Physical Dramaturgy: Ein (neuer) Trend?

Dramaturgie im zeitgenössischen Tanz ist ? positiv gemeint ? ein heißes Eisen. Idealerweise sind Dramaturginnen und Dramaturgen während der Erarbeitung eines Stücks die besten Freunde der Choreografen. more more

GoetheInstitute

23/05/2006

Rattle's downward roll

Manuel Brug feels that Sir Simon Rattle's novelty with the Berliner Philharmoniker is wearing off

We've grown used to him. The thrill is gone, has yielded to more pedestrian charms. We are well-acquainted with his dashing gestures, we've seen through his permanent expression of ecstasy, which has curdled into a mask in the meantime. We know his tricks and his mannerisms, know how he sashays up to the podium with a gently stooped gait. We know in advance when he is about to leap upward from the podium, can anticipate when he is about to tease out a climax from his players, or to deploy one of those pregnant, yet occasionally empty silences. When he is about to don a rigid smirk.

After four years, the Simon Rattle System is quite familiar. The British conductor and the 120 members of the Berliner Philharmoniker are no longer madly in love, but instead preoccupied with delivering top-notch musicianship, maintaining their reputations. In the meantime, we have learned that the fellow with the sunny disposition is human just like the rest of us. It was the same with Abbado after the initial "Hi, I'm Claudio" phase. The Italian conductor also had the good fortune to usher in a genuinely new era in the wake of the shambling Herbert von Karajan monolith.


© Berliner Philharminker© Berliner Philharmoniker


At the annual press conference today, Simon Rattle will be presenting his fifth Philharmonic season. And once again, we should not expect anything especially novel: a Haydn cycle, to be recorded with EMI; dancing, as usual, at the Arena; a couple of tours; a few conductor's debuts; plus a great deal that is familiar. Only a few new works. He will be conducting Brahms' 4th Symphony for the first time. Is that all?

Feeling good without pain. No real challenges, no genuinely expanded horizons. True, Simon Rattle has acquainted the Philharmoniker with early music performance practices, and he programs a good deal of French music, striving for maximum variety. He has tuned the orchestra's sound to greater transparency, but also allowed it to become slightly neutral. He inspires the general public with standardized soundbites and an educational program that flourishes thanks to Deutsche Bank. But he also induces mild despair in the experts by essentially failing to expand, blithely diversifying instead of specializing. For him, Berlin is always a bit like Birmingham. In working with this venerable orchestra, he neglects the great German symphonic tradition, in particular the works of Anton Bruckner. Nor does he set out for distant lands.

In his few concerts in Berlin with the Staatskapelle, Daniel Barenboim - who has evolved into the Mahatma Gandhi of music - cultivates a small, oft-repeated standard repertoire, perpetuating the celebrated golden German sound of bygone times. For a long time, Kent Nagano amused himself with oddball sandwich programs before making a powerful comeback by rescaling the symphonic heights. And Claudio Abbado, as highly-esteemed as ever, comes once every season to outdo Rattle in Mahler, on the latter's home territory. The competition, then, is not sleeping.


© Sheila Rock / EMI© Sheila Rock / EMI


Even Christian Thielemann conducted a Bruckner 5th Symphony two seasons ago (after much practice in Munich) about which the Philharmonic members are still talking. And then bored everyone more recently with a mindlessly streamlined and virtuosi "Heldenleben." Simon Rattle then conducted the same Strauss work: lusciously sonorous, adroitly effective, yet peculiarly hollow and monotonous because lacking in tension and cohesion. And this is increasingly the case for live concerts as well, for instance with Brahms' 2nd Symphony, or Schubert's Great C major Symphony that was so far from Furtwängler. Glorious and overwhelming music, yet devoid of penetration. The same is true for many recent CDs which Rattle has been privileged enough to release in a steady stream. The singular exception is Debussy. Here, Sir Simon has succeeded in locating a lucid airiness in the Philharmonic's sound.

And how do the Philharmonic members themselves see things? If you ask five of them, you will hear five different opinions, always hedged with qualifications and retractions, maybes and buts. To date, the art of discourse, of dialogue, has never been cultivated there, particularly when it comes to outsiders.

How could it have been otherwise? For many years, there was just the boss and the sound machine. Missing were the communicator, the mainstay, the general manager. You just kept your head down, sulking and grumbling. But now, once again, everything is supposed to be different. Pamela Rosenberg, now 61, begins today as the new managing director (more). Will she turn out to be a mediating figure capable of inserting a bit more harmony into this marriage? Can she supply the new impetus that Rattle evidently lacks, and which the orchestra itself is not prepared to provide? It would be about time. Up to this point, there has been no real crisis, but the signs are multiplying.

*

The article originally appeared in Die Welt on May 11, 2006.

Manuel Brug is music and dance critic for Die Welt.

Translation: Ian Pepper

Get the signandsight newsletter for regular updates on feature articles.
signandsight.com - let's talk european.

