Press Room

Peter Uehling

(...) Of all of Berlin’s orchestras, it is meanwhile the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester that has the most individual, well-formed and warmest sound. The Berliner Philharmoniker may have more stylistic flexibility or more high-profile soloists, but in its seven years under Marek Janowski, the RSB has achieved a sound quality with an inner vivacity that is reminiscent of the Philharmoniker trained by Karajan in the 1960s. A single chord can sound so beautiful that the music surrounding it is barely needed to flood the depths of one’s physical and psychological fabric with the utmost intensity. The beginning of Friday’s concert at the Konzerthaus with the swelling, deep C of Weber’s “Der Freischütz” Overture, was the best example. And it was just the beginning.

Marek Janowski unites a German kapellmeister’s propriety with a sensibility for color that is usually attributed to the French, although French orchestras or conductors have never really distinguished themselves in that respect. It can come as no surprise if, after Schumann, Bruckner and Strauss, French composers are now setting the tone for the season. Janowski’s selection of the theme was motivated by the German kapellmeister, however: the “profoundly elaborated” Symphonie fantastique of revolutionary instrumentalist Hector Berlioz would do the RSB good.
He didn’t make too many promises. Every sixteenth was defined, each harmony perfectly balanced, there was no confusion in the strings, and the sound itself was characterized sometimes by brilliance, sometimes by a moving warmth.
(...)

Link to the article (in German)

Berliner Zeitung vom October 6, 2009

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Martin Wilkening

(…) When Béla Bartók’s pantomime The Miraculous Mandarin is presented in a concert performance instead of as a staged production (and this is almost always the case), there is plenty to keep the audience’s imagination busy. (…) Yet the frenzy of the giant city is also unequivocally captured. There is something unmistakably evil and aggressive about Bartók’s inhuman moloch, and this horrible coldness is played out with chaotic brusqueness in this frank, all-out interpretation by the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester conducted by Marc Albrecht.

Bluebeard’s Counterpart
The pantomime The Miraculous Mandarin is actually the counterpart to the opera Bluebeard’s Castle. And because, even in this city of three opera houses, one never has an opportunity to experience the two works either on stage or together, it is that much more commendable that the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester now follows up on its grandiose concert performance of Bluebeard during the Musikfest with a concert performance of the Mandarin, also in the Philharmonie, and not as an orchestral suite but with the complete stage music.
For once in a concert hall performance, the piece does not close with the wild fugue of the chase as the Mandarin pursues the girl. This demonstration of steeled orchestral muscle is followed by the bizarre transfiguration scene with the triple murder of the Mandarin and music that sounds as if it is virtually being suffocated, full of dark murmuring, sighs and finally the brief performance of the choir.
In the first half of the concert, the RSB presented the German premiere of a recent work of Peter Eötvös. “Levitation” was written for the sibling clarinetists Sabine and Wolfgang Meyer. For all the skewed beauty and constructive fantasy with which the voices of the soloist duo are interlocked, the four-movement series of snapshot-like musical images of suspended states also presents such brilliant clarinet play that the success of the piece is assured. Overblowing and flageolets lend the harmony a slightly distorted quality, full of subtle allusions between seemingly fathomless tones and hints of foundations upon which the clarinets sculpt their three-dimensional figures in surreal weightlessness.

Link to the article (in German) ...

Berliner Zeitung vom September 26, 2009

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By Martin Wilkening

In the original language or in German? This question has lost some of its edge since supertitling in the opera is possible, and one can have both at the same time – the sound of the original language, with a greater or lesser degree of understanding, and a projected text to ensure comprehension. These texts can also be sort of alienating, despite the fact that they have meanwhile become so common that one hardly notices the illusion-shattering effect anymore.
If only for this reason, it is interesting that Marek Janowski, in a concert performance with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester, takes the risk of presenting Bartók’s one-act opera Bluebeard’s Castle in the original Hungarian (with German singers) and without supertitles. Especially with this particular opera and composer, all of the musical factors speak in favor of this decision, as does the respect for a so-called small language: a language, without the melodic and rhythmic quality of which, the music of Bartók – now valued by the whole world – can hardly be imagined.

