66 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019
MUSICAL EVENTS
SAFE SPACE
Kirill Petrenko makes a conservative début at the Berlin Philharmonic.BYALEX ROSS
ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREA VENTURA
replaced Rattle in August, shows no in
terest in picking up where his prede
cessor left off. The main work in his
first concert was Beethoven’s unavoid
able Ninth Symphony. A short tour of
European festivals also included Tchai
kovsky’s inevitable Fifth. Marginally
more modern repertory fleshed out the
programs, in the form of Berg’s “Lulu
Suite” and Schoenberg’s Violin Con
certo. New music was conspicuously
absent, and none appears in Petrenko’s
remaining concerts during his first sea
son. Conservatives in the orchestra and
in the audience may be reassured, but
this retrenchment is a troubling signal
from a historically great orchestra that
ought to be assuming a leadership role
in global classical music.
Petrenko, a native of Omsk, Siberia,immigrated to Austria with his family
when he was eighteen. He made his rep
utation primarily at German opera
houses: first at the Meiningen Opera,
then at the Komische Opera, in Berlin,
and, most recently, at the Bavarian State
Opera, in Munich, where he will remain
the music director until 2021. Because of
his avoidance of publicity and his report
edly monkish immersion in the music,
Petrenko has acquired a cultish mystique.
A German critic has described him as a
“maestro without myth,” whatever that
might mean. In fact, classical music has
no older or hardier myth than the notion
of rising above worldly concerns and let
ting eternal beauty speak for itself.
There is no doubt of Petrenko’s in
born mastery of the art of conducting.
He is a compact, lithe man who exudes
tremendous physical vitality. He con
ducts not only with his hands and his
arms but also with his shoulders, his torso,
his legs, his feet. One moment he is ca
ressing the air with painterly strokes; the
next he is all but jitterbugging on the
podium. All this energy is channelled
into a thoughtful, unmannered projec
tion of the score. His Beethoven may
have raced a little ahead of the standard
tempos; his Tchaikovsky may have fallen
on the slow side. But the interpretations
had a straightahead rightness: there was
nothing wayward or eccentric.
Perhaps Petrenko’s greatest strength
is the devotion that he elicits from or
chestras. Last year, when he finished a
run of Wagner’s “Parsifal,” in Munich,
he was showered with roses from the
musicians—something that I had never
seen in an opera house or a concert hall.
The Berlin players are a notoriously hard
toplease bunch, but at the concerts I
saw last month—one at the Philharmonie
in Berlin, two at the Lucerne Festival—
they had the eager alertness of a happy
orchestra. The sublime monster of the
Beethoven Ninth came together in a
reading of rare focus: crisply articulated
fury in the first movement, prankish wit
in the Scherzo, singing sadness in the
Adagio, a disciplined and headlong
“Ode to Joy.” The slow movement of the
Tc h a ikovsky began with a tableau of
jaw dropping beauty: an immaculate
horn solo, by Stefan Dohr, emerging
from a thick morning mist of strings.
The downside to Petrenko’s supremely
confident control of musical flow is, parW
hen, back in 2002, Simon Rattle
began his seventeenyear tenure
as the music director of the Berlin Phil
harmonic, he opened his inaugural pro
gram with Thomas Adès’s 1997 work
“Asyla,” which mixes grand Romantic
gestures with fouronthefloor dance
beats. Rattle thus announced his inten
tion to modernize an ensemble famed
for its almost occult command of the
core repertory. That night’s performance
of “Asyla” was only fitfully persuasive;
the players seemed less than convinced
by the music. Throughout his term, Rat
tle met with resistance from the orches
tra—even from younger musicians who
had pushed for his appointment. He
succeeded in his mission all the same.
Kirill Petrenko, the fortyseven
yearold Russianborn conductor, who