For Sir Colin Davis (1927-2013)

A Magic Flute that's pure joy. 

When Sir Charles Mackerras died, I was faced with an odd choice as a blogger. This was a conductor whose musicmaking simply had too much personal imprint upon my life to do a normal obituary. I'm determined not to make the same mistake with Sir Colin that I did with Sir Charles. But all the same, I can't simply give the details of Sir Colin's life without talking about the personal impact of his musicmaking on me.

Pure fire and brimstone - Mozart's "Great" C-Minor Mass

By any standard, Colin Davis was not my favorite conductor. But he was one of the conductors with whom I grew up, and one of the conductors whose best performances gave me the most joy. One of my early memories was when I was four years old, and seeing Davis conduct the New York Philharmonic in Brahms's 2nd Symphony and Beethoven's 4th piano concerto. To call me an unusual little kid would have been the century's understatement, and I had practically worn out my Bruno Walter tapes of Brahms 3rd and 4th symphonies already. But even at that age, I thrilled to my discovery of Brahms 2 the way an archaeologist would thrill to the discovery of Atlantis.

Berlioz Requiem -

Much as rhythm was the basis of Sir Charles Mackerras's music-making, sound was at the center of Sir Colin's approach - and he clearly loved making sounds as rich and full as any conductor since Leopold Stokowski. But unlike Stokowski, there was a stiff-upper-lip reserve that prevented him from exceeding the bounds of good taste. He conducted very little Mahler and claimed to loathe Mahler's 'vulgarity', yet had he let that magnificent shock of a silver mane down, he could have been a truly great Mahlerian (I grew up listening to his Mahler 1 and it was a wonderful, if unorthodox, performance), or equally great in more rough-hewn composers he generally avoided like Janacek, Bartok, and Mussorgsky. But he never could let himself go enough to get rid of his particularly English 'tastefulness'. Even in composers for whom his performances were justly world-renowned, like Berlioz and Stravinsky, his performances were full of passion, but they were passionate within an extremely constricting framework. It often felt as though Sir Colin had placed himself within an interpretive straightjacket which undercut all the momentum he worked so conscientiously to build. .

Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique (I’m not even sure a Colin Davis performance is in my top dozen choices for Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique - the piece is such an amazingly bizarre sonic kaleidoscope that most conductors know that they can cut loose in any way they like, and do so only to the music’s benefit. But Sir Colin was in such demand as a Berlioz conductor that he recorded the Symphonie Fantastique no less than four times. Most record lovers prefer his Concertgebouw recording from 1974, but while I’ve not heard his 1980’s version with the Vienna Philharmonic, I believe that his first with the London Symphony in 1963 is easily the best of the three I've heard. It can’t be denied that Davis was, in his manner, a truly great Berlioz conductor. But to me, Colin Davis’s Berlioz is overvalued. His evangelism on behalf of Berlioz cannot be overvalued, but he was able to evangelize for Berlioz because he brought out all the tasteful elegance of Berlioz, showing the world that Berlioz was no less classical than anything in Haydn - in Davis’s hands, Berlioz was a ‘normal’ composer. But the Berliozian bizarre which you get from Charles Munch or Leonard Bernstein or Pierre Monteux or John Eliot Gardiner is virtually nowhere to be found. Of the Davis SF’s, most people prefer his 1974 version with the Concertgebouw. But to me, that version is too long on elegance and too short on drama. Sadly, I’ve only heard one Davis performance of the Symphonie Fantastique that can thrill on the level of Munch’s, Bernstein’s, Dudamel’s, Gardiner’s, Monteux’s, Karajan’s, Ozawa’s, Muti’s, Celibidache’s, ... I’m sure I’ll think of more before long... and it was from long before Davis could be considered a 'mature master.')