A Dream Duo

Even if, much like this critic and, presumably, the greater part of the audience, one understands little more throughout the entire performance than “kékszakallú” (which doesn’t mean “I love you” or “I’m dying”, but rather “Bluebeard” or, in poor opera German designed to fill four syllables, “Herzog Blaubart”), even then, one can only be thankful for the uncompromising nature of this decision.
The Prologue, which places the events that follow in the distant realm of legends and myths, was with good reason spoken in German: a brief, perfectly-toned performance by Otto Sander, into which the music with its sinister circles fades in. For the first time, Bluebeard’s young bride sees her new home. The grimness of the windowless castle, the glistening light and the fading shimmer of dusk that push in through the doors the woman has opened are painted with such suggestive tones by Bartók’s music that one doesn’t necessarily even miss the accompanying stage set. And the luminosity and intensity that Marek Janowski draws out of the fabulously-cast RSB, especially in the wind section, is inspiring. Petra Lang and Albert Dohmen as Judith and Bluebeard are a dream duo that can also draw upon stage experience with this piece: she has vocal presence in all shades of anxiety, devotion, fear and alienation, yet without overacting; he with a powerful, deep voice, imprisoned in hopeless solitude.
Above all with Petra Lang, who mastered the Hungarian version from memory, did that miracle come to pass in which music and text become one; one grows out of the other in endless reflection and interwovenness.
The first part of the concert placed the symbolist vagueness of the young Bartók, which nonetheless sets a gigantic sound in motion, in contrast to the sarcastic edge and the wisdom of age that is practically unparalleled in terms of a reduction of means, of the Michelangelo Suite of Dmitri Shostakovich: Music that, much like the last string quartet or the viola sonata, says everything with but a few lines. Here, Bartók’s image of time caught in a mythical, perpetual circle meets the incorruptible view to the passing of time and its mechanical ticking with which, ironically, the last of the Michelangelo poems, “Immortality”, comes to an alienating close.
For the soloist, these songs are a merciless challenge. He must fall into line with the fine lineation of the thinned texture, yet also perform powerfully and, finally, convey the rich meaning of the words. The Danish bass Johan Reuter came very close to squaring the circle. He sang in German in a manner in which nearly every word could be understood; he used no tricks, not even in excursions to higher registers, and held his own with the profound darkness of the piece while, in the softer passages, his voice unfortunately did not always have the same resonance. The unsentimental precision with which Marek Janowski steered the music through the more brittle as well as the more poetic passages was precisely in keeping with its impressively terse cadence.

Berliner Zeitung vom September 9, 2009

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By Julia Spinola

Never did Dmitri Shostakovich speak so openly of himself as in the seldom-heard, somber songs after sonnets by Michelangelo Buonarroti. (…)
Why Shostakovich’s uncodified openness in defining the great themes of love, beauty, truth and death never runs the risk of devolving into confessional exhibitionism was powerfully demonstrated at the Philharmonie during Berlin’s Musikfest. Johan Reuter and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin under Marek Janowski moved the entire event into the sphere of the imagination and let the songs sound like a series of internal monologues and invocations. Equally emphatic and straightforward, Reuter formed the vocal part, which follows Mussorgsky’s declamatory rhetoric, in a powerfully melodious bass timbre. With the apodictic tone of the first song, “Truth”, he transformed his voice into a piercing beacon, let it flower with gentle nuances in the following two, “Morning” and “Love”, only to then deprive it of all warmth and color in the next-to-last piece, the wholly unglorified “Death”, imagined as a terribly real, nightmarish grimace. The texts were sung in the German adaptation, with commendable comprehensibility.

For all its fill of characterization, this interpretation kept the audience at a strict distance, through which alone the illusion could be upheld that one was listening to a radically private train of thought that was not actually intended for disclosure. No vocal wink of the eye, no improper intimacy, no fussy overemphasis clouded the seriosity of the songs. The sparse orchestral language of the late Shostakovich, which only moves in intimations, fragmented gestures and eloquent pauses, was made by Janowski for once not to sound merely brittle and angular. The conductor felt out the meaning of this poignant economy in his interpretation of the suite as a self-monologue: music that is nothing more than a “natural” resonance chamber, music that moves in the smallest of impulses and reactions because there is no longer a vis-à-vis to which it would owe a detailed explanation.

