Alfred Brendel's farewell to the Proms
The most notable concert in this year's Proms was Alfred Brendel's final live broadcast, and hence final Prom. In the first half, the Philharmonia under Christoph von Dohnányi gave a subtle and refined performance of Brahms's 3rd symphony. The second half began with Harrison Birtwistle's charming settings of three of Brendel's poems, and then the orchestra was joined by Brendel himself for the Emperor concerto. Anyone who had switched on the radio without knowing who was playing would have been hard put to guess that this was a farewell performance by an elder statesman. Rarely can the work have sounded so fresh and daring. Perhaps because the Emperor is Beethoven's last piano concerto, or perhaps just because of its nickname, there is a tendency for pianists to play it in the grand manner and smooth out its edges. Not so Brendel, who revealed it to be a much more interesting and quirky work than it so often seems. Alert to the boldness of Beethoven's imagination, he played with a youthful interpretative freedom and rhetorical dash. This sounded like a young man's playing, except that few young pianists would be able to manifest such a sure grasp of the work as a whole. Dohnányi and the Philharmonia provided a model accompaniment.
Brendel, who will be 74 next year, has begun to draw back from some parts of his concert life-he has said, for instance, that he will not play the Hammerklavier in public again. Yet at least to my ears, he is playing better than ever. He can produce the most powerful musical effects by means of the subtlest rhythmic inflections and changes of colour. Both at the Proms and at his solo recital at the Barbican last June, his playing had what seemed to be an ever greater underlying simplicity, as well as beauty of tone. It is surely extraordinary that at this stage in his career, he should play with a continuing sense of discovery that would be remarkable in a pianist 50 years his junior.
A syrupy Rattle
Like last year, though perhaps with less fanfare, the closing stages of the Proms saw the arrival of the Berlin Philharmonic for two concerts under Simon Rattle. On the first night, Beethoven's 9th symphony was preceded by Schönberg's Variations for Orchestra, while the second night's programme consisted of Debussy's La Mer and Messiaen's Eclairs sur l'au-delà , his last completed orchestral work. I went to the first and listened to the second on the radio. The sound of the orchestra has changed considerably in the two years since Rattle took it over. This, of course, is to be expected with a change of artistic director, but it is not yet clear what kind of sound Rattle is aiming for, and the danger of a certain anonymity is lurking. This was recognisably still a first-class orchestra, but not one with any very distinctive character. And there are signs of decline. Of the strings, for instance, only the double basses seem to have maintained their ability to project at every dynamic level and the winds, while still capable of fine playing, were also capable of a certain scrappiness, and did not blend together as effortlessly as they once did.
It was striking that the orchestra performed better in the French than the German repertoire. In both the Debussy and the Messiaen, there was some wonderfully controlled playing, and Rattle showed himself able to achieve an impressive orchestral balance with a fine sense of detail-but neither performance breathed. In the Debussy, the tempos were too rigid, and too little was properly phrased, so that the whole thing seemed like an exercise in orchestral balance rather than a living performance. (This was true too of the Messiaen, though that may well be the right way to do it.) Tellingly, perhaps, the worst playing came in the Beethoven. Here Rattle clearly did set out to provide an "interpretation" and to put his mark on the piece-but with fairly disastrous results. The first movement was so flexible that it lacked a consistent basic tempo, and this made a nonsense of its structure. The second movement, in contrast, was so relentless that it sounded like one of Prokoviev's parodic scherzos. In the slow third movement, Rattle elicited from the violins a sonority and phrasing that would have better served some piece of late 19th-century salon music: syrupy instead of rapt. While the last movement was exciting enough (even with the Birmingham chorus's less than reliable grasp of German vowels-all men, it seems, will be brooders), there was no sense at all of its coming as a surprising climax to a coherent musical work.
More generally, and thus more worryingly, Rattle seemed unable to sustain the tension of the music when the volume dropped; he will have to learn how to do this if he is to explore the symphonic repertoire with any plausibility. Worrying too was a lack of care for the phrasing and articulation of the parts of the orchestra that were not directly in focus at any given time, so that there was often a great deal of dead space in the orchestral texture. Of course, not every conductor can have interpretative sympathy for every work he is called on to conduct, and all are entitled to experiments that fail. But for the Berlin Philharmonic to have an artistic director who can seem so out of sympathy with the central Austro-German symphonic tradition is itself an interesting experiment whose success is hardly assured.
