Wolfgang Rihm (1952-2024)
Saturday, May 31, 2025
Berliner Philharmonie, Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße, Berlin
We must speculate what is transitional about Wolfgang Rihm’s piece from 2017, music of expressive intertwining sonorities, many layers of Wozzeck-like intense emotions, forward-moving, and huge fortissimo climaxes that suggest some sort of exorcism; complex, yes, if lucid, deeply involving as sound and passion, driven ardently by Klaus Mäkelä and performed marvellously – precise, dynamic, committed – by the Berliners as the work heads to the cliff’s edge, lemming-like, the abrupt ending rather shocking. Twenty incident-packed (and then some) minutes passed in a flash, this stupendous opus from a prolific composer who wrote enough for two lifetimes let alone the one he had, which was cut short, perhaps anticipated in Transitus III.
An Alpine Symphony may also be heard as a life’s-journey score – birth-to-death – Strauss’s farewell to large-orchestra symphonic poems, and this is the peak of them (pun arrived and retained), in a performance that glowed, tuttis and solos, the latter exemplified if invidiously by oboist Albrecht Mayer, Mäkelä balancing to a nicety direction and detailing, pictorial aspects and deeper observances. The summit was reached triumphantly, the coming back down just as compelling (not always the case) here hitting a no-holds-barred Storm, including tremendous timpani thunder, and a sensitive calm following it, Strauss soon ravishing the senses. Hovering around the on-average fifty minutes (my experience includes Pappano’s forty-three and Maazel’s sixty-seven), if cut from a distinct tartan, there was no doubt that with the closing bars, night once again, that the ascent and descent had brought illumination and nourishment to the listener, the mountain still there, towering.
As for the doubts expressed (in certain quarters) about Klaus Mäkelä’s orchestra CV, currently Paris and Oslo, he now appears ready for the forthcoming double challenge of Chicago and Concertgebouw.