If the programmatic coupling with Béla Bartók’s symbolist one-act opera Bluebeard’s Castle seemed enticing on paper, it was given concrete meaning through this pointed interpretation of the Michelangelo suite. “The tale is old”, the bard opens the spoken Prologue, which is usually omitted (…) “Is the theatre here, or in your heads?” The orchestra responds with the rich sound of deep strings, conjuring up in archaic pentatonic a striking image of the sinister castle of the wife-murdering Bluebeard.

The way that Janowski set the whole thing in flowing motion with flexible tempi and breathing agogic accents made audible that these walls are meant to be imagined more as an unstable psychological interior than as a formidable gothic fortress. Janowski kept the changing moods and the synaesthetically charged colors and characters in permanent, at times nearly aimlessly wandering, fluctuation. Spanning from the extremes of the dark F sharp minor of the beginning and end of the opera to the gleaming C major climax with the full organ upon the opening of the fifth door – at which point for several moments any foothold seems to have crumbled away as the music dissipates into pure, formless tone – thus resounds the Bluebeard artist’s whole inner wealth.

Albert Dohmen interprets the role of Bluebeard as a truly unconquerable fortress: with a stoic, steadfast and absent expression that is perhaps at times a touch too defensive and rarely sounds threatening. With the melancholy, balladic tone at the end of the Second Door (“cool and soothing is the blood that oozes freshly”, sung in the original Hungarian) he lends his baritone great melodic warmth. Petra Lang drives her flaming mezzo-soprano like a scorching gaze into Bluebeard’s fortress, which has begun to totter. She throws herself with genuine furor into the role of the Judith, who has come to spy out the man’s innermost secrets. She flatters him with iridescent sweetness when she carries upon her lips her great love, which she never grants him. She hones her voice to a dangerous weapon when she hysterically insists the doors be opened. And she is finally extinguished in boundless sorrow when, at the very end, Bluebeard has digested her as a memory and closes his doors once again.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung vom September 9, 2009

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By Klaus Geitel

His concert with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester at the Philharmonie in the middle of the world music festival series was a sensation, although it sowed seeds of tristesse at the outset.
The program featured the Michelangelo songs that Shostakovich composed in honor of the 500th birthday of the great master.
(...) Janowski had placed a concert performance of Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle on the program and cast the two roles of the musically highly eloquent psychological drama richly. Petra Lang sang (and acted!) fabulously in the role of Judith, the sacrificial lamb driven by curiosity. The Duke was personified by Albert Dohmen with peaceful, magnificent-sounding authority. What a duo! But under Janowski, Bartók’s challenging orchestral language with all its many nuances also came into its own. At the end, jubilant cheers.

Berliner Morgenpost vom September 9, 2009

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Michael Baumgartl

Ulrichshusen. The festival weekend was organized under the code 9x9, which represents the series of nine ninth symphonies to be presented at the Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. However, the Sunday afternoon concert with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin under its former principal conductor Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos turned out to be a festival of Romantic sound.

From the very beginning with the Freischütz overture, that ultimate musical symbol of German Romanticism, the conductor and the wonderfully committed orchestra savored the piece to the fullest, tasting its vibrating tensions at a remarkably calm tempo. Softly expiring endings in the introduction; corpulent, gently rounded chords at the close – Agathe’s mental agony and Samiel’s fear became audible in the spirit of a fairy tale.

This was only a prelude to the F minor clarinet concerto with soloist Matthias Schorn, however, who carried this Romantic sound sorcery to a climax. Schorn has always been a master of piano. Yet when he celebrated this art in the adagio – particularly in the midsection, accompanied only by horns – then time stood still and all earthly elements disappeared. Again and again, he and the conductor put their heads together as if discuss at a whisper how to make the transitions from the clarinet to the orchestra to flow as if in one breath. This melding of sound was of such inspired perfection that the audience broke into jubilant cheers.

Then, finally, Antonín Dvorák’s Ninth Symphony “From the New World”: In this case, it was particularly the calm with which the 76-year-old conductor allowed solo passages to unfold and the demanding manner in which he made his way out of this calm back to the urgent impetus of an orchestra tutti that captivated the audience. After great jubilation, many bravos and two encores from Dvorák’s Slavic Dances, this excursion into Romanticism came to an end.

