Wholly German art

Christian Thielemann (born in 1959) is a self-consciously old-fashioned figure who makes rather a virtue out of his limitations. As a conductor, he stands out in a profession increasingly given to the eclectic, and to performances of music outside the western canon. The practitioners of art music have almost all surrendered to the requirement to reach out, to experiment with the new and the non-European, and to mesh their endeavours with conscious gestures of social improvement.

Thielemann could hardly be more out of sympathy with the prevailing mood. He is noisily devoted to musical excellence at all costs, and to long apprenticeships rather than flashes of stardom. There have been conductors in the past who limited their repertory even more drastically than Thielemann has — notoriously, Carlos Kleiber. But Thielemann has gone beyond a youthful training in which he conducted more or less anything to a professional practice in which he rarely ventures outside the core German repertory of Wagner, Brahms, Bruckner, Beethoven, Richard Strauss and the occasional Mozart piano concerto.

This is now unusual, to say the least; also unusual is the particular form of excellence that Thielemann has cultivated at the Dresden Staatskapelle. He has made the sound of this orchestra overwhelmingly sumptuous and rich — a homage to Karajan’s 1970s style, perhaps. Advanced public taste these days prefers — at least in Beethoven — something a little more bony and direct.

Thielemann’s name was recently bruited about for two very important German jobs. It seems astonishing that he was being seriously considered for the post of music director at the Berlin Philharmonic after Simon Rattle steps down in 2018. If the Berlin orchestra is the most glamorous in the world of international music-making, it is also an orchestra of its city — a city of argumentative liberal values. It is a tribute to Thielemann’s qualities that the orchestra was prepared to consider him at all.