A Mahler feast
Bernard Haitink is 75 this year, and to celebrate this the Barbican has presented a series of concerts throughout the year in which some of the orchestras with which he has been most closely associated have performed works that have been central to his repertoire. In March, the Concertgebouw played two concerts, covering, among other things, Debussy's La Mer and Bruckner's 9th. The Debussy was an important inclusion: outside the opera house, Haitink is most closely associated with the Austro-German symphonic tradition and it is often forgotten how idiomatic an interpreter he is of French music, to which he brings, as he did at the Barbican, both a welcome clarity and a keen sense of orchestral colour. The series will end in November with the Dresden Staats-kapelle playing Weber, Hindemith and Beethoven, but in between it has properly been dominated by Mahler, whose symphonies Haitink did so much to bring into the centre of the orchestral repertoire. In April, he directed the Vienna Philharmonic in the 9th symphony, in June the London Symphony Orchestra in the 6th, and in September the Berlin Philharmonic came to play the 3rd, the high point of the series.
One thing that has been made very clear through the year is how powerful an effect Haitink's presence has both on the orchestras he conducts and on British audiences, whose affection for him is obvious as soon as he walks on stage. Of musicians, only Brendel appears to have quite the same personal authority with a London audience. In part this is because they are both great European musicians of international stature who have chosen to work so much in Britain (and in Brendel's case to live here), but it is also because they are both musicians who do not seek to impose their personalities on the music they play. Orchestras too are responsive to this central quality of Haitink's music-making. As Albrecht Mayer, the BPO's principal oboist, put it to me the day before their Mahler 3: "his personality is very warm, very kind, but in the moment of the concert, he steps back for the sake of the composer, which means that it will be really Mahler and not Haitink. The whole orchestra loves that."
There are still some people who think that this kind of self-effacement leads to bland performances, but that belief could not have survived any of the concerts at the Barbican, nor indeed any that Haitink has given in London over the past few years. Usually this view is the result of hearing him on disc rather than in the concert hall - something that gives only a very partial sense of his musical personality. For he is not a conductor who has always been able to capture the electricity of live performance in the studio. (Anyone who doubts this should get hold of the Philips Dutch Masters box of the live recordings of Mahler symphonies given at the Concertgebouw's Christmas performances during the 1970s and 1980s and compare them with the very musical but much more restrained studio versions made during the same period.)
Haitink certainly does generate electricity in performance, not least because of his ability to put an orchestra on its mettle. The Vienna Philharmonic, for instance, is quite capable of all but ignoring its conductor - though usually only when this will be musically beneficial. I remember one London concert when the orchestra sensibly refused to take notice of the conductor's indication to alter the tempo in the first movement of Bruckner's 7th. With Haitink, however, they were attentive to his every movement and the result was a performance of the 9th symphony that was as intense and moving as any I've heard.
Five years ago, Claudio Abbado brought the Berlin players to the Festival Hall to give a performance of the 3rd symphony which seemed to set new standards of Mahler playing. Even now, if one listens to the recording of that performance, released by Deutsche Grammophon a couple of years ago, it is difficult to believe that any orchestra could play with such precision and yet such expressive naturalness. The symphony is a vast one and requires a correspondingly vast orchestra, but it also needs to be played with the flexibility of a chamber ensemble. In practice, however, the sheer difficulties of co-ordinating an orchestra of this size force an unhelpful rigidity of phrasing and tempo. Under Abbado, it suddenly seemed as if those difficulties had been removed, so that the players could exercise extraordinary freedom in their playing and yet pose no risk to orchestral coherence.
It was not certain that, two years after Abbado's departure from Berlin, the Berlin Philharmonic would still have the capacity for playing at this level. In the event, Haitink's ability to galvanise an orchestra did its trick and we were suddenly again presented with the Berlin Philharmonic of old, with all its musical and expressive power. Haitink's conception of the symphony was not the same as Abbado's - the first movement was more monumental, the second and third movements more edgy. It was just as shattering, however, and just as well played. There was not a dead or insignificant note for the whole hour and three quarters. As the ebbs and flows of the valedictory final movement gave way to the defiant triumph of the climax, what was so moving was not just the emotional power of the symphony itself, but that a great orchestra had been so effectively restored to reveal that power.