 
More articles

Functions like DNA

Monday 31 October 2011

In 2007 the rap duo Kinderzimmer Productions disbanded with rapper Henrik von Holtum, alias MC Textor, publishing a ranting manifesto against the rap scene in the Tageszeitung. But Kinderzimmer Productions is back with a new live recording of their old songs - with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. Nina Apin from the taz talks with MC Textor about rap, classical music and the question of aging gracefully.
read more

Beyond the groove

Tuesday 19 July 2011

TeaserPicSearching for new sounds to take the party to new highs, club music is turning to classical and new music. Prominent techno DJs such as Carl Craig and Moritz von Oswald, Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer are working with the recordings of Deutsche Grammophon and ECM. Alexis Waltz samples some bewitchingly beautiful and psychedelically absurd results. Photo Ricardo Villalobos © Stefan Stern
read more

Lady G and the dead industrial product

Tuesday 1 June, 2011

TeaserPicDesigned to appeal to everyone over the age of six, Lady Gaga's new album "Born this Way" is basically funfair techno – with a dash of hilarious mock German. Diedrich Diederichsen explains why this is not how good pop music happens.
read more

What, yet another neglected genius?

Tuesday 27 July, 2010

This year's theatre festival in Bregrenz hosted the world premiere of Mieczyslaw Weinberg's Auschwitz opera "The Passenger" from 1968. His biographer David Fanning introduces the life and music of this incredibly prolific composer, whose work somehow failed to emerge from the shadows of the Iron Curtain.
read more

Composed in delirious time

Tuesday 22 June, 2010

TeaserPicRobert Schumann was born 200 years ago on June 8. The conductor and composer Heinz Holliger, who has devoted his life to the study of Romantic master, talks to Claus Spahn about the his labyrinthine imagination, erudition and incredible modernity. He also dispels a string of clichees that have consigned so much of the Schumann's work to musical oblivion.
read more

The apathy and the ecstasy

Friday 22 January, 2010

Riding the retro wave, singers from across the spectrum of popular music have brought back falsetto with a vengeance. While this is mostly in homage to bygone styles and idols, it has also introduced new nuances of meaning. Ueli Bernays traces falsetto's high-pitched passage from expression to gimmick and back.
read more

What was eating Wagner?

Thursday 9 April, 2009

In this, the Mendelssohn bicentennial year, Martin Geck looks at why the wealthy middle-class composer, who was Europe's most successful musician in the final decade of his life, brought out the very worst in Richard Wagner.
read more

Julia Fischer: Virtuosissima!!!

Thursday 10 January, 2008

At the New Year's concert in the Alte Oper in Frankfurt the audience's excitement was palpable. It was patently clear to all assembled that they were either about to witness the disgrace of one of the world's greatest living violinists, or the triumphant birth of a new piano virtuoso. By Arno Widmann
read more

Kylwyria - Kálvária

Wednesday 24 October, 2007

Ligeti the gesamtkunstwerk, Ligeti the Socrates-Ligeti, Ligeti the volcano. Hungarian composer György Kurtág spoke at a memorial session of the Order Pour le Mérite in Berlin about his lifelong friend, György Ligeti, who died on June 12, 2006.
read more

In the cradle of the Phaedra myth

Thursday 27 September, 2007

Hans Werner Henze's fourteenth opera "Phaedra" almost cost him his life. Now the premiere has taken place in Berlin. Volker Hagedorn visited the eighty-one-year-old composer at his home above the Tiber valley, where he has lived and worked since 1953.
read more

Nonchalance out of the depths

Wednesday 26 September, 2007

Benjamin Biolay is France's new Serge Gainsbourg. He is pioneer of the "Nouvelle Chanson," even if he rejects the term. And basically he sings about one thing: love, nothing but love. By Elke Buhr (Photo © Bruce Weber, courtesy Virgin Records France / EMI)
read more

Tradition, revolution and reaction in Bayreuth

Monday 30 July, 2007

Probably never before has there been so much hype around a premiere at the Bayreuth Festival. Because the director of this "Mastersingers of Nuremberg" is Katharina Wagner, great granddaughter of Richard Wagner, who could one day take over as festival director. By Marianne Zelger-Vogt (Image: Katharina Wagner. © Enrico Nawrath, courtesy Bayreuther Festspiele)
read more

Mann and his musical demons

Wednesday 18 July, 2007

Thomas Mann was enchanted by German classical music but was also wary of its seductive powers. In his novels, he anticipates its instrumentalisation by the Nazis, who used it as the gateway to bourgeois German hearts and minds. By Wolfgang Schneider
read more

La Scuola Napoletana sings again

Friday 25 May, 2007

Conductor Riccardo Muti describes rummaging through Naples' venerable music archive, where he discovered a number of slumbering opera manuscripts, among them Domenico Cimarosa's "Il ritorno di Don Calandrino," which opens the Salzburg Whitsun Festival tonight.
read more

Arnie of the ivories

Wednesday 2 May, 2007

After brilliant beginnings, bodybuilding pianist Tzimon Barto's career crashed as spectacularly as it started. Now the bizarre mixture of rancher, writer and keyboard collossus is back, with a fabulous new recording of Ravel. By Kai Luehrs-Kaiser
read more