And yet, there was a second side to Davis. Even in his genial old age, this conductor who appeared the personification of avuncularity could suddenly seem inflamed with the fire of a thousand angels and demons, and cause orchestras to play with the kind of fire which their training is supposed to drain out of them. Davis belonged to a line of conductors - like Bruno Walter and Carlo Maria Giulini and James Levine - who began their careers in blazes of fire and were known for giving performances of scorched earth intensity. But as age mellowed them and the fires cooled, they began to 'savor' the music and linger on every beautiful passage to milk it for maximum expressive potential. Sometimes the results were absolutely beautiful, sometimes the results were boring and maudlin. Nevertheless, in each of these cases, these conductors could occasionally summon the fire of old and stun their audiences with a blazing excitement which no 80 year old should ever be able to summon. In Sir Colin's case, he was able to summon the old passion seemingly on command in his beloved Berlioz and Britten and Sibelius even in his final years. But there was no better example of how the fire would return than in his recordings of the Nielsen symphonies. Sir Colin had never conducted these works that are known still to strike terror in the hearts of orchestral players for their difficulty until his 80's. With one exception, the results seem marginally a success with some awkward errors. But in Nielsen 4, still one of the most difficult pieces of music ever written for orchestra, Sir Colin and the London Symphony recorded perhaps the most scorched earth performance ever made of this terror written by lightening which takes the unambiguous heroism and necessity of visceral playing which one can only find elsewhere in Beethoven, and allies it to musical techniques that are fully of the twentieth century. Sir Colin's performance of Nielsen 4 with the London Symphony is a miracle.

Stravinsky - Oedipus Rex (Good as the linked version from Munich is, it’s still not as good as the scorched earth that inevitably resulted from Colin Davis’s Stravinsky from a quarter-century earlier. Colin Davis was an angry young man, and perhaps his performances of Oedipus at Stadler Wells (no the English Naitonal Opera) did more to establish him as a force with which to be reckoned than any other single accomplishment of his early years. Most conductors, not least Stravinsky himself, are unwilling to go with Stravinsky’s writing to the primal power of his dissonances to make them as ugly as possible. But Davis plunged as fully in as his 'English' reserve would ever allow. Davis is perhaps not up there with Pierre Monteux, Ernest Ansermet, Antal Dorati, Leonard Bernstein, Valery Gergiev, and Esa-Pekka Salonen as one of the very greatest of all Stravinsky conductors, but he's damn close.)

Many of the recordings of works he recorded with that amazing fire are nowhere to be found on youtube: Benvenuto Cellini, Dvorak 7, Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements. But there is one work above all others for which he will probably always be best known. Les Troyens, Berlioz's magnum opus, the crowning glory of his grandiosely glorious career, his Grand-with-a-capital-G rendering of Virgil's Aeneid, lay unheard by most music lovers, and rarely heard by even the most passionate classical music fans, who would have to travel halfway across the world for a revival, which seemed only to happen once every five years in a single city. But by now, Les Troyens is nearly as much a repertory item as The Ring Cycle, produced everywhere in spite of its expense. We could, if we like, pretend that it's due to the efforts of other musicians. But no, it is because of Colin Davis's tireless promotion that Les Troyens is no longer a rare item, and not just his promotion of Les Troyens, (though I believe his second recording sold 100,000 copies, a number which even Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma rarely equal). It is because of his ceaseless, tireless, championing of Berlioz throughout his fifty-year career. When Sir Colin began to undertake his holy cause of performing Berlioz throughout the world, Berlioz was still an under-regarded composer for a full century after his death. For championship like that, who cares if there were Berlioz conductors who made better performances?

Elgar 2 - A work he did better than any conductor since the composer himself. 

Colin Davis was a bit of a walking (conducting?) contradiction. A voracious reader, he was among the most intellectual men to pick up a baton, and yet few if any conductors seemed more guided by their gut instincts. And yet he would leave his gut instincts at the edge of the cliff, and rarely if ever dived off of it if it meant giving interpretations that were too controversial. He was stubbornly, resolutely old-fashioned in 'classics' from Handel down to Mendelssohn, with sometimes stunning and just as often extremely boring results. And yet he publicly accused his friend John Eliot Gardiner in the press of being insufferably dogmatic, when Gardiner's sole crime was to be the mirror image of Davis's own dogma. There should be no doubt that he was a great conductor, but he could have, and should have, been still greater. 

