<<  -- 5 --  Bill Newman    BERLIN FESTIVAL DIARY

Wolfgang Christ, viola was far more persuasive, immersing himself entirely in the contrapuntal ingenuities of Kammermusik Nr 5, the composer at his most intriguing and bizarre, mixing satire and nobility -- never forgetting he was a fine viola player himself -- in equal shares. Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber remains, for many, Hindemith's party piece, yet the contrapuntal felicities have to breathe in line with melody changes -- both are equally important. Again, the opening movement was very fast, but the rest quite excellent.

Everywhere I walked in the City of Berlin I espied a poster of Kent Nagano looking directly at me. A Berg concert with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin promised much for a conductor reputedly a specialist in 20th Century music. Alas, it was not to be.

Alban Berg's strict metrical mode of composing is overlaid by strongly personalized romantic outpourings of carefully matched scoring that gives serenity, sublimity and intensity to linked episodes. Remove this basic workout from the musical argument, and you tread paths of danger and misunderstanding. I instance Boulez, Mitropoulos, Dorati, and Andrew Davis (who I watched and heard prepare a concert performance of Lulu for transmission by BBC Radio 3). As different as they were from an emotional standpoint, their consistent feeling for Berg's musical language possessed strict understandings of metrical flow and his inherent gift for building a theatrical musical thread out of the complexity of notes in the printed score.

I felt Nagano was pulling this thread in various directions out of context to recreate his way of how Berg's instrumental forces should sound. The Lulu Suite sounded flaccid, lacking in projection, non theatrical. By reversing the printed programme order and placing the early Drei Orchesterstücke next, the similarity of approach in purely orchestral terms did not make sense. For a few minutes, I failed to recognize what, to me, was familiar music.

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