The Berlin Philharmonic Doesn’t Need a Star Conductor

When, in 2009, the Berlin Philharmonic launched the Digital Concert Hall, a streaming-video platform for its concerts, the orchestra had no particular need to bolster its reputation. For decades, the Philharmonic had reigned as the world-champion musical heavyweight. Established in 1882, it had been led by a procession of luminaries: Hans von Bülow, Arthur Nikisch, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Herbert von Karajan, Claudio Abbado, Simon Rattle. And yet the distinctive Berlin sound—I’ve compared it, over the years, to a Rembrandt interior, a Russian men’s choir, and deep-focus cinematography—has never relied on the elevating powers of any one maestro. Indeed, members of the Philharmonic are more likely to ask whether conductors have risen to their level. Rattle, who departed in 2018, described them as a company made up of leading actors. They are intelligent, argumentative, self-aware. When they are of one mind, the concert stage knows nothing more potent.

Still, the Digital Concert Hall has had a pronounced influence: it has humanized a group that can intimidate audiences as much as it does conductors. Olaf Maninger, a member of the cello section, came up with the initial idea for the platform, and over the years the setup has grown increasingly sophisticated, with eight stationary cameras, two control rooms, and banks of monitors. During the Philharmonic’s most recent American tour, in November, I could tell that some spectators around me were Digital Concert Hall regulars. “There’s Sarah Willis,” someone would say, as the French horns took their seats. “There’s Stefan Dohr.” The cameras often focus on the principals, but they also show the collective personality of the various sections: the double-basses, with their eerily unanimous pizzicatos, or the violas, with their smoldering tremolos. What distinguishes the Berliners from other orchestras is that they seem to dig into each phrase a little more. You can see this as readily as you can hear it.

On the November tour, the Philharmonic presented eight concerts in five cities. One program consisted of Rachmaninoff’s “Isle of the Dead,” Korngold’s Violin Concerto, and Dvořák’s Seventh Symphony; the other was given over to Bruckner’s immense Fifth Symphony. I saw both programs at Carnegie Hall and the Bruckner again at Boston’s Symphony Hall. The tour took place against a troubled financial backdrop: in Germany, the Berlin Senate had announced a roughly twelve-per-cent cut to the cultural budget, affecting the Philharmonic along with many other institutions.

The Philharmonic is worth protecting at all costs, because it preserves a singular performance style that harks back to the Romantic era. According to this philosophy, which Furtwängler perpetuated, the orchestra should avoid lockstep exactitude; instead, it should function as an organic mass, a crowd of like-minded but non-identical voices. This impression of calculated imprecision made for an enthralling “Isle of the Dead.” At the outset, cellos, double-basses, timpani (Wieland Welzel), and harp (Marie-Pierre Langlamet) established an oar-stroke rhythm that dragged ever so slightly as other instruments joined in and pushed ahead. Yun Zeng, a brilliant young horn player who this year assumed a co-principal position alongside Dohr, delivered a spectral solo that glowed through the murk and then was swallowed up in it. What emerges from such playing is an acoustic three-dimensionality. Sounds are seen in perspective, attain height and depth, cast shadows.

Music of a gloomy cast seems to suit the Berliners best. The prowling viola-and-cello figures at the outset of Dvořák’s Seventh become a cohesive, visceral gesture. The downside is an intermittent awkwardness with dancing, carefree music. There was little syncopated swing in Dvořák’s Scherzo and finale. Yet the Korngold concerto, with Vilde Frang as the soloist, showed lightness and effervescence. Frang avoided the syrupy tone that has prevailed in this concerto since Jascha Heifetz gave the première, in 1947. The orchestra foregrounded glistening timbres of harp, celesta, and vibraphone. The clarinettist Matic Kuder, another recent addition to the ranks, enlivened both the symphony and the concerto with limpid, puckish solos.