Sibelius 3 - I grew up with his London Symphony version. I never understood why people found this a dry work, until I heard every other performance.

Handel: Messiah

Verdi: Falstaff

Michael Tippett - A Knot Garden - a work he premiered

The Legendary Peter Grimes Performance

More Proms Reviews and Rants

(Along with Bernstein’s final recording, best of the best in Mahler 2. And completely different from one another.)

Fischer and Budapest: The achievement of Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra is singular in our time. In an era when all the great new ensembles are chamber orchestras, early music, contemporary music, chamber music, anything except full symphony orchestras, Ivan Fischer created what most would never even dare - a truly great orchestra from nothing that can stand with the greatest and oldest in the world. Was it their finest night in the concert hall? Certainly not, but the achievement was there for all to hear. Fischer and the BFO did two concerts over the course of a single night. The first concert was not quite the revelation for which I’d hoped, the second one was. Fischer began with an orchestral arrangement of Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz. I am not a Liszt fan on my most charitable days, but there is something about an orchestral arrangement of the Mephisto Waltz that feels too lumbering by half. Even in these nimble hands, it’s just clumsy. Then came a far better treat: Liszt’s Totentanz - a superbly crafted 20-minute piece of virtuoso fluff for piano and orchestra. The Croatian pianist, Dejan Lazic, is an ideal Lisztian: fearlessly ascending to flights of bravura vulgarity that would terrify a more timid pianist. Totentanz is neither deep nor particularly great, but it is a very well constructed piece of music that’s entertaining as hell. Bravo to all involved. But the piece everybody really cared about was the Mahler, a composer for whom Fischer is compiling a reputation second to none in his generation. Unfortunately, this was not the revelation for which I’d hoped. Fischer has conducted perhaps the greatest Mahler 2 on record, so I had enormous hopes for this Mahler 1. Alas, for all his fire, Ivan Fischer is not a died-in-the-wool Romantic at heart. Mahler 2 is a piece based on effects, and it requires iron control to bring them off. Mahler 1 is a more natural (and to my ears, greater) piece of music, and requires the ebb and flow which only spontaneous musicianship can bring. There was freedom and rubato aplenty in this performance, but it felt imposed from without.Fischer was unable to do bring that off, that is, until the finale. I’m not sure I have ever heard the 20-minute finale done better. Suddenly, the musicianship felt spontaneous and right.
The revelations didn’t end there. Next came a ‘by-request’ concert in which audience members were given a catalogue of 285 pieces and three numbers for were drawn out of a lottery from a tuba. After the three lucky audience members chose their favorites, the audience got to vote as a whole. And so we were then treated to a battle between the Prommers and the Classic FM audience, with the sweet sounds of the Prommers winning out every time. So rather than the usual Classical Top 40, we got Kodaly’s Dances of Galanta, Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances, Berlioz’s Rakoczy March, Strauss’s Music of the Spheres Waltz and the fastest ever performance of Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmilla Overture we shall ever hear. What amazes is that though none of these works were rehearsed (indeed, it’s probable some were not played in years), Fischer took absolutely enormous interpretive risks in each of them. The results were not always note perfect, they didn’t need to be. The raw nature of this concert seemed to spur the players to intensity that much greater. In its own way, this was a revelatory concert.\


(It’s already up. Great work from the LSO chorus that quickly goes awry as the performance continues. The wrong Colin Davis showed up. This is not the work of a great conductor. Below, is the work of a very great one.)


