There is an extraordinary concert (a belated birthday present to moi- finally listening on WMHT radio almost a month later): (there are indeed many others and many more extrordinaires I just haven’t heard) from the BBC Proms 2016. (Online access throughout the world -unless like me you are kinda off-grid for the summer). 6 days left. The BBC repeats early winter, from memory. But this concert in particular is special. Special to music lovers who know the relationship conductor Sir Roger Norrington created with the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR (Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra). (Not an orchestra that was/is necessarily on the tip of many a tongue.) Special to the orchestra because it was their final concert at the Proms as they will be forced to merge with another German orchestra and inevitably jobs will be lost.
Sir Roger Norrington is at the forefront of researching/unearthing/imagining/re-imagining and extolling the virtues of period instrument interpretation. Brahms struggled. But let’s focus on the music. Because music was his struggle really. What Sir Roger’s period performance does is make Brahms sound a little like original Philip Glass (I think I meant that in reverse…;)! Crazy. No! Glass was/is interested in sonorities/harmonics. Of course so was Brahms. Yet as amazing and pleasurable are the many classic modern orchestra Brahms performances by great great artists, they are just not the sound Der Brahms intended. There is an exquisite purity and pain to the sound that on modern instruments sounds, well, a little muddy no matter how great is that soil quality and prestige cows over the years.
Not even mentioning pianist Robert Levin (whose master classes around the world are unmissable) in the evening’s opening Beethoven Piano Concerto No 4 with Levin's improvised cadenzas.
Change is not an evil quality in any human endeavour. But is it real change? THAT is the question to be asked. And the answer only ever emerges ever so slightly from a deep knowledge and research of the subject’s history. Such is the case for period interpretations of music. We are so used to a ‘Wagnerian’ sound but on period instruments…and no vibrato from the singers… O Du, Mein Holder Abendstern from Tannhäuser (1845), makes sense of that (just as an example).
Norringon and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony was a metaphor for beauty: and intelligence. And in a very unusual way tolerance in our fractured society. The society of Beethoven, Brahms, let alone Wagner’s was no less fractured. Few want to take the time to understand (that is not the same as condone) Wagner's political beliefs. Today is not a world away from that reality!
We that are still 'young' may we all live so long to hear so more….