As for the Bruckner, the Berliners succeeded in animating a figure who is too often treated as an impassive statue. This year, the bicentennial of the composer’s birth, the Philharmonic has been holding an extended Bruckner seminar. By year’s end, the orchestra will have performed all nine of his numbered symphonies, as well as two apprentice works. The Fifth, lasting more than seventy minutes, is probably the hardest to bring off. Austere and relentless, it culminates in a finale that piles theme atop theme in towering fugal sequences. Although the climaxes invariably raise goosebumps, the symphony also contains many hazardous stretches of exposed solo writing. The horns are constantly exchanging figures with the winds at soft dynamics. At Carnegie, Dohr, a legend in the profession, squelched a note or two, and the veteran oboe-and-clarinet team of Albrecht Mayer and Wenzel Fuchs fell momentarily out of synch in the Adagio. Two nights later, in Boston, everything snapped into place as the orchestra revelled in the bright, lush acoustic of Symphony Hall.

During that second outing, I realized that the Berliners were treating this symphony as a kind of conceptual comedy—not funny per se, but intellectually playful. At the beginning of the finale, Bruckner lays themes out like pieces from a kit to be assembled. Fuchs put a prankish spin on the descending octaves that tootle above the reprise of the symphony’s solemn opening. Cellos and basses then took up that figure with lusty force, like a rugby scrum pushing downfield. When the full brass blared forth, they had a hint of marching-band exuberance. Underpinning the festive atmosphere was the bravura timpani playing of Vincent Vogel, who joined in 2022. Vogel has a way of unleashing climactic Bruckner rolls at ostensibly maximum volume and then making a crescendo in the final seconds. This going-to-eleven effect isn’t in the score, yet it pays off.

The conductor was Kirill Petrenko, who took over from Rattle in 2019. That I’ve waited so long to mention him might seem a slight. In fact, it’s the highest compliment I can think of. Petrenko made crucial decisions in an unobtrusive way, shepherding the orchestra toward its best instincts. His first outings as artistic director struck me as interpretively fussy, and his tastes appeared to be conservative. But Petrenko has melded with the Philharmonic to a remarkable degree, and, although he is not a new-music maven in the vein of Rattle, he has delved into neglected twentieth-century repertory, with an emphasis on the music of German Jewish émigrés. (Petrenko, who is of Russian and Ukrainian Jewish descent, immigrated to Austria when he was eighteen.) Watching the Digital Concert Hall, I notice a merry glint in his eyes. That unexpectedly rollicking Bruckner Fifth bore his signature.

Three days after the Berliners vacated Carnegie, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, another indisputably world-class ensemble, arrived to play two concerts under Klaus Mäkelä, its twenty-eight-year-old chief conductor designate. One program paired Mahler’s First Symphony with Schoenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht.” The other consisted of Ellen Reid’s new “Body Cosmic,” a richly evocative tone poem of gestation and birth; Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto, with Lisa Batiashvili as the soloist; and Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony.

If Petrenko is inconspicuous, Mäkelä is inescapable. He currently leads the Oslo Philharmonic and the Orchestre de Paris; in 2027, he will move on to the Concertgebouw and the Chicago Symphony. He possesses considerable talent, but his confidence is outpacing his experience. He commandeers the podium with an often musically superfluous ballet of jabbing, pointing, bouncing, and crouching. Although his primary beat is vital and clear, he tends to become distracted by side matters, allowing tension to drain away while he dissects some timbral detail: over-prominent harp notes here, artificially cosseted string pianissimos there. The Rachmaninoff went on for sixty-four minutes, verging on the interminable. The Mahler had gripping moments alongside groggy ones. Dance sections lacked charm; lyric passages were spiritless; the klezmer episodes in the third movement were strictly goyish. Mäkelä tended to mishandle the balances, resulting in cluttered textures and crude climaxes. The Concertgebouw is a historically great Mahler orchestra, yet here its playing sounded bizarrely unidiomatic.

Loud ovations greeted the Carnegie performances, and the musicians themselves applauded their future leader. Mäkelä’s swaggering charisma is not to be denied, even if it leaves some of us cold. What purpose, though, does this brand of maestro worship still serve? Petrenko is tracing a different path, one that young conductors should emulate. His charisma is indistinguishable from that of the orchestra itself. He has not blurred his musical profile by assuming myriad commitments. This season, he has taken on one opera engagement—a run of “Der Rosenkavalier” at La Scala—and two weeks of guest-conducting, at the Israel Philharmonic and at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. Otherwise, he has concentrated his energies on the one orchestra in Berlin. That restive beast on the edge of the Tiergarten would presumably expect nothing else. ♦