This time last year, the Edinburgh International Festival was ending solidly but not particularly excitingly with mostly Scottish artists in Mendelssohn’s Elijah. A year and a new funding settlement later, the EIF has upped its international game significantly with a weekend of performances from none other than the Berliner Philharmoniker. Let’s hope it’s a sign that a corner has been turned.
Under their Chief Conductor, Kirill Petrenko, they brought innovative Scriabin that seemed to push back the frontiers of gravity and head skywards. Yet the fascinating thing about their performance of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto is how backward-looking it was. This was Beethoven on the grandest scale: a large symphony orchestra – eight double basses! – with lashings of string vibrato and overall slow speeds. Petrenko’s Beethoven sounded closer to Karajan’s or even Furtwängler’s rather than Rattle's or Abbado’s.
Yet it was a sound so luxuriously lovely that it would win over any but the most committed period purists. Tuttis were so grandiose that they could have been overawing, yet Petrenko shaped them with such care and attention to detail that for the length of this performance it was hard to imagine them sounding any other way. It helped that Petrenko tweaked and caressed almost every phrase in a way that seemed to spotlight it, and that the playing was out of this world. The string sound for the slow movement was so soft that you could have lost yourself in it, yet the final Rondo rocked with rollicking strength.
Soloist Augustin Hadelich didn’t always match the orchestra for strength – how could he with a band as huge as this? – but he made up for that with forthright directness in all of his playing which seemed to conduct the concerto like a proper conversation, as though orchestra and soloist were suggesting ideas to one another. He played his first movement cadenza like a movie actor taking his close-up, and brought similar assertiveness to the countermelody of the slow movement, before driving his way through the finale in a way that seemed to urge the orchestra over the finish line with him. Old-school Beethoven like this is pretty unfashionable these days, but that made this performance all the more memorable.
So, too, was their luscious rendering of Scriabin’s Third Symphony, The Divine Poem, but mostly because it’s such a rarity in concert halls. Petrenko clearly loves it, because he showed similar attention to detail in its heavily scored textures, and just about made it make sense. He seemed to atomise the heavily layered score, prising apart its many elements to make them sound as clear as possible individually before putting them back together in a way that meant you could hear the space through the middle. He seemed to do the same to the orchestra, lifting out the horns or caressing the violins, focusing the basses to give the music a terrific kick from beneath.
Yet overall it had an amazing coherence because Petrenko knew exactly where he wanted to take it. The weighty grandeur of the outer sections gave way to tremulous sensuality in the central movement, yet you could still hear the chirruping flutes while the violins were playing with the most voluptuous sweetness, with an overall lightness to the playing which meant that Scriabin’s multi-layered sound world never cloyed. I can’t claim Petrenko solved all of Scriabin's riddles – perhaps no one ever could – but with conviction like his and orchestral playing as brilliant as this, it’s hard to imagine any musical team doing as good a job.
