Stand-in saves the day for Berlin Philharmonic’s new year concert

From a serious musical standpoint, New Year’s Eve concerts have always been questionable — disposable music for distracted drinkers. The Berlin Philharmonic has a little more standing in the business. A carefully chosen programme, an outstanding ensemble and a chief conductor with a forceful personality can add much-needed substance to the event.

Kirill Petrenko had assembled a programme with plenty of bite to usher out a year we would, in general, prefer to forget. Then back pain obliged him to cancel, and Lahav Shani stepped into the breach.

This was a gig no clear-thinking maestro would want. Even with some programme changes, how could a youngster take on such a delicate balance of frippery and profundity and bring it the necessary zing? With little rehearsal time, the risk was that this became about the chief conductor’s absence.

You hear the absolute trust the orchestra now has in Petrenko in the split-seconds of uncertainty you get with a substitute. Or are we splitting hairs? Certainly soloist Janine Jansen had no difficulty taking matters into her own hands. Her account of Bruch’s Violin Concerto was fiercely emphatic, never leaving the smallest doubt as to what she wanted the orchestra to do. Hers was a ruthlessly unsentimental Bruch, and it was the better for it.

With the 1919 version of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, Shani had his own party piece after the interval, and pulled out all the stops. You will hear Simon Rattle’s legacy in the way this orchestra plays this piece for years to come, but Shani worked hard to place his own stamp on it.

Ravel’s La Valse brought the concert to a shattering, bittersweet close. The festive banality of the opening Fledermaus overture long forgotten, the orchestra submitted to Shani’s garish colours and abrupt contrasts, and the audience roared its approval.

After all the sudden blows and shutdowns, the changing regulations and shifting ground, it is good to witness Berlin’s monster orchestra in full flight. Last year’s New Year’s Eve concert was only offered online; this year, with masks, proof of vaccination, and fresh tests, the audience was able to be together, in the hall, as it happened. The collective live moment is quintessential to the musical experience; no broadcast can replace the visceral thrill of it. May Omicron not take it away from us again.

★★★☆☆

berliner-philharmoniker.de

Perhaps even stranger than the tradition of celebratory New Year’s Eve concerts is the habit among German opera houses of keeping their standard repertoire rolling over the festive season. While the Berlin Philharmonic rolled out waltzes and bonbons, the Komische Oper, a few hundred metres up the road, offered Janacek’s Katja Kabanova on Christmas Day.

How about a bit of dysfunctional family drama and social cruelty to round off your Yuletide? Jetske Mijnssen’s grim little production sets the action within the claustrophobic walls of a 1950s home, keeping the chorus offstage and letting the social pressure play out through implication. With Annette Dasch giving her considerable all in the title role, the whole is darkly effective.

On the podium, Giedre Slekyte keeps things together well. The cast is universally strong and wholeheartedly inhabits Mijnssen’s fastidious world of repressed characters in a cloying environment. The holiday season was not without its losses; so many orchestral players were ill that the woodwind players had to juggle multiple parts, and Karin Lovelius stepped in, wonderfully capably, as Kabanicha, the mother-in-law from hell.

On the bright side, few things are more lushly gorgeous than Janacek’s score, and however disappointing your family Christmas may have been, it was almost definitely not as bad as that of the Kabanova household: the infidelity, guilt, town witch-hunt and suicidal plunge into the Volga of Janacek’s hapless heroine put most family squabbles into perspective. Paradoxically, this beautifully miserable production leaves you feeling elated.

★★★★☆

To July 5, komische-oper-berlin.de