By ANDREW POWELL
Published: November 26, 2017
MUNICH — Post is under revision.
Photos © Arthaus, BelAir Classiques, Querstand, Supraphon, Warner Classics
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By ANDREW POWELL
Published: July 29, 2017
PASSAU — What more heavenly way to mark your 90th birthday than conducting a favorite symphony in four cathedrals on four successive nights, and with an orchestra that adores you? This, at least, was Herbert Blomstedt’s thinking, amenably realized by the Bamberger Symphoniker — in Bamberg’s Dom St Peter und St Georg July 19, Würzburg’s St-Kilians-Dom July 20, Passau’s Dom St Stephan July 21, and, aptly in this case jumping from Bavaria to Austria July 22, the Stiftsbasilika St Florian. On the stands: Bruckner’s Fifth, his Fantastische, a work that climaxes only in conclusion.
Blomstedt wore a beatific smile here as he gently yet cohesively propelled the players through the 75- to 80-minute score, applying a number of firm accelerations (to clock in at the fast end of that range). Occasionally he requested less sound, from his chair on his podium on a tube-and-clamp orchestra platform far below Dom St Stephan’s emphatic white moldings and rich Carpoforo Tencalla frescos. Cathedral acoustics had their various effects: here was “staccato with resonance,” in Jochum’s phrase; here, too, pizzicato without exactness, quite a drawback in this symphony.
The cohesion lay of course in the counterpoint: not everyone’s strong suit but certainly Blomstedt’s. So the grand musical edifice stood straight and its sections and parts sounded and ended exactly where they needed to. Light shone into the music, much as it streamed through Carlo Lurago’s transom windows. Ideas flowed in long breaths. There was no leaning on particular notes, no pushing for effect by the Bambergers. Blomstedt presented a rational and questioning, ultimately peaceful, encounter with this magnificent score, keeping volume in reserve for its late peroration. Even there, from where the Finale’s two fugues sound together in the brass (after the double fugue) and the horns lastly restate the first-movement theme, no one blasted. Balances had been set, and the American-born maestro could cue without visible effort players he has known for decades, his back to a capacity crowd.
The Passau performance took place as part of European Weeks, in another American connection. This was the first festival founded in postwar Germany, in 1952, when the U.S. 7th Army Symphony Orchestra served in the pit for Le nozze di Figaro starring Willi Domgraf-Fassbaender and “We Demand the United States of Europe” served as marketing slogan. The 65th European Weeks was as busy as any before.
Home to Europe’s largest cathedral organ, Dom St Stephan splendidly models the Italian Baroque. Along with Lurago and Tencalla, designer Giovanni Battista Carlone produced its dramas of contrast: stucco against frescos, daylight against shadows, plain verticals against the ovalled, vaulted ceiling. Outside, meanwhile, three rivers calmly meet: the charcoal-colored Ilz from the Bavarian Forest, the milky-aqua Inn from St Moritz via Innsbruck, and, in between, the coffee-colored Danube from the Black Forest. (Munich’s Isar and Salzburg’s Salzach are upstream tributaries.) The main stem takes the Danube name although the Inn has been the trunk flow, and the coffee color prevails as it enters Austria two kilometers down.
Photo © Diözese Passau
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By ANDREW POWELL
Published: February 17, 2013
MUNICH — There is a genteel inscrutability about Herbert Blomstedt. Authoritative, tall and silver-haired, he has never cut the profile of a star. But the gaze is probing. Musicians play well for him perhaps out of a sense of being acutely monitored. Two years ago Bayerischer Rundfunk hired the Massachusetts-born, Juilliard-educated Swede, now 85, for a Dvořák Seventh with its flagship Symphonie-Orchester. That was a revelation: the minor-key work played as an engrossing set of assertions and retorts, Victorian shadings and Czech emphases. Much cheered, it soon showed up as a pirate CD. These last two weeks Blomstedt has been back with the BRSO, conducting music associated with him. The Feb. 7 Gasteig program paired Nielsen’s Flute Concerto (1926) with Bruckner’s D-Minor Third Symphony.
Henrik Wiese, one of the orchestra’s two principal flutists, nimbly traced the solo line of the stubbornly jaunty two-movement concerto. Its brief sections of banter with other wind instruments injected droll humor. Blomstedt and the modest orchestra, in unobtrusive support, flexed their way through the Danish composer’s background shades of light and dark. The concluding tempo di marcia section, written last and calibrated to sum up the 18-minute piece, made its witty impact without seeming to try.
By using the symphony’s Urfassung of 1873, Blomstedt cast the work in optimal light, as a snapshot of a composer in transition. (Christian Thielemann and his Munich Philharmonic did the same in 2009; Lorin Maazel in concerts since then has not.) For Bruckner was just settling on what would become his trademark compositional palette and his way of leading the ear with brass motifs. The piece suffers from odd logic and thematic paucity, especially when compared with the less “Brucknerian” yet fully mature and richly argued C-Minor Second Symphony of the previous year (1872). Numerous revisions to the Third never overcame these problems.
The opening trumpet melody over rippling string figures signaled a balanced, restrained performance. Conducting from memory and without visible toil, Blomstedt had apparently set fine dynamic and interpretive details in rehearsal. Wind intonation was exemplary. The Gemäßigt, misterioso first movement, as marked in this version, and the brief Scherzo brought suave playing from the BRSO strings. Blomstedt did not always nudge the pulse in the second-movement Adagio as might his peers in this repertory — fellow octogenarians Stanislaw Skrowaczewski (still busy at 89) and Bernard Haitink (83), along with Thielemann (53) and the versatile Daniel Barenboim (70) — and so Bruckner’s longueurs took their toll, but the conductor’s discipline and his rapport with the musicians compensated. Call it an honest snapshot.
