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Taking the big-shot orchestra slot in the final week of the Proms, the Vienna Philharmonic proved its credentials in two concerts covering the staging posts from classical to modernist. The conductor Franz Welser-Möst barely needed to break a sweat to draw out impeccably polished string sound and top-notch wind and brass solos. No surprises there. But might a few surprises, a few experiments, have made it more memorable?
For all the pleasures of these performances, the cumulative effect was of safety and good taste – words not usually applied to Berg’s Lulu Suite, three movements of which began the first concert. The strings and flute sent their tendrils out tenderly and silkily; the blend when the rest joined in was seamless. The intrusion of low brass near the end of the first movement and a moment of barrel-organ brightness in the second briefly ruffled the surface, but you wouldn’t have guessed the anguish of the Lulu story from this.
Nor was the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony the following night as darkly devastating a conclusion as it can be, although the closing bars, the melodic lines sobbing repeatedly over insistently pulsing double basses, did finally pack an emotional punch. This followed a smart, tautly controlled March and a second-movement dance as light-footed as you’d expect from an orchestra with the VPO’s waltz pedigree.
Opening the second concert, Welser-Möst made no great statements with his poised, patrician interpretation of Mozart’s Prague Symphony: Mozart’s symphonies almost have novelty value now outside period-instrument orchestras, and performances as straightforward as this perhaps even more so. Tempos were flowing but unhurried, the sonorities in perfect balance, and the wind provided small but noticeable dabs of colour in the finale, without especially standing out.
If there was some truly memorable playing it came with another Austrian symphony, Bruckner’s Ninth, which followed the Berg in the first concert. The orchestra immediately found a golden sound that could encompass the length and breadth of Bruckner’s endless phrases in these three movements – the symphony was performed incomplete, as Bruckner left it. Within this sound quality there was still room for quicksilver changes of tone: the end of the first movement, simultaneously jubilant and ominous, set us up for the menacingly mechanical qualities of the second – which temporarily evaporated into skittish violins and chirrupping flute.
What was most striking, though, was the all-persuasive sense of direction, stemming partly from Welser-Möst’s notably fluent tempos but also from the quality of the phrasing: the cogs of Bruckner’s music, those endlessly repeated cells and ideas, needed no extra effort to keep turning. Sometimes it feels as though Bruckner only ever wrote slow music, but here the music emerged with a flow as natural as breathing.
