thu 28/03/2024

Prom 73: Vienna Philharmonic, Welser-Möst | reviews, news & interviews

Prom 73: Vienna Philharmonic, Welser-Möst

Prom 73: Vienna Philharmonic, Welser-Möst

Still Frankly Worse Than Most?

The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra like to do things their way. They still show little compunction about discriminating on sexual and ethnic grounds and for over 70 years have maintained the idiosyncratic position of having no fixed principal conductor. Instead, like the prettiest girl in the school year, they carefully bestow grace and favour on a special chosen few. One of their longest running relationships has been with Nikolaus Harnoncourt, a partnership whose early results – trail-blazingly authentic - regularly raised Viennese hackles. So it was a great disappointment to learn that Harnoncourt – 80 this year - had been taken ill and that Franz Welser-Möst - whose former orchestra, the London Philharmonic, had nicknamed him Frankly Worse Than Most - would take his Proms place.
Haydn’s Symphony No 98 was agreeable enough, though its contrasts were softened and its focus dissipated into a vague loveliness. This is not to say that it wasn’t enjoyable. The slow movement, with its delicate cascades and charming questioning and answering, was mostly a delight. And the lightness of touch and moulding of some of the phrasing, especially the sculpting of melodic tail ends, was often exceptional.
In which vein, perhaps the first thing I should suggest is that Welser-Möst be re-nicknamed. For this concert was better than most, if not in the same league as a Harnoncourt concert might have been. Beauty was the order of the day. Beauty and refinement and lustre. These are the characteristics that the orchestra can always fall back on, even on a bad day. And to this extent, it was difficult to know to what extent Welser-Möst was coaxing this out of them and to what extent the prettiest orchestra in town was, yet again, just doing her own thing.
Yet, the whole simply wasn’t that consistently thrilling, the orchestra in many passages appearing to run on a – though beautiful - bland autopilot. There was a feeling of distance between the woodwind and the strings in the third movement and a homogeneity in the sound world of the fourth that tamed the moments of rebelliousness in the cellos, for example.
The Schubert – his Great Ninth Symphony - started better. There was an immediate and instinctive exuberance to the opening movement that struck a chord within me, reminding me of something that I seem to remember reading recently about Schubert’s final years. Namely that on his bookshelf, by his deathbed, were a number of seafaring novels of a trashy sort. Was the swash and buckle of the open seas praying on his mind, I wondered as I listened to those enormous timpani and string-driven swells in the first movement, the salty like of which the musical world wouldn’t hear until Debussy. Were the bassoons deliberately echoing the windy rip of a canvassed sail? Were the low, rough double basses trying to evoke the tree-splitting sounds of a wooden hull in harbour? And were those the melodies of seafaring jigs I could hear?
Unlikely, I admit. But what was nice about particularly the opening Andante –Allegro and the third movement Scherzo and Trio was that one at least had some images to play with. An intriguing and characterful sonic world was being conjured up by Welser-Möst, if not throughout the work – the slow movement was lacking flavour and intimacy and the final Allegro vivace seemed to run a little ragged – then for enough of it for one to receive some level of satisfaction. And for this, I feel, a new nickname is perhaps in order. How about, Fractionally Better Than Most?

Tonight the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Zubin Mehta; Proms end tomorrow with The Last Night of the Proms. Book online

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