Photo © Martin Lengemann
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BR Campaign Runs Out of Gas
Monday, February 10th, 2014By ANDREW POWELL
Published: February 10, 2014
MUNICH — Creative exhaustion appears to have arrived for a whimsical, multi-year promotional campaign here. Its subject: the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. Its budget and goals: inscrutable. The thing would never have seen the light of day in the U.S., if only for legal reasons, and its existence is one of several signs of a vain administration within parent entity Bavarian Broadcasting, or Bayerischer Rundfunk, known as BR.
Centered on posters, or Plakate, the distinctive campaign eschews images and color and relies for its life on typography, specifically the manipulation of one clunky serif-and-sans-serif font, used until recently with flair. Typically, names or numbers related to a concert program are toyed with. Riccardo Muti comes to conduct, and so we see a giant MU. At some distance, not where spelling dictates, we land on the TI. Or RAT tops a Ligeti-Schumann-Haydn-Sibelius poster, its TLE completing the conductor’s name lower down. III, heavy like prison bars, blares out for a Bruckner Third Symphony.
The layouts show up on street posters, the Internet, handouts, even on the BRSO’s scholarly and free concert program books. They are the brainchildren of Bureau Mirko Borsche, whose trending design clients include Zeit Magazin, Harper’s Bazaar and the Bavarian State Opera.
But the design firm’s ideas have become less flattering of late. A gas mask promotes Herbert Blomstedt’s all-Brahms program this week (Feb. 13 and 14). In use for months already, the image results from a zoomed-in, weighty letter B, rotated right. The composer’s name forms a facial pout that traces the B’s dimple, with the conductor’s name straight, above the mask’s eyes. No slur is meant, one must assume. Other inverted or morbid layouts, including distorted initials, have dampened the aging campaign’s fun as options for novelty have narrowed.
Is there oversight? Only of the lightest kind, apparently. Beyond the posters, questions lurk about misleading buttons and missing contact information on the BRSO website, extravagant BRSO sales literature, and a peculiar organizational structure.
Orchestra administration is buried deep inside BR, a Munich-based, license-funded broadcaster with a budget above $1 billion and more on its plate than classical music. Just how deep is reflected on BR’s giant website, whose home page offers no direct link to the orchestra. Site visitors must learn that the acclaimed BRSO is part of BR Klassik, and then a link can be found. Once on the orchestra’s home* page, material is clearly presented. But not all of it. A click on “Presse” at the top, for instance, loops you back to BR and no fewer than sixteen press officers, one of whom, Detlef Klusak, has “Musik” after his name. In a brief call last week, however, Klusak confirmed he has nothing to do with the BRSO.
Finding the orchestra’s managers from its home* page is a trip in itself. You first click on “Orchester,” then on “Die komplette Besetzung” (the whole cast) under an illustration showing only musicians. You scroll down to the lower right corner of the next page, click on “Management,” select and copy the name of the person you want — there being no email addresses or phone numbers on the secluded page — and Google him or her!
Nikolaus Pont is in charge. New, with less than a year on the job, he did not initiate the promotional campaign or plan the website, and it isn’t clear yet whether he is more than a caretaker. (Fundraising, to be sure, is not front-and-center for him as it would be for an American counterpart.) Still, he must have reviewed the BRSO’s 2013–14 season brochure.
Or rather book. Weighing in at 1 lb. 6 oz. (more than half a kilogram), its 180 pages lie between thick, gloss-coated card and a cloth, die-embossed orange spine. Inside are concert details and color photographs, including four hopelessly sullen shots of Chefdirigent Mariss Jansons. Freely distributed, the Bureau Mirko Borsche-developed book carries no paid advertising. Broadcast-license-payers can only imagine its cost and the fees earned for design and printing.
An area optimistically labeled “Kommunikation” is headed by Peter Meisel, while another group has its own person under “Marketing.” Meisel works directly with the design firm (a Facebook favorite) but his diverse duties include photography, video liaison and special events. He is, moreover, tasked with keeping the world’s press (including this blog) informed of, and involved in, BRSO activities. A recent round-robin list showed 78 email contacts for the orchestra’s media outreach: 14 within BR, 9 at the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Bavaria’s answer to The New York Times), 16 at other Bavarian media outlets, 16 German outlets, 2 foreign (including Musical America), 6 German freelance music journalists, 2 non-media and 13 private.
Is it time for fresh approaches at the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra? By U.S. standards, certainly, on several fronts, starting with more management accessibility and a promotional campaign that respects visiting artists. As for this week’s concerts, Brahms will pout or smile depending on Blomstedt and the musicians, not on any poster design. The serene and sage maestro, still effective in his eighties, will no doubt laugh his gas mask right off, but of course that would suggest an altered formation for B-L-O-M-S-T-E-D-T.
[*Domain and site changes in April 2015 removed the awkwardness described here.]
Screenshot © Bayerischer Rundfunk
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Tags:Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Bayerischer Rundfunk, BR Klassik, Brahms, Bureau Mirko Borsche, Commentary, Herbert Blomstedt, Mariss Jansons, München, Munich, Nikolaus Pont, Peter Meisel, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Symphonie-Orchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks
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