Strained Sophistication From Vienna

Tuesday, midway through its three-night visit to the Orange County Performing Arts Center, the Vienna Philharmonic took a baby step into the 20th century.

As Berg wrote his Three Pieces, Opus 6, between 1913 and 1915, the First World War was breaking out. Remnants of old Vienna’s waltzes and military marches swirl through these concentrated pieces, no longer representing agreeable times. Berg was still deeply attached to the Romanticism of Mahler and had also hitched his wagon to the Modernist Schoenberg. Berg’s Opus 6 was music of a young composer who yearned for the past yet recognized the present.

The Vienna Philharmonic performance, led by Bernard Haitink, had the character of amplification--every gesture was larger than life; the climaxes were very loud. This orchestra is a highly evolved machine that can turn up the decibels without the slightest distortion, and it did so proudly. When it was over, someone booed.

The boo seemed almost invited--the performance was self-consciously attention-getting, and Bergian turmoil couldn’t help but appear exaggerated next to the Classical niceties of Mozart’s “Haffner” Symphony or the exalted lyricism of Schubert’s C-Major Symphony (the “Great”), also on the program. But for Orange County, it marked a moment of cultural arrival.

Five years ago, this hallowed orchestra came to Segerstrom Hall, and it was regarded with simple awe. This time around, the audiences are more sophisticated. The Philharmonic Society, which sponsored the concerts, leads tours to the Salzburg Festival, where booing is common. The society has built such an array of attractions that its audience really can start to feel secure in expressing its own tastes. Bravo to the boo.

But sophistication can go too far, and I think it did, for other reasons, on Tuesday and Wednesday. On Monday, the group scaled Olympian heights with a magnificent performance of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, majestic and superbly human. The next two nights, the group remained on high, complacently looking down. On Tuesday, Mozart’s “Haffner” was lumpen; had it been sprightlier, Haitink might not have felt compelled to drive Berg down our throats. Schubert’s symphony brought out the group’s silken smoothness, but it too was played with dogged determination.

Wednesday’s program was designed for a bit of adventure. Brahms’ lively Variations on a Theme of Haydn and Haydn’s ever-surprising Symphony No. 101 (“The Clock”) were on the first half. After intermission came Strauss’ tone poem “Don Quixote.” Again, the playing was peerless. Winds so pure, so utterly in tune, immediately put a listener in a very good mood when the musicians opened the Brahms. How delicious was the tick-tocking, in ever changing instrumental colors, throughout the Andante of Haydn’s symphony. But Haitink drove through these pieces as if control of the vehicle and destination were his reason for the trip, not the scenery or the joys of unexpected detours.

“Don Quixote” displayed an orchestra thrilled with itself and the sounds it can make. The solo cello (which impersonates the Don) and solo viola (Sancho Panza) were drawn from the ranks of the orchestra. Franz Bartolomey is as elegant an orchestral cellist as you would ever want to hear, but his playing was elegance unrelieved, bringing out few of the qualities of the bumptious knight. He made the final passages, the Don’s dying breaths, beautiful in the extreme, but by then the tenderness had become cloying. Tobias Lea, on the other hand, was a bountiful Sancho, his big, robust tone a more sustaining pleasure.

Haitink does not relax on the podium, and if he has a sense of humor, it was too dry to make the Haydn or Strauss as much fun as they might be. Only in the Bruckner was he able to sustain a sense of music unfolding with inevitability, grace and grandeur. But he is a thorough musician, and the Vienna Philharmonic plays for him with utter commitment.

Waltzes by Josef Strauss were the encores on Tuesday (“Delirium,” playing off the Berg) and Wednesday (“Music of the Spheres”). They were wonderfully played but were taken too seriously to sound like dance music and, in fact, under Haitink, revealed a few chinks in the armor of mid-19th century Viennese society.

But no one, of course, booed.