Estrangement in the night ... Bernard Haitink (aka 'Uncle Bernie')
There's nothing worse than being the only person at a party not having any fun. Except in my case (because I avoid parties in the same way most people avoid poking themselves in the eye), there's nothing worse than being the only person not having fun at a concert. The worst case of this musical estrangement I can recall was at last year's Proms, when Bernard Haitink conducted Mahler's 2nd Symphony.
Now, I'm a big fan of Uncle Bernie, and this was the sort of repertoire in which he should have excelled; but for some reason it just wasn't happening for me. Perhaps it was the humidity, or the fact that I hadn't found myself an acoustically perfect place in which to plant myself. Or maybe it was that my poor, long-suffering girlfriend - never that keen on Mahler to begin with - was feeling ill and so spent half the performance looking as though she was one brass chorale away from passing out.
Whatever the case, I found the whole performance disappointingly prosaic, especially in light of the high expectations I'd had for it. But a disappointing performance is one thing: what really pained me was that everyone else seemed to have had such a ball. The audience erupted with applause, showering St Bernard with bravo after bravo. "Prom of the season," a friend later told me; one of the best Mahler Seconds he'd ever heard.
Were we at the same performance? I found myself struck by the same question on Friday night, when Haitink returned to perform Bruckner's 8th Symphony with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam. It should have been a real occasion, but no matter how hard I tried I just couldn't get into it. Far from being transported to that magical Brucknerian plane where time seems to stand still, I felt every last foot-throbbing second of the symphony's 80-minute span - and I wasn't at all happy about it.
So why did everyone stamp their feet and whoop and holler at the end? What did they all hear that I didn't? I couldn't help but feel left out, and all I could think was: humbug.