Colin Davis does the Missa Solemnis - The pantheon of the ‘Great Conductors’ generally requires two things for admittance:
1. You look to be on death’s door.
2. The utter irrationality of critics.
The treatment of great conductors as musical gods is always unhealthy, but never moreso than the arbitrary gerontocracy that grants special musical powers to certain aged conductors in their dotage. The process by which conductors are deified is utterly irrational. Performers who were routinely slammed in the press ten years before could suddenly do no wrong. It happened to Leonard Bernstein around 1980, Herbert von Karajan around 1985, Georg Solti and Pierre Boulez around 1990, Bernard Haitink and Claudio Abbado around 2000, Daniel Barenboim and Charles Mackerras around 2005. Today, for whatever reason, the current pantheon of those whose coverage has a halo around it include Abbado, Haitink, Barenboim, James Levine, Pierre Boulez, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and perhaps Riccardo Muti, Mariss Jansons, Michael Tilson Thomas and John Eliot Gardiner. Why these conductors rather than Neeme Jarvi, Christoph von Dohnanyi, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Herbert Blomstedt, Christoph Eschenbach, Kurt Masur, Michael Gielen, David Zinman, Charles Dutoit, Yuri Temirkanov, Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, Jiri Behlolavek, Georges Pretre, Andre Previn, Lorin Maazel, Leonard Slatkin, Roger Norrington, Franz Bruggen, William Christie and Rene Jacobs? I have no idea. Of the conductors who get the royal treatment, I think only Harnoncourt and MTT deserve it, if any. The rest seem to me no better than any on the list below. Jarvi, Eschenbach, Rozhdestvensky and Jacobs are perhaps better than any on the top list. Yet the critics have spoken: This one, not the other. Why? Who knows.
It would now seem that Colin Davis has ascended to living god status. I suppose that with the death of Charles Mackerras, this was inevitable. Davis was always the bigger ‘star’, but Charles Mackerras is one of the greatest conductors of all time, Colin Davis is merely ‘sometimes’ one of the all time greats.
On this night he was not one of the greats, regardless of what reviewers say. Colin Davis made two respectable but somewhat dull recordings of the Missa Solemnis. In 35 years, his concept hasn’t changed much. It is at times beautiful, and also big and bloated in that Victorian 3000-musician way. It sounds like an old Karl Richter Handel performance. It has grandeur aplenty, and some very beautiful moments. But in no way is this recognizable Beethoven, even if your preference is for the old Furtwangler/Klemperer type of performances. Davis is a fine conductor of the Beethoven symphonies. But there is no Beethoven symphony, and hardly any other work in the canon, for which bloat is more lethal than in the Missa Solemnis. The grandeur grows exhausting under the weight of all that profundity. For all his faults, give me John Eliot Gardiner's Missa any day of the week over this. Give me Toscanini, give me Klemperer, give me Szell, give me Bernstein, give me Michael Gielen. And if I'm in a mood to require the Beethoven performers of today to conform to a Teutonism that’s been anachronistic for a half-century, give me Barenboim.
One must give credit where its due. And Davis’s patience reaped wonderful dividends in the work’s quiet sections, which have rarely sounded more beautiful. Unfortunately, there was little of the Beethovenian power to carry us from one lyrical section to the next. The Gloria should launch us like a rocket to heaven, but it’s difficult to ignite a wet noodle. And the Credo simply sounded under-rehearsed; with all sorts of sloppy entrances in the final fugue in spite of a glacially slow tempo. I have loved Colin Davis for years, and I wish I could say that this was a performance worthy of his best. But it simply wasn’t.


