A farewell symphony dedicated to God, erupting with vast fortissimos and disconcerting harmonies, giving every orchestral section from solo woodwind to Wagner tubas to golden-toned strings a chance to shine: Bruckner’s Ninth was the perfect roof-raising epic for Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic in the first of two concerts at the Royal Festival Hall last week, part of this partnership’s final international tour.
Typically, Rattle conducted from memory, using the last-movement reconstruction he favours (forgettably referred to as the Samale-Phillips-Cohrs-Mazzuca revision, 1983-2012). It gives the work, unfinished at Bruckner’s death in 1896, after nine years’ desperate labour, as near a sense of completion as we’re likely to find. As Rattle has argued, this version retains more of the composer’s original thoughts than Mozart’s similarly incomplete-but-completed Requiem.
It’s been a long goodbye to the orchestra Rattle has conducted, as chief conductor and artistic director, for 16 years. He announced his departure five years ago. His successor, Kirill Petrenko, doesn’t start until the 2019-20 season. Rattle has been simultaneously engaged in an equally prolonged hello with his new orchestra, the LSO, juggling both jobs in the past year. Comparisons between “old” and “new” ensembles are tempting but fruitless: different playing tradition, different halls, different musicians, but united by one conductor who stretches them to the utmost. Change lies ahead for both, but it’s too early to guess the impact.
By some miracle the Berliners make you forget the dryness of the Festival Hall acoustic: by whatever combination of supersonic resonance, use of vibrato, the quality and variety of their instruments, the unmatched organic nature of their ensemble, the music hung in the air in those great, Brucknerian pauses, instead of falling away, dead. Rattle’s particular gift is to keep detail and overarching structure in balance. The double basses, both in the symphony and in the short opener, the UK premiere of the texturally arresting Three Pieces by Hans Abrahamsen (b1952), deserved their special Rattle handshake, every note singing out with no hint of a growl.
So, too, to mention just one player, did British oboist Jonathan Kelly, a former City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra principal who followed Rattle to Berlin in 2003 and must feel particularly sad as this era ends. Rattle conducts Mahler’s Sixth Symphony for his final, or “final”, concert in Berlin later this month. His ‘‘this truly is it” moment, to borrow from Cher, is a mass-audience outdoor concert in Berlin’s Waldbühne amphitheatre on 24 June with his wife, the mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená. Then it’s Auf Wiedersehen till the next time.
If Rattle is one of music’s most loudly sung heroes, he would be the first to praise the undersung. A starry event on a more intimate scale, with several leading composers present, took place on Tuesday in the satisfyingly refurbished Purcell Room. It was to celebrate the life of the pioneering biotechnologist and amateur viola player Leo Hepner (1930-2015), a refugee from Nazi Germany who arrived in Britain in 1939. A familiar figure at contemporary music concerts, he had a passion for commissioning chamber music. His widow, Regina, keeps the flame alive. A new work for viola and cello by the Berlin-based British composer Charlotte Bray (b1982) was one of three world premieres, performed alongside works by other Hepner Foundation friends, George Benjamin (Viola, Viola), Wolfgang Rihm (Fetzen/Fetzen II) and Brian Ferneyhough (Dum Transisset I-IV).
Mid-Oceaned (2018), full of muted suspense and glimpsed lyricism, was inspired by a sea voyage when Bray crossed the international date line and the days freewheeled from misty, milky-whiteness to crystalline blue. Ralf Ehlers (viola) and Lucas Fels (cello) passed the murmuring, entwined lines between each other expertly in this intricate miniature. The Serbian-born composer Milica Djordjević (b1984), in her Pomen II for viola solo (2018) – formidably played with many a broken bow hair by Paul Beckett – drew on the instrument’s percussive effects, notably scratch tone (digging the bow into the string to cause a grating sound), creating a febrile but tender elegy.
In his first (of many, let’s hope) string quartet, the London-born Tom Coult (b1988) made extensive use of open strings with two instruments retuned, the second violin down a semi-tone, the viola down a tone, creating new aural possibilities with fascinating results. The tireless Arditti Quartet, after 44 years still unrivalled in new repertoire, gave masterly performances to all. The spirit of Leo Hepner lives on, triumphantly.
You could be forgiven for not noticing that this year is the 460th anniversary of the death of John Sheppard, one of the least well known and most adventurous of Tudor composers. How to mark this momentous event? You could sit down and acquaint yourself with his entire output. If you’re more flighty, tune in to Radio 3 in Concert on iPlayer and check out Media vita (“in the midst of life we are in death”), sung as part of Vox Luminis’s almost impeccable Cadogan Hall concert of early English music: some 20 minutes of the most serene, and soaring, Renaissance polyphony in existence. No exaggeration.
Star ratings (out of 5)
Berlin Philharmonic/Rattle ★★★★
Arditti Quartet ★★★★★
Vox Luminis ★★★★
