Does the euphoria about the successful interim concert construction raise too high expectations of the performances? This was the impression one could get on this partly disappointing evening with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Antonio Pappano and with works by Dvorak, Liszt and Nielsen. In part, it may have been due to the fact that the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra has not yet really made friends with the compact and noisy concert hall of the Isarphilharmonie. On the other hand, the conductor Antonio Pappano pushed the orchestra’s tendency to produce a rather superficial black-and-white drama with rough effects, which has nothing to do with the baroque chiaroscuro drama, but rather to achieve really designed climaxes. At the latest when these pretend highlights fizzled out, you noticed in the subsequent dry, bloodless decrescendo what musical stillbirths you were witnessing here. This was already evident in the opening piece, Antonin Dvorak’s Othello Overture, which Pappano tried to set in motion with hard-worker motor skills, with powerful, jerky movements, which shook him far more than all those listeners who lacked empathy in this lively tune in to the form of autosuggestion.
This evening there was above all loud and quiet
When one thinks of how effectively and finely constructed precisely Dvorak designed these decrescendi, the gradual ebbing away, how he teased out the last bit of radiance and drama from a melody in the process of sinking, then one had to be disappointed by this performance. That evening, for Dvorak, there was above all loud and quiet, and the quiet was just a dimmed, inhibited forte, not a happy, melodically acted out moment of relaxation. The swinging melody disintegrated into fragments, brass noise often dominated, nothing actually remained of Dvorak’s natural-romantic magic.
And so the pianist Yuja Wang in Franz Liszt’s First Piano Concerto also seemed funny and cracking at first, even the most catchy melodic phrases came out a bit rumbling and without any inner connection. However, it is performed with tremendous joy in playing and with a desire to grab hold of it powerfully. Is Liszt’s E flat major concerto a work of musical travesty? Because Yuja Wang also masters the easy game, the glittering surface, the finely sparkling cascade. The very special. Its scales and broken chords flow like finely balanced waterfalls in a baroque garden. Only faster. Yuja Wang has an admirably sovereign finger technique. Nevertheless, it took a while before you noticed: Oops, she’s just pretending to cooperate aesthetically with the BR Symphoniker and the somewhat less precise conductor Pappano. In truth, with almost subversive irony, she is pursuing completely different plans. In any case, one thing seems alien to her: the dark, demonic, the romantic that works through all modern sound constructions.
It never really advances in Liszt’s drama of widely spread chord structures, it never becomes threatening, strange, gloomy – everything remains friendly. The world is wonderful, it doesn’t get any better. There’s something terribly pragmatic about it, which is also reflected in Wang’s playing. Above all in a variable metrical basic structure, which was opposed to that of the BR-Symphoniker from time to time. But whenever one felt the need to save Liszt from this aesthetic pragmatism, Yuja Wang happily thundered away all concerns. What should you do? It is important to forget your ideas for a day and to capitulate in good time. In the end she – a great pianist – saved the evening after all.
It’s easy to underestimate her, because her demeanor, and that doesn’t just apply to her clothes, is flirtatious and would have been a scandal 40 years ago. Definitely in China, but also in Europe and America. Today one experiences more and more artists, also from Asia, in playful eccentricity, especially with a new self-confidence. And Yuja Wang, the most successful pianist in China next to Lang Lang – both studied and live in the USA – has certainly contributed a lot to this new freedom of performance. Art is good for that. The times of mechanistically drilled keyboard robots without musical understanding may not be quite over yet, but the common prejudices of this kind, which still haunt the world of classical music, can gradually be thrown overboard.
Left to its own devices, the orchestra lacked access
Wherever millions of children learn to play the piano, as it once was in Europe, now and then, regardless of the pedagogical conditions, gifted children come to light. And this evening also showed one thing: There is no national monopoly on musical understanding. This happens even in the best orchestra families. It’s just not quite as funny, but rather tedious. And that’s exactly what happened after the break, when the orchestra was once again on their own for the great Fourth Symphony by the Danish late romantic and avant-gardist Carl Nielsen. It found no real access to this path into the modern age, which, like the sound world of Paul Hindemith, has been considered inferior to serial music since Adorno’s dictum. Apparently, conductor Pappano couldn’t help either, and the attempt to present the lively chaos of sound as a subtly ordered relationship failed. Thank God.
Otherwise one would have to think of Nielsen as a bad composer. It all sounded quite unbalanced pompous, sometimes with two “ö” in the brass. However: the contrapuntal section was brilliant, the concept worked there, and the final apotheosis, yes, it can also rattle a little. But for the sake of acoustic hygiene, you shouldn’t apply it too thickly in this hall. What you can always admire about this orchestra is the flawless precision, the unconditional reliability of craftsmanship at the highest level. So the very best prerequisite for great music. You almost forgot that evening.