(Pittsburgh’s “vulgar” orchestra)
Pittsburgh Symphony Rant: So if I was mildly irritated by the reception of Colin Davis’s Missa Solemnis, I was genuinely incensed by the reception of the Pittsburgh Symphony. If Yuri Temirkanov or Valery Gergiev had led their orchestras in the exact same performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, detail for detail, which Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony gave, it would have been hailed as ‘the only true way to play Tchaikovsky....an authentically Russian approach that puts our own orchestras to shame.” But the reward Honeck and the PSO get for emulating the Russian style so well is to be accused of American vulgarity. If Ivan Fischer or Simon Rattle had led their orchestras in a carbon copy of Honeck’s Mahler 5, the reviews would have been ecstatic about the “revelatory new insights found in this overplayed warhorse.” And yet again, we read dismissals of the Pittsburgh Symphony as a superficial American virtuoso band, more concerned with loudness than probity.
I find it difficult to believe that the orchestra of Otto Klemperer, William Steinberg and Mariss Jansons could be accused of lacking probity, especially with Manfred Honeck at the helm. The Pittsburgh Symphony is a rarity in America, a orchestra of the rust-belt that is thriving more than ever. The Philadelphia Orchestra now pays the price for piggybacking on past glory, but the PSO keeps standards as high as ever and finds themselves a true Maestro in Honeck who is both a great musician and a true music director who happily plays the ambassador to their city while primo don conductors like Daniel Barenboim and Riccardo Muti refuse to do the ambassadorship it takes to keep music alive in America (in Muti’s defense, he looks as though he may be changing his tune in Chicago). Yet the reward for the PSO’s accomplishment is to be dismissed as a provincial American band more concerned with technical showboating than depth of insight. I don’t know another word for this than anti-Americanism.
Then again, there is a lot in these concerts to carp about. They just weren’t the things about which the critics sniped. Honeck’s fascination with Walter Braunfels mystifies me. Braunfels is a generic throwback to early 20th-century Austro-German music - Richard Strauss without the originality. Furthermore, the violin concerto written by Wolfgang Rihm for Anne-Sophie Mutter is simply ghastly - even an atonal composer must provide something original in harmony, rhythm, melody and form. But Rihm’s music is just noodling. Wolfgang Rihm continues to be an Emperor ohne Clothes.
Helene Grimaud’s performance of Beethoven’s 4th Piano Concerto was unpromising: as though this were yet another performance of a work everybody knows far too well. The opening and final movements should bewitch every time we hear them, yet they sounded like just another performance. But I have rarely heard the still more magical second movement sound more poetic - Grimaud’s sensitivity matched the brawn of the Pittsburgh Symphony perfectly: it finally sounded like a true dialogue between Orpheus and Hades.
In any event, the Pittsburgh Symphony’s performances of the big pieces were absolutely magnificent. The Tchaikovsky reminded me of Willem Mengelberg’s old recording of seventy years ago. No, it was not the most subtle performance ever heard. But come on people, this is Tchaikovsky 5! If you can’t cut loose in this piece, you can’t cut loose. It was a performance after the manner of Svetlanov and Koussevitzky (Nikolai Golovanov would have made the PSO performance sound downright restrained...and so would Leonard Bernstein). The range of dynamics was absolutely extraordinary, with incredible control from the softest pianissimo to the loudest brass passage. Yes, the brass section was unsubtle and loud. But so are Russian brass, and I refuse to believe that Tchaikovsky ever intended anything else. Honeck provided an enormous variation in tempo, and the end result was a performance that surely anyone who loves music can appreciate. Listen to it again.
The following night, we heard a Mahler 5 for the ages. Again, I thought of Mengelberg (who only recorded the Adagietto) but also of Bernstein’s late 80’s Vienna Philharmonic performance and Barbirolli’s recording dating shortly before his death in 1970. The sprawl of Mahler 5 was met on its own terms. There was no attempt to portray this work as anything but a rambling 70-minute piece that can only justify its length by being compulsively fascinating; and that’s precisely what Honeck and the PSO provided. The full lavish range of Mahler’s orchestral color was here, along with a complete lack of shyness about portraying Mahler’s most outrageous effects.
Perhaps anti-Americanism is the wrong word, perhaps it’s only due to a difference in temperaments. Clearly, if England’s model for how to play Mahler is Bernard Haitink, the English will not be accustomed to the Leonard Bernstein approach. Yet I can’t help thinking that if Honeck gave the exact same performances with the Czech Philharmonic, the reaction would have been 180 degrees different.

