Concert Review: Berlin Philharmonic returns with thrilling Brahms and difficult moderns

Ah, the Berlin Philharmonic was finally back Nov. 20, making its first appearance in Orange County in 15 years. Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa was packed in anticipation and abuzz with excitement. All seemed almost right with the world. It was even raining for a change.

The venerable ensemble, long the gold standard for symphony orchestras, was taking its music director, Simon Rattle, on a farewell tour of North America that had already stopped, among other prestigious venues, at Carnegie Hall, Boston’s Symphony Hall and, the night before, Walt Disney Concert Hall. Rattle, who has led the group since 2002, will step down in 2018, the Russian/Austrian conductor Kirill Petrenko replacing him.

The musical agenda was an odd, even daring one. Touring orchestras usually visit with warm and cuddly masterpieces to play. Here, Rattle had decided to open with a large dose of music of the Second Viennese School, specifically Anton Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, Arnold Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra and Alban Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, thorny and abrasive one and all. The heavy dose of medicine was followed by the sugar, Brahms’s Symphony No. 2, one of the composer’s most congenial works.

In the event, the concert, presented by the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, proved slightly disappointing. The program, for one thing, turned out to be a miscalculation. Taken together, the Webern, Schoenberg and Berg pieces, played without pause as if a 14-movement symphony, were too much of a nasty thing, more than 50 minutes worth, in fact.

These early atonal works are important in music history and are seldom performed. They are dense and complicated, gritty and angst-filled, jagged and sinister, uncomfortable and apocalyptic. In short, they are demanding to listen to, especially so since we rarely encounter them in the concert hall. Performing one of these three pieces would have been plenty.

Of course, hearing the Berlin Philharmonic play (almost anything) is usually compensation enough, but here it wasn’t quite. The orchestra was appearing in Segerstrom Concert Hall for the first time, and had only a brief warm-up to adjust to its reverberant acoustics. And while there were many impressive feats of agility and strength in the course of the dissonant events, there were also regular displays of shrill fortes and cluttered climaxes. The orchestra sounded best, as it happened, in the soft and spare episodes.

Perhaps the Berlin Philharmonic doesn’t have quite the distinctive sound it once had. The orchestra seems to be in fine shape — it is versatile and athletic; it is still a band of virtuosos — but that luxurious and burnished polish it was so famous for under Herbert von Karajan wasn’t in evidence at Segerstrom. (Nor was it the night before in Los Angeles, in a Boulez/Mahler program at Disney Hall.)

The strings remain strong but are now lean and muscular rather than plush — even the double basses, which played aggressively. In Sunday’s concert, the woodwinds, led by that gorgeous and distinctive oboe sound (haloed and distant), and the brass, mellow and well behaved, mostly took a back seat to the strings, at least in the Brahms.

The Brahms symphony was indeed beautifully done. Rattle, a smiling presence on the podium, led an unhurried reading that relished the roses without dawdling to notice them. Indeed, the narrative line of the piece was unbroken from beginning to end, the conductor sensitively shaping phrases but never exaggerating either the quiet moments or the big ones.

The well unified and yet ever expressive strings allowed the music to sing throughout. Yet, even here, many of the textures weren’t what they should have been, a flood of aural information overwhelming clarity. Again, the orchestra, and the music, sounded best in the softer dynamics.

A cheerful encore would have been nice after the heavy meal, but though the roaring crowd demanded it, Rattle and the orchestra did not oblige.

Before the concert began, Philharmonic Society president John Mangum announced the good news that the organization had reached the halfway point of fundraising for a $10 million endowment.