I’m still not wholly convinced by Kirill Petrenko: Berlin Phil’s Digital Concert Hall reviewed

At the start of Elgar’s Second Symphony the full orchestra hovers, poised. It pulls back; and then, like a dam breaking, the music surges forward in wave upon wave of golden sound. ‘Rarely, rarely, comest thou, Spirit of Delight!’ writes Elgar, quoting Shelley, at the top of the score, and you won’t hear that spirit captured more exuberantly than in a performance from May 2009 by the Berlin Philharmonic under its future music director Kirill Petrenko. The violins gleam, the horns swell and every player is audibly leaning into the music. Under Petrenko, Elgar’s leaping compound rhythms almost seem to dance.

The catch, of course — the truth that gives this symphony its universality, and its wrenching emotional power — is that this is pretty much as joyous as it gets. Ahead lies melancholy and splendour, terror and tenderness. Essentially, though, it’s downhill all the way: to twilight, dissolution and a stillness that no one could seriously call peace. The stature of any performance rests upon how the conductor manages that decline, and on that front, I don’t think Petrenko can be faulted. Perhaps it’s a bead of sweat, or perhaps it really is a tear that glints on his cheek as the Berlin violins stream downwards from the crest of the slow movement — but in any case, just listen to the intensity and lustre of that string sound!

Petrenko’s deft, restless touch transforms the scherzo into an expressionist nightmare out of Schoenberg’s Vienna (apparently Alban Berg and Egon Wellesz used to play piano-duet versions of Elgar’s symphonies). And at that catch-in-the-throat moment, when the sun sinks behind the rolling hills of the finale and Elgar quietly shows us just how late it really is, the Berlin musicians respond with playing of such translucent, expressive delicacy that it comes as a jolt to learn — from an interview, available as an appendix to the performance on the Berlin Philharmonic’s Digital Concert Hall website — that they hadn’t played this symphony in nearly four decades.