From the Nordkurier of June 25, 2009

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On the two concerts of the RSB in Colmar, the Bonner General-Anzeiger wrote: "(...) This time, the focus was on the pianists, whether established or promising young musicians such as Severin von Eckardstein, who performed Mozart’s “Jeunehomme” concerto with an exquisite touch and sparkling fluency. Orchestral partners for the concert in the Saint Mathieu Church were Berlin’s Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester and conductor Marek Janowski, and they created a marvelously transparent sound pattern with great depth of focus. Anna Vinnitskaya also gave a grandiose performance at the same location and with the same orchestra, playing Mozart’s late, sullen D minor concerto with disarming authority (…)”

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Daniel Wixforth

The problem with the summer is that it’s a bit elusive at the moment. So it just hits the spot when the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin presents the next concert in its “Feuerstein: Introducing Classics” series (Feuerstein führt Klassik ein) at Radialsystem under the banner of a “Solar Power Station”. Herbert Feuerstein is responsible for the sunny mood, and he leads the audience through the program with considerable popular knowledge. Yet Markus Poschner doesn’t seem as convinced as Feuerstein that Prokofiev’s suite “Summer Day” was above all meant as “a political message to the youth”. His baton draws intimately gentle gestures from the RSB and puts the focus on the other-worldliness of the piece. (…) Poschner manages to find a navigable middle road between dissection and exultation in both Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and Mussorgsky’s “Night on the Bald Mountain” (…)
The makers of the classical cabaret series have been awarded a prize from the initiative “Germany – Land of Ideas”. (…)

Tagesspiegel vom June 28, 2009

http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/art772,2834255

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by Klaus Lipinski

One of them had meanwhile reached the seventh symphony in his Bruckner cycle; the other was his soloist for Mozart’s Piano Concerto KV 503.
A more than 20-minute long Bruckner Adagio can change a great deal - for the audience as much as for the musicians. In the two remaining movements of the symphony, the Berlin Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester played as if electrically charged and under current from head to toe.

Janowski conducted Nowak’s version, with the cymbal clash in the Adagio. Of much greater importance, however, was the finesse with which he attained the highpoints. Always finding the voices that carried the current, he needed no screaming superficial effects but rather used variations of color and tempo to create powerful moods. The perfectly-tuned woodwinds threw themselves into it and tore the strings along with them.
(...)

Ruhr Nachrichten vom May 19, 2009

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by Felix Stephan

Grimmer and more unrelenting than usual was Janowski seated in the saddle of the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchestra. He left it up to the pianist to radiate sympathy. The here in Germany less well-known Irishman Barry Douglas has the imposing constitution of a bodybuilder. He vigorously crawled through Reger’s sea of sound. With a big heart and even bigger hands, he brought new life to Reger’s dripping, Late Romantic opus. During his encore, the audience was given an opportunity to confirm that Douglas also has a vein for the devoutly poetic. After Max Reger’s rolling mass of tones, Brahms’ intimately overcast intermezzo Op. 116, No. 4 felt like a godsend.

In the second half of the concert, another show of symphonic strength was discharged. Janowski consequently brushed Richard Strauss’ Alpine Symphony against the grain, dispelling all tranquility and idyll. He left Nature in a raw state, a rugged and brutal obstacle for the mountain wanderer. Restlessly, the conductor drove the musicians to top capacity. The orchestra fought with body and soul. Janowski didn’t use the piece to pat himself and his musicians on the shoulder. The last thing he wanted was to shine; he shocked with sheer untamed chaos instead.

From the Berliner Morgenpost of June 13, 2009

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Jörg Königsdorf

The music of Richard Strauss is like a drug for conductors. Few of them can resist the temptation to exhaust its effects to the point of losing orchestral control. Luckily, Marek Janowski has outgrown the drug phase. When the head of the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester conducts Strauss’ Alpine Symphony at the Philharmonie, it’s not about effects but about clarity, order and inner consequence. Light-footed does Janowski go about his mountain trek, staying close to Richard Strauss’ own recording from 1941.

Already the introductory “Night” episode strains toward the first ray of sun – the mountain is no enemy, but rather the symbol of Nature that is governed by its own laws. Even when Janowski climbs up “On the Summit”, it has nothing to do with Wilhelmian bluster, but that much more to do with thin mountain air. The “Alpine Symphony” sounds like an antithesis of the German Romantic because Janowski confronts it with a piece that points to the dead end in which German composers that came after Brahms, Wagner and Liszt were stuck: Reger’s Piano Concerto from 1910 is a prime example of that egomaniacal agitation that stylized the composer’s own emotional life. Barry Douglas calmly navigates through the thundering chords and even discovers traces of post-Brahmsian meditation in the slow movement.

