Daniele Gatti became the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra’s chief conductor a year ago. He is only the seventh person to hold that position in the orchestra’s history, which stretches back to 1888. All but the earliest of his predecessors spent at least a decade with the orchestra – and one, Willem Mengelberg, was there for half a century. That sense of continuity, of a performing tradition that has been passed on from one generation of musicians to the next, comes across in everything this wonderful orchestra plays.
Although the orchestra has been an annual visitor to London in recent seasons, it has been eight years since the RCO last appeared at the Proms, and the programmes for the two concerts with Gatti, which featured symphonies by Bruckner (his Ninth) and Mahler (the Fourth), provided the best possible reminder of its pedigree, which no other orchestra in the world can match in these two composers. The connection with Mahler dates to concerts conducted by the composer himself in the early 20th century, at the beginning of Mengelberg’s reign. Meanwhile, it was Eduard van Beinum, the conductor who followed Mengelberg, who established the RCO as a great Bruckner band after the second world war. Both traditions have been nurtured ever since by all three of Van Beinum’s successors, Bernard Haitink, Riccardo Chailly and, most recently, Mariss Jansons.
Gatti’s performances suggested that the orchestra is in no danger of letting those performing traditions wither. From the numinous bass stirrings with which Bruckner’s Ninth begins through the great climaxes – each seemingly more massive than the one before – that mark the progress of the opening movement, the soundworld the RCO conjured up seemed perfectly imagined. The effortlessly velvet strings wrapped themselves around the long, surging, melodic lines and became miraculously transparent in the music’s moments of transcendence, while the brass provided the perfect weight and authority to every fortissimo outburst, never seeming strident or overbearing.
Gatti’s approach underlined the symphony’s monumentality more than anything else. His tempi were generally on the slow side – even the insistent, oppressive scherzo (the central movement of the three that Bruckner completed), lacked real fleetness. The overall effect of his performance was more to erect a great monument, even if it was a magnificently imposing one, than to bring to life a living, breathing musical organism. While his tendency to over-engineer things, to taper the end of phrases and introduce unnecessary ritardandos in the Bruckner was not too disruptive, it seemed much more obvious and distracting in the Mahler symphony the following evening. There, every thematic statement seemed to have been put in quotation marks, so that the real drama and ambiguity of the work, the darkness that clouds the Fourth’s apparently guileless surfaces, seemed almost to be caricatured.
The orchestral playing, buoyant, effortlessly flexible, was still a constant delight, however, and Chen Reiss was a striking soprano soloist in the finale – in a role Mahler insisted should have no suggestion of parody – even if her approach was more knowing than childlike.
The Mahler was preceded by another symphony, Haydn’s No 82 in C, known as The Bear. Gatti had scaled down the orchestra appropriately, yet the work lost a lot of its dynamism and grandeur in the expanse of the Albert Hall, even though everything about it was neat and tidy. But before the Bruckner, there was a piece ideally suited to the space of the venue. Wolfgang Rihm’s In-Schrift was composed in 1995 to be performed in St Mark’s Basilica, Venice, and intended to exploit the geometry of that extraordinary building and to evoke memories of earlier music composed specifically for it.
It is not music concerned with antiphonal effects – there are no groups of instruments dispersed around the auditorium. Instead, In-Schrift uses an on-stage orchestra shorn of its oboes, violins and violas, to create echoing sonorities and bold thematic statements that fill out the space and its resonant possibilities – from the lowest instruments, a tuba and a pair of contra-bass trombones, right up to the tubular bells that begin the whole work and seem to colour its harmonies throughout. Gatti’s performance emphasised its detached ritualism but, like all of the two concerts, the performance was more about the superb orchestral playing than the way in which the music was being shaped.
• Proms 64 and 66 are on BBC iPlayer until 1 October and 2 October respectively. The BBC Proms continue until 9 September.
