The Bamberg Symphony Orchestra will be giving the concluding two concerts of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival under its chief conductor Jonathan Nott.
The Bamberg Symphony Orchestra will be giving the concluding two concerts of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival under its chief conductor Jonathan Nott. The programmes aren’t what you might expect from one of Germany’s leading orchestras, but then very little is typical about the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra. It will be performing Messiaen, Bartók and Ravel.
A few weeks ago I went to watch the orchestra rehearsing in its home concert hall, and moved on with it to Baden-Baden where it gave a performance in the Festspielhaus of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony (the once so-called ‘Symphony of a Thousand’). The reasons I accepted the invitation were heterogeneous: the purely musical one is that Mahler 8 has long been a work I detest. So, since whenever it is performed it draws full houses and prolonged applause — as at the beginning of last year’s Proms — I felt I should try to get into closer contact with it, by attending rehearsals, especially purely orchestral ones where I could follow what was going on beneath, as it were, the distractions of a team of soloists and choirs scattered round the hall. Another reason, of a different kind, is that Bamberg is one of my favourite cities. No doubt a lot of Germany used to look like this, but the RAF and USAF did a pretty comprehensive job on most of it, while unaccountably leaving Bamberg unscathed.
Bamberg’s concert hall was built in 1993, and is very much of its time, with wilful asymmetries in its interior, but with superb acoustics. I went to a series of rehearsals there over a couple of days, during which the orchestra worked its way through the symphony, and I must say I enjoyed hearing it that way much more than I ever have listening to the complete, exhaustingly would-be exalted piece.
As always, the resourcefulness of Mahler’s orchestration is a thing of wonder, as is its delicacy, for much of the time — a delicacy which gets drowned when its world-embracing message is being proclaimed by the singers. Mahler 8 is one of those ‘inspired’ works, of which there were many in the late Romantic, especially late German Romantic period, whose creators took the will for the deed, and many modern audiences are content to follow suit.
Anyway, in Bamberg I got to know the guts of the Eighth well, and to admire the extreme professionalism of Jonathan Nott, who said very little, but the effect of whose words was instantly apparent when the orchestra repeated a passage.
The Bamberg Symphony Orchestra is far less known than it deserves. It was founded in 1946, when it consisted of players who had worked in Prague, and who arrived as refugees. Its first conductor was Joseph Keilberth, a Bayreuth regular and a man with a broad repertoire. The orchestra has been conducted by many fine musicians, but most of them haven’t been stars. Yet it shows itself, both in concert and on recordings, to be a first-rate ensemble, with a dark but not especially rich tone. Bamberg is a city of about 70,000 inhabitants, and astonishingly one in ten of them is a subscriber to the orchestra’s concerts.
Jonathan Nott was appointed its chief conductor in 2000. I finally met him, having gone out mainly with that in mind, after the dress rehearsal of the Eighth in Baden-Baden, which took place at 11 a.m., with the concert scheduled for the early evening. At last the soloists and choruses were present. I felt sheepish going to meet Nott during the brief gap. I suspected that the last thing he would want to talk about would be the Symphony, especially to someone who couldn’t disguise his scepticism about it.
‘I can go along with all Mahler’s slushiness,’ he said disarmingly, thereby unwittingly (I think) putting me in the position of a musical prude. And he went on to make it clear that for him music is an existential matter: you learn from music about the nature and genuineness of feeling, and you feed into your interpretation of music what your feelings about life, personal relationships, crises, may be. I must admit that I found the intensity with which he spoke about his music-making and his life ruled anything that could be called an interview out of the question. Hesitant and eloquent, slight and exhausted, but overflowing with the need to communicate, he seemed an unlikely person to be, Atlas-like, lifting the Eighth off the ground that evening.
But of course he is a consummate professional, apart from his other qualities, and at seven he swept on to the platform and demonstrated, with his sinuous, relatively unobtrusive gestures what he had claimed to me earlier: that the music is, for him, there waiting to be released, and his job is to enable that. And that is what this, by far the most persuasive performance of the Eighth I have heard, clearly affirmed.
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