{"id":978,"date":"2019-03-25T02:32:35","date_gmt":"2019-03-25T09:32:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/?p=978"},"modified":"2019-03-27T21:17:00","modified_gmt":"2019-03-28T04:17:00","slug":"rattles-berlin-philharmonic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/rattles-berlin-philharmonic\/","title":{"rendered":"Rattle’s Berlin Philharmonic"},"content":{"rendered":"

A great deal of what I know about music, it turns out,\u00a0has accrued to me over the years through\u00a0my attendance at\u00a0Simon Rattle’s performances with the Berlin Philharmonic<\/a>. When I first arrived in Berlin in 2003, Rattle had only recently taken over the orchestra. He\u00a0was 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\u00a0whenever they visited New York or\u00a0whenever I visited Berlin, and the results were never less than thrilling.<\/p>\n

Now\u00a0that Rattle has officially left the Berlin Phil for the London Symphony Orchestra, that era has come to an end. Whenever he\u00a0is brought back as a guest conductor, as he certainly will be over the years, the feeling is likely to be slightly\u00a0different\u2014more formal, perhaps, and with less taken for granted. (That may not be altogether a bad thing.) This March, which included\u00a0performances of the St. John Passion<\/em> and a symphonic program the week after,\u00a0marked the first of such returns.\u00a0And 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.<\/p>\n

The St. John Passion<\/em>\u2014a revival of the original 2014 production\u2014is actually the second major Bach\u00a0collaboration between Simon Rattle and Peter Sellars, the first being the St. Matthew Passion<\/em> from the year before. I adore\u00a0the music of St. Matthew<\/em> 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<\/em>\u00a0is 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\u00a0orchestral music, so that each\u00a0aspect finally becomes indifferentiable from the other.<\/p>\n

The St. John Passion<\/em>, on the other hand,\u00a0is 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<\/em>, which excels at solo instruments matched with solo voices, and which generally is performed with\u00a0two separate orchestras, each backing half of the chorus. St. John<\/em>, though equally complex,\u00a0<\/em>relies much more on its singers, and particularly on the tenor who sings the Evangelist role.<\/p>\n

Luckily, this Berlin production in March featured\u2014as it has always featured\u2014Mark 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\u00a0voice, but also at conveying emotion\u00a0through his bodily stance, which is never histrionic yet\u00a0always expressive. Nothing he has ever done is better than his Evangelist in this St. John.\u00a0<\/em>He almost literally knits the piece together\u2014with 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\u00a0among us can begin to apprehend the point of the suffering we are witnessing.<\/p>\n

And he is helped, in this production, by a stellar cast of singers, including the outstanding\u00a0members 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\u2014 his Peter movingly distraught,\u00a0his Pilate even better, with a combination of\u00a0arrogance 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\u00a0in this role). And no one could have made a more sympathetic Christ than the terrific\u00a0baritone 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\u2014gripping 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2014which he did a week after the St. John<\/em>\u2014because 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 J\u00f6rg 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\u00a0youth 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\u00a0blast of sound, with softer, slower passages intervening only in the third movement; whereas under Rattle, practically each measure seemed to have its own\u00a0dynamic, its own\u00a0tempo. 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.<\/p>\n

Silences at\u00a0the Berlin Philharmonic can be as telling as overt music. This\u00a0had been\u00a0especially noticeable\u00a0in the St. John Passion<\/em>, where the silences between<\/em> the passages of recitative seemed\u00a0almost\u00a0as memorable as the lines themselves. For his\u00a0final performance (for now) in this august concert hall, Rattle knew how to introduce such\u00a0silences even into the oceanic Schumann symphony. It may not have been my favorite Rattle performance\u00a0ever\u2014I would be hard put to choose that one\u2014but es war genug<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A great deal of what I know about music, it turns out,\u00a0has accrued to me over the years through\u00a0my attendance at\u00a0Simon Rattle’s performances with the Berlin Philharmonic. When I first arrived in Berlin in 2003, Rattle had only recently taken … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[583,17,147,580,582,434,576,581,237,236,579,584,291,25,578,577],"class_list":["post-978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-lesser-blog","tag-andrew-staples","tag-bach","tag-berlin-philharmonic","tag-camilla-tilling","tag-georg-nigl","tag-jorg-widmann","tag-junge-deutsche-philharmonie","tag-magdalena-kocena","tag-mark-padmore","tag-peter-sellars","tag-roderick-williams","tag-rundfunkchor-berlin","tag-schumann","tag-simon-rattle","tag-st-john-passion","tag-st-matthew-passion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=978"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":991,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/978\/revisions\/991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}