Beyond comprehension

The London Philharmonic Orchestra’s ‘Belief and Beyond Belief’ season is drawing to a close, without making it in any degree clearer what it was supposed to be about. Many major works have been played, and the season will end with Eschenbach conducting Beethoven’s Ninth. But then any series of concerts with a pretentious name ends in that way; in fact, I have devised several imaginary series of that kind myself, and will gladly forward the details to any orchestra looking for a grandiose rubric. I would be grateful if whoever devised the name of this current season would tell me what ‘Beyond Belief’ means. There is no need to find excuses for programming a series of more or less monumental works and, as Andris Nelsons showed earlier in the season, if you’re able to elicit a great performance of a Bruckner symphony from an orchestra that is a justification.

The pre-penultimate concert had an old-fashioned feel about it: an overture, a vocal excerpt, and after the interval a symphony. Admittedly, the overture and the vocal number were both by Wagner, and the symphony was Bruckner’s great elegy for his revered Master, but none of the pieces threw light on the others.

The overture was to Der fliegende Holländer, regrettably with the revised ‘redemption’ ending. This wonderful piece, which announces definitively Wagner’s arrival among the greatest composers, was given a bracing but routine performance. Marek Janowski, who may have made more recordings of Wagner than any other conductor, including two complete Ring cycles, and is the current conductor of the Ring at Bayreuth, ignored Richard Strauss’s famous advice to conductors not to look at the trombones (‘It only encourages them’), and from the start the performance was brass-heavy and string-light.