If I was the sort of person who kept a record of every concert I have ever been to—and I'm not—I'd have a pretty good idea that the conductor whose work I have heard more often than any other would be Bernard Haitink. He marked his 80th birthday in March with two London concerts by the Royal Concertgebouw orchestra of Amsterdam; the dates had been blocked out in my diary for months.
You would have to be nearly as old as Haitink to remember an era when the Dutchman was not a central figure—arguably the central figure of his age—in London's orchestral life. He has been a major presence with the London Philharmonic, of which he was principal conductor in the 1970s, for decades. Nowadays, however, he works mainly with the London Symphony, not least because he prefers the Barbican to the Festival Hall. Add to that 15 sometimes storm-tossed years at the helm of the Royal Opera and numerous concerts with visiting orchestras, and it is hard to think of anyone since Beecham who has done more to raise and maintain the quality of London music.
I first heard Haitink and his Dutch orchestra at the Proms as a student nearly 40 years ago. In those days he was the Concertgebouw's principal conductor: appointed in his early 30s, he held the post for a quarter of a century. Almost inevitably, they performed Mahler—who along with Bruckner and Shostakovich has always loomed especially large in Haitink programmes. Mahler was not then as familiar a composer as—due in no small part to Haitink—he has now become.
Since then, there have been many Haitink Mahler performances in London, and even more of Bruckner. There are other, generally more solipsistic, ways of doing Mahler than his, but for Bruckner—especially the last three symphonies—Haitink remains the gold standard, as he proved once again with the Ninth at the Barbican in March. I once asked him for his secret with this most elusively idiomatic of composers. He replied that you have to trust in Bruckner, regard yourself as a guide and not mess around with his music, which is exactly right. I then asked him if you had to believe in God to conduct his music. Well I don't, he replied curtly. That's right too, because Bruckner's symphonies are full of loneliness and doubt as well as faith.
For a conductor who tends to be pigeonholed as an Austro-German specialist, Haitink has a much broader repertoire than is often acknowledged. He isn't the world's most committed champion of contemporary music, but when he does it he does it well. He is tremendous in English music—his Holst, Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Britten are all notably good. And he is one of the best in the business in the French repertoire. His recording of Debussy's La Mer is the one to have and whenever the work is on his concert schedule—as it was in London in March and will be again with the LSO in June—it is a go-to event.
There was a period of Haitink's career—the 1980s and 1990s—when opera dominated. His years at the helm at Glyndebourne and then Covent Garden made him a familiar figure in the pit here, though rarely in other countries. It would be utterly wrong to dismiss this phase of Haitink's career, as some do. There were many peaks in both theatres, notably in Britten, Janacek, Mozart and Strauss. But Haitink is not as much at ease with the theatre's impulsiveness as he is with the more studied art of the concert hall. Moreover, my own view—advanced diffidently and certainly not universally shared—is that he is not the great Wagner conductor that is sometimes claimed. The ability that allows him to shape large symphonic works often eludes him in Wagner.
Why have I kept on returning to Haitink all these years? The answer, I think, is his musical integrity and clarity. This least histrionic of conductors—he has a temper, though—always brings the same basic virtues to everything he does. He has his own, warm sound: transparency in the strings, balance in the brass. He is scrupulous about dynamics—Haitink orchestras are never allowed to play too loudly—and has an unerring sense of structure: the climax is always delivered at exactly the right moment. He works well with orchestras, who idolise him and respect his authority. "When you start talking to orchestras you are losing it," he once said. Perhaps that's the key. The man is all music.
