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The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, always welcome visitors to the Proms, are big hitters reserved for the final week of the season. Last night, the first of their two concerts, paired Berg and Bruckner, displaying their incomparable assets of sonic beauty and technical polish.
It didn’t start well, however. The three movements chosen from Berg’s Lulu Suite (made by the composer in 1934 to popularise his opera) encompassed love scenes, the transition to the finale in the fateful attic where Lulu is murdered by Jack the Ripper and the grisly death itself. So languorous was Franz Welser-Möst’s handling that any of the sexual shenanigans that’s never far away in the opera seemed more like post-coital torpor. Berg’s ardent, richly lyrical harmonies were heard as through a veil, while the angularities that give the music such an anguished quality were smoothed out to the point of blandness.
Fortunately it was quite a different story after the interval with Bruckner’s magisterial (if incomplete) Ninth Symphony. Animated would still not be the word to describe Welser-Möst’s podium style: rather suave and measured. But an element of restraint is precisely what’s called for in an hour-long span of such intensity: it doesn’t do to deploy your big guns too soon. So intimate is Welser-Möst’s relationship with this orchestra that a raised eyebrow is enough to secure an expressive micro-hesitation, while a finger pointed in the direction of the brass was able to unleash a thrilling conclusion to the first movement.
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In the Scherzo, neatly phrased melodies on the strings made for a refreshing contrast with the properly terrifying scything gestures of the Scherzo itself. For reasons not completely clear Bruckner never completed this last symphony but the Adagio provides a movingly tranquil resolution. Early in the movement the mellow sonorities of the Wagner tubas were matched by the sweet phrasing of strings and wind. Welser-Möst’s control of the rise of tension to the gorgeous cacophony of the climactic chord was masterly.
That control was equalled by that of the orchestra in the exquisitely voiced chords on the brass choir that eventually brought the work to a deeply satisfying conclusion. The Ninth may lack the monumental perorations of its two great predecessors, but when realised with such sensitivity as here, the work reveals a grandeur all of its own.
