In skins, with green and black wigs and enormous bats' wings: 'The sight of the gloomy cavern was most fearful, and so was that of the Furies to be seen on the towers: while the sight of the devils bearing torches lit with a fire which seemed full of pitch and bitumen and sulphur was full of gloom and melancholy and horror.
None of their concerts was more thoroughly Germanic than this one, given by the Staatskapelle Dresden. The conductor was Christian Thielemann, a conductor who famously called for the far-right Pegida movement in Germany to receive a fair hearing. That, plus his determination to limit himself to Austro-German music – a provocative stance in a world where musicians are supposed to be open to everything – makes him suspect to some, and dull to others. Mainstream the concert certainly was, with music by Beethoven, Max Reger – a curious, anachronistic figure from the turn of the 20th century – and Richard Strauss. But dull it was not. The first thing one became aware of in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto was the rhythmic heat of Thielemann’s conducting. He likes to urge the melody on to its high point, and then relax the tempo just enough to let us savour the moment.
The second thing was the sheer sumptuousness of the Dresden orchestra’s sound, so different from the lean muscular quality of Daniel Barenboim’s Berlin Staatskapelle, which visited earlier in the week. That sound offers a certain resistance to Thielemann’s impetuous beat, and the interaction of the two was fascinating, warm and soft-edged yet animated. Bmp2cnc 2 71 Keygen Free there. Within that sound some fine individuals emerged. When the bassoons took the melody in the concerto’s first movement they actually stole the limelight from the soloist – which was quite a feat, as Danish violinist Nikolaj Znaider was wonderful. He was poised and energised with an effortlessly massive tone, and so was ideally matched to the orchestra. If any orchestra and conductor could have persuaded me to love Reger’s Variations on a Theme of Mozart, which followed the Beethoven, it was surely these.
But not even they could make Reger’s harmonic side-slips appear anything but queasy, or his orchestration anything but muddy. In the final piece, Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel, we discovered the poetic side of Thielemann, in the way he lingered over the nostalgic moments in Strauss’s portrayal of the great prankster of German folk-tale. The piece is usually rendered with uproarious gusto; here it had a tender feeling of “far away and long ago”, which was very affecting. Prom 70: Staatskapelle Berlin / Daniel Barenboim ★★★★★ Nothing could have illustrated more clearly the contrast between the two leading Berlin orchestras than their almost back-to-back appearances at the Proms over recent evenings. Hot on the heels of two splashy programmes by the celebrated Berlin Philharmonic, the more venerable Staatskapelle Berlin arrived for a pair of concerts both juxtaposing Mozart concertos and Bruckner symphonies.
The differences in content and delivery seemed to begin with their respective conductors: Simon Rattle, micro-managing his forces, and Daniel Barenboim, acting as a channel through which the music flowed with utmost naturalness. Very nearly half a century since he made his conducting debut, and considerably longer since he first appeared as a prodigy pianist, Barenboim still gives every appearance of being in love with music.