Saturday, March 1, 2025

Berliner Philharmonie, Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße, Berlin

Sibelius-Saariaho-Debussy, the composers representing Dalia Stasevska’s Berliner Philharmoniker debut (following Marin Alsop’s last week), these programmes, and the one conducted a fortnight ago by David Robertson, each integral to the Philharmoniker’s Third Biennale, details below.

For the third time in this run, Stasevska opened with Sibelius’s masterly Pohjola’s Daughter, deliberately paced and highly atmospheric; volatile, too, so that the midpoint flare-up was superbly exciting yet precise (exceptional brass), an adrenalin-filled input to a Northern Legend already being told, begun by Bruno Delepierre’s gravelly-sounding cello narration. The late Kaija Saariaho’s Orion suggests the mysteries of the universe without attempting to explain them, music at once hauntingly ticking and tumultuously thrilling, with later sections expressively from somewhere afar, sucking the listener into strange yet fascinating places, the piece rounded by a punchy toccata that resembles a meteor hurtling somewhere it shouldn’t. The twenty-minute performance had the polish of a fastidiously produced studio session. Similarly La mer was painstakingly prepared, a familiarly flowing view of the symphonic sea, charted with certainty to midday, then playful and passionate, ending with the drama of conflicting elements (if minus the ad lib fanfares) and staying stormy for the ultimate pages without compromising Debussy’s meticulous notation.

Following Sibelius, Jean-Frédéric Neuburger, a pianist with a wide-ranging repertoire (Bach to Barraqué, including Chopin and Stockhausen) and a composer who has been played by the Boston Symphony and Dohnányi, teamed up with the collaborative Stasevska for Grieg’s perennial Piano Concerto, lively yet shapely, Neuburger spontaneous if at times combative – man versus piano, a thunderous left-hand in the first-movement cadenza, Grieg as umpire if his rules flouted here and there – engaging as an ‘of the moment’ rendition and the slow movement came from the musicians’ collective heart. As an encore Neuburger played the ‘Passepied’ from Debussy’s Suite bergamasque in such a way as to nominate his fellow-Frenchman as one of his closest allies.

Jean Sibelius Pohjola’s daughter
Edvard Grieg Concerto for Piano and Orchestra
Kaija Saariaho Orion
Claude Debussy La Mer

Berliner Philharmoniker – Marin Alsop conducts “depictions of nature” – Day Night Day, Fire Music, Appalachian Spring, and Chôros 10 (Rasga o coração). Live Digital Concert Hall webcast.

Berliner Philharmoniker – David Robertson conducts Varèse’s Arcana, Miroslav Srnka’s Superorganisms, and Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony. Live Digital Concert Hall webcast.

Berliner Philharmoniker: Paradise lost? – The threat to nature.