star, in terms of local popularity, and I and my friends attended every concert we could. Over the years I have kept up with these musicians whenever they visited New York or whenever I visited Berlin, and the results were never less than thrilling.
Now that Rattle has officially left the Berlin Phil for the London Symphony Orchestra, that era has come to an end. Whenever he is brought back as a guest conductor, as he certainly will be over the years, the feeling is likely to be slightly different—more formal, perhaps, and with less taken for granted. (That may not be altogether a bad thing.) This March, which included performances of the St. John Passion and a symphonic program the week after, marked the first of such returns. And so here I am in Berlin as well, since I am not about to miss the chance to hear this great conductor at the head of the great orchestra he both shaped and was shaped by.
The St. John Passion—a revival of the original 2014 production—is actually the second major Bach collaboration between Simon Rattle and Peter Sellars, the first being the St. Matthew Passion from the year before. I adore the music of St. Matthew and I have loved almost every production I’ve seen of it, from Mark Padmore’s scaled-down version at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw to Jonathan Miller’s English-language version at BAM. The Sellars-Rattle production, which I saw in both New York and Berlin, was no exception; it may even have been a high point of the genre. For me, St. Matthew is a religious work that transcends religion, a passion-play that evokes all the contemporary human passions, and a magnificent choral work that depends equally on its orchestral music, so that each aspect finally becomes indifferentiable from the other.
The St. John Passion, on the other hand, is something much weirder and harder to grasp. As an atheist Jew, I have always felt somewhat more excluded from the emotions it generates, which depend heavily on sympathizing with the tortures Christ endured. Orchestrally, too, it is less fascinating and integrated than the St. Matthew, which excels at solo instruments matched with solo voices, and which generally is performed with two separate orchestras, each backing half of the chorus. St. John, though equally complex, relies much more on its singers, and particularly on the tenor who sings the Evangelist role.
Luckily, this Berlin production in March featured—as it has always featured—Mark Padmore. I will cross oceans, and have done, to hear Padmore sing just about anything, from German lieder to Handel operas to Czech and English songs. He excels not just at making you understand the words (even if they are in a language you don’t know), and not just at putting across the music through his straightforwardly appealing voice, but also at conveying emotion through his bodily stance, which is never histrionic yet always expressive. Nothing he has ever done is better than his Evangelist in this St. John. He almost literally knits the piece together—with his recitatives, which join up the others’ passages, and also with his physical expressions of caring and concern. Throughout the two-and-a-half-hour performance, Padmore’s St. John crouches by Christ’s side, or carefully shadows Pilate, or tenderly lends his support to Peter, or simply listens attentively to the chorus, all the while maintaining the look of a man immersed in what is happening around him. It is through him that even the least Christian among us can begin to apprehend the point of the suffering we are witnessing.
And he is helped, in this production, by a stellar cast of singers, including the outstanding members of the Rundfunkchor Berlin, who allowed themselves to be deployed to wonderful effect in Sellars’ typically wild crowd movements. I was disappointed, at first, to learn that Christian Gerhaher (also a singer for whom I will cross oceans) was being replaced by Georg Nigl, an Austrian baritone previously unknown to me. But I needn’t have worried. Nigl’s lovely voice is almost as delicately nuanced as Gerhaher’s, and his acting in this case was perfect— his Peter movingly distraught, his Pilate even better, with a combination of arrogance and self-doubt that ultimately made sense of the strange role. Camilla Trilling made a great Mary, and Magdalena Kozena an equally persuasive Magdalene (though I could have done without the excessively sexual gestures that Sellars always encourages her to perpetrate in this role). And no one could have made a more sympathetic Christ than the terrific baritone Roderick Williams. Even the bit parts, all played by Andrew Staples, were beautifully performed. It was like watching a play underlaid by the world’s greatest music—gripping from beginning to end, and satisfying in just about every way. All of us who were in the audience that night (and I speak for the strangers around me as well as my four friends) felt we had witnessed something special.
To go from a sublime work like Bach’s to the more routine excellence of nineteenth- and twentieth-century masters is necessarily a bit of a comedown, but in the hands of Simon Rattle, even a Schumann symphony can scale the heights. I was particularly happy to hear him conduct Schumann’s Second—which he did a week after the St. John—because I had just listened, on the preceding Monday, to a performance of that same work by the Philharmonie’s youth orchestra, playing under the baton of Jörg Widmann. I always love to hear and watch the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, a collection of incredibly talented, enthusiastic youngsters who end their concerts by hugging each other. But no youth group could live up to the professionalism of the Philharmonie itself, and Widmann (who is primarily known as a composer and clarinetist) is by no means the conductor Rattle is. Under Widmann, the Second was a single prolonged, excitable blast of sound, with softer, slower passages intervening only in the third movement; whereas under Rattle, practically each measure seemed to have its own dynamic, its own tempo. Because the orchestra knows him so well (and because they have played this piece together numerous times, in numerous places), Rattle barely had to move a muscle to evoke the perfect performance: it had all been done beforehand in rehearsals, and what we were seeing was merely the outward reminder, with a gesture here and there to bring out or tone down the sound.
Silences at the Berlin Philharmonic can be as telling as overt music. This had been especially noticeable in the St. John Passion, where the silences between the passages of recitative seemed almost as memorable as the lines themselves. For his final performance (for now) in this august concert hall, Rattle knew how to introduce such silences even into the oceanic Schumann symphony. It may not have been my favorite Rattle performance ever—I would be hard put to choose that one—but es war genug.