Tagesspiegel vom June 12, 2009

http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/art772,2820778

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Daniel Wixforth

And because the mini-festival is made possible with the support of the Berliner Volksbank, it should be pointed out that cultural sponsoring is bitterly necessary in times such as these, but by no means a matter of course.
The RSB is sophisticated in its approach to the Haydn Symphonies Nos. 6 and 8, which were written in the composer’s early days at the Esterházy court. Without falling overly prey to the expressive ideal of early Classical severity, Marek Janowski demands a good deal of transparency and countenance. That becomes apparent in the second movement of the Sixth Symphony, when the first string chairs engage in filigree chamber-musical interaction, and also in the Allegro of the Eighth, when the orchestra repeatedly and subtly slows the buoyancy of the 3/8 tact. In an enormously multifaceted performance, Annette Dasch sings “Berenice, che fai” and “Chi vive amante” with a soft timbre that induces goosebumps. (...)

Tagesspiegel vom May 23, 2009

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The Frankfurter Rundschau: The Philharmonie shook nevertheless; a party mood prevailed all around. That was certainly not least due to the first part of the concert, which was much more compelling and offered proof that Daniel Schnyder (…) is a fantastic arranger and saxophonist. Alongside the orchestra, led by Järvi with rhythmic verve, and the two exceptionally gifted jazzmen Georg Breinschmid (has such a soft contrabass ever been heard?) and Michael Wimberly on drums, Schnyder played his way with extended solos through his own piece and the variations and paraphrasing for orchestra of pieces by Jimi Hendrix, Horace Silver, Abdullah Ibrahim, John Coltrane and the great old Duke Ellington, whose ballad “Memories – in a sentimental Mood” was the undisputed high point of the evening. The flourish that Schnyder brought forth from his tenor sax was enough to make one melt. No, it was majestic. (Jürgen Otten in the Frankfurter Rundschau, May 8, 2009)

In the Berliner Morgenpost, Klaus Geitel wrote: Daniel Schnyder, the sheer unsurpassable soprano and tenor saxophonist, is Artist in Residence with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester this year, for which one can only congratulate them both.
Schnyder, in this case also composer in his own right, played two highly original musical works under the direction of the exceptionally nimble and elegantly energetic Kristjan Järvi at the Philharmonie, and he was thanked with such terrific applause as is surely yet to be enjoyed by his colleagues from Schönberg to Rihm. (…) Schnyder is a highly virtuous instrumentalist. His intonation is beyond a doubt sublime. One listens to him with passion. Moreover, he has Michael Wimberly (Percussion) and Georg Breinschmid (Bass) as fellow musicians on his side. (...)

Up Out of the Folding Chair Traps! challenged Peter Uehling in the Berliner Zeitung: This is what they call “crossover”, but what is actually being “crossed” here is not the earnest and the entertaining or Europe and Africa. No, the frontier runs straight through the body. It is what Schnyder says it is: there is music that fills a space with beats and dancing, and then there is music for singing and listening. The first one permeates the body, taking control of it; the other renders the body immobile while the instruments and the act of listening command its selective attention.
The concert confronted listeners with a contradiction between body and space: in the presence of such intense rhythm, the folding chairs in the Philharmonie turn into traps. What to do with the kinetic energy that Jimi Hendrix’ “Purple Haze” pumped out right from the beginning? To be sure, you can let of some steam with applause and cheers and then, during more mellow numbers like Duke Ellington’s “Memories – In a sentimental Mood”, you can revert to more contemplative enjoyment of the decorative art of Schnyder’s tenor saxophone or the virtuosity of contrabassist Georg Breinschmid.
Schnyder’s arrangements are confident without pushing the music to the limits of its capacity; everything retains its clarity. Still, with Hendrix or John Coltrane’s “African Blue”, he drives the orchestra into a frenzy. The RSB makes an honest effort to forget about philharmonic culture for one evening – but after eight measures, when Breinschmid throws in his absurdly precise and coolly driven plucked tones, the differences between cultures are clearly perceived. (…)

