The Berliner Philharmoniker has been performing at the 2026 Salzburg Easter Festival since March 27 (with no doubt certain theatre rehearsals before then) and completes its stint there in a couple of days’ time. Das Rheingold was the opera (staged, directed by Kirill Serebrennikov, conducted by Kirill Petrenko, to begin a ‘Ring’ Cycle) with a concert version of this ‘Preliminary Evening’ coming live from Berlin on Friday (April 10) on DCH. Petrenko is also conducting Mahler Eight, and on this very evening Tugan Sokhiev is concertizing with the Berliners. To fill a few holes in the broadcast schedule, recordings have been made by members of the orchestra, this one from the Brahms Ensemble featuring two-viola Quintets.
The burst of energy and spacious, heroic melody that opens the Mendelssohn is characteristic (reminding of the Opus 20 Octet) and immediately established DCH’s excellent sound – tangible and lucid – and the fine-grained playing of the musicians, alert to each other as well as togetherness and dynamics, a sustained exhilaration that was countered by the charm of the second movement, played gracefully, and the soulfulness of the slow one, intimate if revealing, imploring when louder, Rachel Schmidt’s first violin particularly intense. The determined Finale, in search of resolution, brought the fieriest playing.
Bruckner’s Intermezzo is elegant, vying between waltz and ländler, with harmonic giveaways as to the identity of the composer, given with a light touch by these players at-one with the nature of the piece as aptly expressed by the title. Brahms’s Opus 111 can be a dense unfurling of thematic ideas and their development. From this eponymous group, the first movement was articulate at a broad pace lyrically-infused, passions integrated rather than overt, symphonic scope at the forefront of the musicians’ priorities, with the successor movement magically hushed at times, suggestive of a chanson triste, rises in emotional temperature made organic; and, following the elusive third, the Finale’s hop-skip rhythms and fervency confirmed this work’s serious complexity, which needed the subito accelerando that drove this ambitious/wide-ranging opus to a consolidated whole.
Felix Mendelssohn String Quintet No.2 in B-flat, Opus 87
Anton Bruckner Intermezzo in D-minor
Johannes Brahms String Quintet No.2 in G, Opus 111
Brahms Ensemble Berlin
Rachel Schmidt & Raimar Orlovsky, violins, Diyang Mei & Julia Gartemann, violas, and Uladzimir Sinkevich, cello.