Still More Thoughts on the Proms

Elijah: I'm not sure that there was a Prom which I more looked forward to all year. Paul McCreesh's 2009 Proms performance of Haydn's The Creation was a revelation. The greatest performance I'd ever heard of that perhaps greatest of all choral/orchestral hybrids. Elijah is a piece I like far less. Moments of the most hair-raising excitement puncture a work with all the turgid longueurs of an Anglican sermon. I had hoped that McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort, with their painstaking recreation of Mendelssohn's premiere (just as they had for Haydn two years earlier), might have made some sense of this flabby behemoth. Instead, we got a performance like every other, only moreso. The big moments were more shattering than ever, and between them was the same generic noodling that we find in every other performance. At his best, Mendelssohn is a very great composer of slender, lyrical music of impeccable construction. This makes him a true heir to Mozart and a forerunner to Richard Strauss at his greatest. And as in Mozart and Strauss, lyricism never precluded drama. Unlike Mozart, both Mendelssohn and Strauss had the bad fortune of being born in eras that devalued elegance. But all his attempts at a grand, heroic utterance after the manner of Handel and Beethoven are hopelessly dull.

Haitink and Ax Play Brahms: It is weird to first hear the great Stephen Johnson and others talk about how Brahms has no greater enemy than his flabby, ultra-dull performers and then hear 3 out of 4 major Brahms pieces being performed in a flabby, ultra-dull manner. Bernard Haitink is a good if inconsistent Brahms conductor, which can describe Emanual Ax's approach to the piano just as well. Neither of them seemed particularly keyed into the Brahms Piano Concertos, which require enormous personal involvement along with the willingness to curb excess which they showed in spades. I once heard him live when he did a good Brahms 3 followed by a mediocre Brahms 4 with the LSO. This concert had a great Brahms 4 preceded by a mediocre Brahms 3. The difference was the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. Both pieces are towering masterpieces even by Brahms's lofty standard, but the more massive textures of Brahms 3 lend themselves to a large orchestra far better than the more subtle part writing of Brahms 4. Considering that Brahms 3 was written for Hans Richter's Vienna Philharmonic and Brahms 4 for Hans von Bulow's Meinnigen Court Orchestra, I suspect this was how Brahms wanted it. Haitink's conception, per usual, was to stay out of the way. No 'unnecessary' tempo changes, all the parts keenly balanced and the dynamics always well terraced. This approach has lead to far more evenings of stultifying dullness than Haitink's legions of superfans are willing to admit. But in the right circumstances, Haitink's understatement can work like magic. And a great Brahms 4 is never to be dismissed lightly.

Dausgaard's Brahms: After his incredible prom last year, I had enormously high hopes for Thomas Dausgaard conducting the BBC Symphony. To be sure, he gave an interesting performance of Brahms's 1st Symphony, if not a great one. Dausgaard's approach to Brahms is entirely different than Haitink's. Far more personal involvement, far more molding phrases, far more willingness to dramatize the music. Unfortunately, I can't help wondering if Dausgaard didn't err in the other direction. It was nice to hear Brahms unashamed of being a romantic, but the Brahmsian understatement was missing.

