Audiences are still not allowed in the Philharmonie, but otherwise the Berlin Philharmonic seems to be continuing with its season, streaming each concert on its online platform, the Digital Concert Hall. The latest, under chief conductor Kirill Petrenko, included a significant world premiere, while providing another clue into the musical sympathies of a conductor who remains an unknown quantity as far as concert audiences outside Germany are concerned.
The new work, a joint commission between the Berliner Philharmoniker, the City of Birmingham Symphony and Iceland Symphony orchestras, came from Anna Thorvaldsdottir. She describes the core inspiration behind Catamorphosis as the “fragile relationship we have to our planet … the core of the work revolves around a distinct sense of urgency, driven by the shift and pull between various polar forces – power and fragility, hope and despair, preservation and destruction”.
Lasting around 20 minutes, it’s a single movement of restrained power, a continuum of shifting, colliding layers of sound, which are minutely detailed in the score yet manage to seem simultaneously massive and delicate as they move from dense chromaticism to moments of almost lucid tonality. The unswerving trajectory of the music sometimes recalls the single-mindedness of Sibelius’s tone poem Tapiola, and there are also moments in Catamorphosis when the use of long bass pedals to underpin the textures, and sometimes to provide the starting point for consoling melodic lines that never quite take off, suggest even closer Sibelian connections. But this scrupulously prepared and wonderfully performed premiere showed that it’s a piece that stands entirely on its own feet, creating an utterly convincing musical world.
After the premiere came Prokofiev, though even with Daniil Trifonov as the dazzling soloist, the First Piano Concerto still never transcended its own splashy meretriciousness. And then there was a real rarity. Interviewed during the interval, Petrenko revealed that the music of Josef Suk was one of his particular enthusiasms, and that Suk’s tone poem A Summer’s Tale was a special favourite. Certainly his performance of the 50-minute piece highlighted all its late-romantic beauties, which are threaded through with hints of Debussy and early Schoenberg, but even his affectionate shaping could not quite make the sprawling five-movement structure hang together.
• Available on demand on the Digital Concert Hall (£).