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Daniel Wixforth

It is a sculptural evening, a metamorphosis of sound into images. After two hours, Gilbert Varga and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin release their listeners in a state somewhere between overwhelmed and enchanted. At the Konzerthaus, Rachmaninoff’s symphonic poem “Isle of the Dead”, inspired by the painting by Arnold Böcklin, turns into a discourse with art. The audience has the painting before its eyes in the form of a reproduction in the program brochure, yet Varga and the RSB offer more than a blueprint, they keep on drawing. A most subtle handling of the melody in the first movement is followed in the midsection by flickering carpets of strings that trade off with violently hewn tutti explosions. Prokofiev’s second piano concerto might also have become a play of color, had the palette of soloist Anna Vinnitskaya been a bit richer. The Russian pianist certainly does offer a reading: with technical perfection, she cements the progressive nature of the work from the year 1913. Yet not until the final movement does her interpretation move beyond a sort of timepiece mechanics. In comparison, Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” in the orchestral arrangement by Ravel is more colorful by nature alone. Once again, Varga drives the RSB to a sensational sound, like sketching with the wooden hammer. Acoustically, it is very impressive (particularly in brass!), yet in terms of content, not necessary.

Tagesspiegel vom April 20, 2009

http://www.tagesspiegel.de

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by Martin Wilkening

For all intents and purposes, Marek Janowski and the pianist Radu Lupu make for an odd team with their opposing musical temperaments: the conductor alert and driving, the pianist fully lost in himself. As a rule, Lupu plays from a normal orchestra chair. Leaned back with eyes nearly shut, his communication with the orchestra through body language is reduced to a slightly diagonal inclination and, guided only by the ear, a turn of his mighty head without a glance.
Together with the Philharmonic Orchestra of Monte Carlo, Janowski and Lupu have performed all of Beethoven’s concertos. It seems a logical conclusion that the G major concerto could convey something akin to the essence of this well-tested collaboration. Of the five concertos, this is the one with the most tightly woven interface between solo voice and orchestra, with the most unusual dramaturgy. And it was a fantastic performance, filled with the tension of various polarities caught up in a finesse of layered listening. Those who have heard Lupu often know the unusual quality of his playing, in which the threat of imbalance is an intrinsic element. On successful evenings like this one, however, he presents himself as one of the greatest pianists.
The major theme of this interpretation of the 4th piano concerto turned out to be the gradual gains of the cantabile, the inner freedom to be won in singing one’s heart out. The continually growing emphasis, the most earnest precedence with which Lupu presented the song-like upswings in the first movement, was nurtured by a seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of energy. Despite Lupu’s incredible ability to tone down, for example when he blends his piano with the palette of the woodwinds, the intonation was never generically lyrical. Even the initial monologue was articulated not with a plaintive sigh, but rather as an expression of inwardly-focused concentration in the absence of affectation.
The Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester was able to pick up on this suggestive sound of finest piano tension – offering a taste of the wonderfully successful clash between the dark unison grumbling of the strings and the improvisatorially inspired, soothing gestures of the piano in the second movement. Janowski stepped up the tempo powerfully in the last movement, and Lupu raised the stakes with lion’s paws in the eccentrically torn and curt cadence. And here as well, in a most natural way, room could be found for the dream-filled episodes where the simple bourdon of the solo cello foreshadows the pastoral tone that is characteristic of the 6th Symphony, which came after the break.

Berliner Zeitung vom April 4, 2009

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Peter Uehling

At the Berlin Konzerthaus on Saturday, Sol Gabetta even performed a piece that hardly anyone knows: the first cello concerto of Bohuslav Martinů. (...) in all of the slower passages and in the second movement in particular, her presentation developed a compelling vocal quality.
Gabetta stays away from the big sound, that cliché of swirling sonorous espressivo that can never mean more than its own weighted tonality. Her playing is sooner reinforced by the tonal development than by the phrasing, the vibrato is dispensed with confidence, the melody unfolds in long breaths of air and then disappears again. The second movement is and remains an unpretentious song and it moves with the power that only modest songs can call their own.

