Alban Berg (1885-1935)
Monday, September 8, 2025
Royal Albert Hall, London
Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony came my way just a few evenings ago, Herbert Blomstedt conducting it in Copenhagen. Like him, Franz Welser-Möst keeps the music on the move, tightly organised, yet Blomstedt lets the music breathe, whereas Welser-Möst restricts expression, even if the Vienna Philharmonic brings a seasoned empathy to Bruckner’s scores that has significance outside of Welser-Möst harrying the first movement as if impatient with it and perhaps consciously subjugating the composer’s emotions. What did work was the unusually deliberate tempo for the Scherzo, its rhythms stamped out, with a Trio intriguingly elusive. With the Adagio (that serves as the final movement) Welser-Möst at least conveyed a sense of nobility in the face of Last Rites (as hindsight now dictates we perceive this music) even if this was not the most-anguished of traversals, rather it was darkly serene spiced with some foreboding countered by luminous invitation, which paved the way for a less than painful climax, Bruckner more accepting of fate than he can be.
In the first half the Suite that Alban Berg compiled from his (also unfinished) opera Lulu was bereft of two of its five movements and a singer (we got I: ‘Rondo’; IV: ‘Variations’; and V: ‘Adagio’), which is difficult to excuse or fathom, nonetheless in a scrupulous performance (this orchestra plays Berg’s music with the same identification as a waltz by Johann Strauss II) that equally lacked for red corpuscles and, crucially, a sense of theatre, yet the timbres were beguiling, the solos confident and characterful, if with the overriding feeling of being short-changed in the final number, without a scream (not guaranteed even with a singer on board) when Lulu (now in sleazy London) has a fatal encounter with Jack the Ripper, the dissonant eruption at this point being smoothly manicured – it should be an assault on the senses – and then no post-murder vocal reflection.
We learnt that at the afternoon rehearsal the orchestra stood for a minute’s silence in honour of Christoph von Dohnányi who died two days ago at the age of ninety-five.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002hwtk
Below is the complete Lulu Suite, with the Vienna Philharmonic (as it happens), Boulez conducting at the Salzburg Festival in 2011 with soprano Anna Prohaska, from 00:00-32:00, followed by the rest of the concert.