Gewandhausorchester Leipzig lends cultured elegance to Strauss at the Barbican

One of the big questions hanging over the music business after the past two years has been whether large-scale touring will come back. The combination of travel difficulties, concerns about climate change and worryingly weak audiences suggests a strong headwind.

The first big, post-pandemic international concerts planned for London were this month’s jamboree of Strauss, due to be shared between the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In the event. the Bostonians never made it, owing to ongoing Covid issues, but Leipzig undeniably delivered the goods.

The mastermind was conductor Andris Nelsons, who leads both orchestras. The plan was to present a grand survey of Strauss’s orchestral tone poems (a seven-CD set has just been released), of which the two surviving Leipzig concerts offered a pair each, together with the suite from Der Rosenkavalier and the Burleske for piano and orchestra.

Had both orchestras been present, this would have been an opportunity to compare and contrast. Instead, the concerts became a showcase for the exceptional quality of the Leipzig orchestra’s playing, its warmth and blend, and the long years of tradition that have taught it how to endow even Strauss’s most bombastic music with a cultured elegance.

With the platform filled to bursting by the huge number of players, the old problem of the Barbican’s constrictive acoustics came to the fore. At full throttle, as in the battle sequence of Ein Heldenleben, the decibels were fighting to get through. Even there, though, maximum volume rarely seemed harsh. Riccardo Chailly, Leipzig’s previous Kapellmeister, polished up the orchestra’s sound to be bright, taut, Italianate. Nelsons has gone the other way, encouraging richness of texture, and the exchange has been all to the good.

The first concert opened with the early tone poem Macbeth, an outpouring of noise and fury, and the rather unsatisfactory suite from Der Rosenkavalier, not compiled by Strauss himself (though how he would have enjoyed Nelsons’ gently teasing way with the waltz rhythms). The high point came with an uncommonly discriminating performance of Ein Heldenleben. It takes a special mastery to spin out the final threnody so slowly and still get it to make sense, indeed create a real eloquence. The final chords of wind and brass were also perfectly balanced.

Nelsons’ tendency to slow down for moments he specially loves robbed Don Juan of some of his legendary libido, though there was much softness and, where required, grandeur. Rudolf Buchbinder was the soloist in a more lyrical Burleske than usual. Nelsons shook the rafters in the famed, “Sunrise” opening of Also sprach Zarathustra, familiar from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (Herbert von Karajan steadfastly used to underplay it), and made much of the work’s extreme contrasts of mystery and enlightenment, philosophy and passion. A few technical wobbles in the closing minutes can be forgiven.

The only regret is that the hall was far from full. If we need to see which of the challenges facing orchestral touring will prove the most serious obstacle, it looks as if it could be audience figures.

★★★★★

barbican.org.uk