As Herbert Blomstedt held up his right hand to signal the end of his somber, generally static performance of Bruckner's Fourth Symphony, he began to collapse, followed by an audible gasp from the audience, and was saved from a potentially tragic fall by the concertmaster. It was the only moment at which the 94-year old conductor had not been in control the entire evening. Known for also standing throughout his meticulous rehearsals, as demanding as a 90-minute concert and planned to the minute, he had successfully shepherded the Vienna Philharmonic through the main program he and the orchestra will be touring to Luxembourg, Bonn, Ghent, Lucerne, Amsterdam and Prague.
And while the same qualities which had been evident the Sunday before, when he and the VPO had played Honegger and Brahms at the Salzburg Festival, it had been less physically exuberant in the more claustrophobic, if more glamorous, confines of the Großes Festspielhaus, and so it was a pleasure to hear them in the open spaces of Grafenegg's Wolkenturm where the conductor's lapidarian concerns were folded into a deeply-invested nonagenarian's view of music he has been performing for nearly seven decades.
In fact, the speeds Blomstedt took for Schubert's “Unfinished” Symphony were similar to his recording with the San Francisco Symphony in the mid 1990s. He took a comfortable strolling tempo for the Allegro con moderato, paying special attention to introductory and transitional passages, with lots of light, subtle colors and long-lined phrasing. Given the post-pandemic climate and the conductor's gravity, Blomstedt might have almost come to a grand pause during the repeat, but in doing so he seemed to have been both affected by – and speaking to – many of eternal issues of the heart and soul that have sprung up during the time of covid.