Berliner Zeitung vom March 9, 2009

http://www.berlinonline.de/berliner-zeitung/

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Frederik Hanssen

In this year of multiple jubilees, before the classical community rushes on to Georg Friedrich Händel (April 14th is the 250th anniversary of his death) and Joseph Haydn (the 200th anniversary of his death is May 31st), Marek Janowski and his Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin celebrated Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy one last time, with two brilliant concerts in belated honor of the composer’s 200th birthday on February 3. What on paper appears to be an evergreen program on Tuesday, featuring the violin concerto, the “Italian” and the “Ruy Blas” overtures, turns out to be a most exciting affair in the completely sold-out Philharmonie. Janowski has taken a very close look at the long familiar scores and developed a highly personal reading of the three works.

The prelude to Victor Hugo’s Spanish comedy, for example, is not allowed to pass as a pretty trifle. Instead, Janowski lends a real dramatic urgency to the cheerful main theme by way of sharp contours and a driving tempo. In the violin concerto, as well, no detail goes unnoticed. Janowski demands of the orchestra maximum concentration for even the most seemingly irrelevant adjacent voice – and his musicians display world class: wide awake and precise, they unfold a tonal landscape that is by all definitions enlightened, the rhetorical concision of which repeatedly outshines the introverted playing of soloist Isabelle Faust.

The fourth symphony also radiates the bright light of the North. The conductor consciously bans all things sunny and southern in order to show how heavily even this “Italian” piece is influenced by the two great constants in Mendelssohn’s thought: Protestantism and the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. The way Marek Janowski highlights the trumpets as a heavenly fanfare in the introductory movement, the care with which he presents the fugue passage here and, in the andante, the “running” bass as stylistic devices in the rhetoric of baroque composition, or the way he interprets the stark melody of the woodwinds as a choral lamento; all these things paint a picture before the mind’s eye in which the white-chalk churches of North German Brick Gothic shine brighter than flowered lemon groves.

Two days later, a very different Mendelssohn meets the listener’s ear in the Philharmonie, with the “Paulus” oratorium. Now, the sound of the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester remains soft and romantic even where the composer picks up on models of older music of Händel or Bach. In delicate pastel hues and with a fine sense of dramatic effect, Marek Janowski draws up a grandiose musical tableau, such as would have met with the approval of Mendelssohn’s contemporaries, the painters of the Nazarene movement. The evening, although aesthetically diametrically opposed to the first, is equally uplifting even if in its own old-fashioned way.

The protagonist in “Paulus” is the choir. The premiere of the piece in 1836 featured 365 voices – the Rundfunkchor Berlin holds its own with one-fifth of the original cast. The choir pros were magnificently prepared by Johannes Prinz, and lent a golden splendor to the solemn passages and resplendent glory to the jubilation: a phenomenal performance. With her weightless soprano, Sunhae Im was like an archangel in glistening silver armor, and Detlef Roth’s transformation from Saulus to Paulus was as beautiful as it was natural.

The mastery with which Janowski gathers all the strings in his hand, celebrating the mammoth work as if it were his own and breathing life into the music, increases the anticipation of his Wagner cycle. From 2010, he plans to perform the complete musical dramas of the master from Bayreuth with the RSB, naturally without scenic accessories, in pure concert form. True to his credo: Music is the essence.

Tagesspiegel vom February 28, 2009

http://www.tagesspiegel.de

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Martin Wilkening

(...)
There may well be many people who have never heard beyond the first movement of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s “Italian” Fourth Symphony. The concert experience of the piece might come as a small shock to an ear largely conditioned by cultural trends, when confronted by the fact that there is more to the piece after the first movement and, in fact, quite a bit more. Yet for this, Mendelssohn himself is not free of blame. The ballad-like andante and the pastoral comfort of the sleepy third movement seem all-too inconspicuous and introspective compared to the buoyant, all-embracing jubilation that rushed through the concert hall before them. And even now, cut loose by Marek Janowski and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, this storm of exhilaration rattled and shook all of our hardened, Berlin-in-February souls from the bottom up once again. The clarity with which the strings formed each phrase to its conclusion was exemplary; the way the woodwinds drove their whirlwind staccato forward was inspiring. This virtuous exuberance is again brought to the boiling point in the final movement, the saltarello, and the RSB gallantly holds its own under Janowski’s uncompromising baton.
(...)

Berliner Zeitung vom February 26, 2009

http://www.berlinonline.de/berliner-zeitung/

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