Gergiev and the LSO: Excepting Rozhdestvensky, there is no conductor who has championed Prokofiev more tirelessly than Gergiev. Even so, after these performances of Prokofiev's most well-known symphonies, I have to wonder how well matched they are. Gergiev’s recorded set of the symphonies with the LSO was a bit of a disappointment - underpowered, slightly sloppy. In this most obsessive and orderly of composers, Gergiev’s emotionalism at all costs can provide both the expression Prokofiev’s mechanical-sounding music often lacks, but can also dampen its impact. I couldn’t help wondering if the Mariinsky Orchestra wouldn’t have given much better performances. The performers sounded almost completely adrift in the delicate Haydnesque confines of the Classical Symphony - finally waking up in the final movement to attempt to keep up with Gergiev’s impossibly fast tempo. The Fifth Symphony faired better, but I still prefer a much harder, more mechanical approach in this work that more recalls Stravinsky than Shostakovich. Even at the best moments of these performances, the impact felt blunted. In between, we were treated to Leonidas Kavakos giving a performance of Henri Dutilleux’s L’Arbre des songes. Any five minutes of this work would have been lovely in isolation, but over 25 minutes, the repetition and tedium is unmistakeable.

Colin Davis and the EU Youth Orchestra - By now, Colin Davis is one of our podium legends. He’s been around for a half-century and given as many great performances as any conductor in podium history. But when he’s off-form, he’s really off form. The first three minutes of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements were frankly terrifying - so much sloppiness that I thought they were going to lose the piece altogether and have to start over. Davis made the definitive recording of this piece more than half a lifetime ago, and it is sad to think that his grip on this piece might have worsened. Fortunately, by minute 4, the performers settled into a good performance - far mellower than the fire-breathing Colin Davis of the 1960’s who played up every ugly sound for all it was worth. In its place, Davis now has a good mind to savor all of Stravinsky’s most pungent harmonies. It was hardly the revelation of yesteryear, but it was a fine performance all the same. The real revelation was Ravel’s Scheherazade with Susan Graham as the mezzo soloist. If Davis is now a ‘savorer’ (conductors who try to milk every moment of the score for maximum flavor: Giulini, Celibidache, Gergiev, Furtwangler, Bernstein, Pretre, Barenboim, Temirkanov, Thielemann, and Jochum all belong on that list too, among others), then there can’t be a piece that gives you more to savor than Ravel’s Scheherezade. Graham was a perfect mezzo for a piece that practically drips with sexuality. It ended with an enthusiastic, but not particularly comprehending performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. Tchaikovsky 4 is a piece that requires a long-term plan - particularly in the 17-20 minute first movement. Davis never seems to give his interpretations much thought, he simply plays up whatever strikes his enthusiasm. In Tchaik 4, that can only get you so fa.

Bychkov’s Mahler - I can’t think of much to say except that if Semyon Bychkov does not record a Mahler cycle, the loss will be history’s. This performance of Mahler’s eternally intimidating sixth symphony was greatness personified with fresh insights seeming to pop up in every bar. Bychkov perfectly negotiated the fine lines between Mahler’s classical proportion, romantic effusion and modernist rebellion. Neither too effulgent nor too rigid, this was a vision of Mahler which grows organically out of German Romanticism at the same time that it displays his need to rebel against it. Perhaps there are other, still more intense ways of playing Mahler 6, but very few performances have ever brought us closer to the tortured soul of this work. And I have never heard as beautiful a performance of the already beautiful slow movement as this one. The hand of a true master was at work in this performance and any orchestra would be lucky to have Bychkov as a director.

van Zweden’s Bruckner - I’ve heard van Zweden do a wonderful Bruckner 5, and memories of that made this Bruckner 8 particularly underwhelming. Where was the willingness to spontaneously bend phrases and shape the music? It was mechanical, efficient, almost generic. Here and there, we heard individual touches, but hardly enough for this symphony’s 80 minute span which took 75 here. One does not need to play Bruckner slowly in order to reach his essence, but just as in Mahler or Brahms, there must be a sense of personal involvement. There was lots of praise in the press for this performance. Given that the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic might be disbanded by the Dutch government, I can’t help wondering if that affected the critic’s decision making. Unfortunately, governments will not be swayed by the quality of a performance. If the government want the money bad enough, they’d even destroy the Concertgebouw to get it.

(Later today, there’ll be thoughts on Mendelssohn’s Elijah, the American Conductors David and Beethoven)