Daniele Gatti bets like throwing darts. They usually hit the mark in the Hercules Hall. Only at the beginning, with Richard Strauss’ ecstatic music drama “Don Juan”, does he wave his hand a little. Even with such a sound-disciplined orchestra as the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, it gets away with it, and the tumult passages get a bit noisy, which is not necessarily a bad thing with this piece. It blows you away, but you don’t get much of Don Juan’s ambivalent pain of success.
With Wagner’s prelude to the third act of the “Meistersinger”, dreamily melancholic and with a brilliant brass chorale, one has calmed down again. This is the starting point for Hector Berlioz’ “Symphonie fantastique”, the orchestral horror fairy tale in five movements. Gatti directs it from a point of cool overview and ignites controlled fires from there. He succeeds in making the forty bars of the “idée fixe” – the musical unit of meaning from which Berlioz crafted the entire symphony – stand out vividly without being overly obvious. At the center of Gatti’s interpretation is the processual, letting things come into being. The scene in the country, “Scène aux champs”, is therefore the strongest, after the ball waltz, which tastefully varies the tempo. A double bottom is played here, when disaster seems to be lurking in the actually cheerful opening dialogue between oboe and cor anglais. The impending doom casts its shadow over the pastoral idyll.
He is not long in coming, because according to Berlioz’s programme, the delirious hero of the symphony is first led to the scaffold in the following movement, but is then allowed to celebrate Walpurgis Night with his loved ones postmortem. In this orchestral virtuoso piece, the motifs, the sound effects and the moods are all over the top. But under Gatti’s strict sound direction, the orchestra acts in the mode of the most concentrated tension, which erupts in the powerful final spurt. A pushy boo-caller did not want to be convinced of this. It can hardly have been due to the music, and the rest of the audience applauded all the more enthusiastically.