Around the turn of the 20th century, Arnold Böcklin’s brooding painting “The Isle of the Dead” made for one of the most popular images in Europe. Freud and Lenin owned prints; after seeing a reproduction in 1907, Rachmaninoff was inspired to write a tone poem.
Nabokov wrote that copies of the Böcklin hung “in every home in Berlin.” Rachmaninoff’s “The Isle of the Dead,” which the Berlin Philharmonic played on Sunday at the start of an amazing three-concert stand at Carnegie Hall, was also once ubiquitous, but these days is programmed less frequently and has a whiff of old-fashioned character piece about it.
Great orchestras — and no orchestra is greater than this one, which plays with force and finesse under its chief conductor, Kirill Petrenko — of course illuminate the deathless classics of the repertoire, as the Philharmonic did on this trip with Dvorak’s Seventh Symphony and Bruckner’s Fifth. But the best ensembles also reveal unexpected depths in pieces you might take less seriously.
Petrenko conducted “The Isle of the Dead” with the same luminous seriousness he might bring to Wagner’s “Parsifal,” making it taut and ferocious, morose without heaviness. Building in strength near the start, the Philharmonic sounded billowing rather than crushing, like a gathering storm cloud. Solos — like the wind fragments that twist around each other, one by one — were played with poise but never look-at-me self-regard. A violin elegy near the end achieved wrenching intensity in what can sometimes be mere mood music.
I’ve often thought that Korngold’s Violin Concerto — which came between the Rachmaninoff and Dvorak on Sunday and again, all three even more potent, on Tuesday — is a lot of shallow showboating. But the Philharmonic and Petrenko made it seem newly sophisticated.
These players’ cohesion allowed them to create uncannily evocative atmospheres. The first movement of the concerto had a moonlit glow. In the third, a golden full-orchestra blast, balanced so that no section swamped the others, dissolved into a fairy tiptoe. Small details were moving in their artfulness, down to a tiny diminuendo passage in the violins in the first movement: a short, tender motif played a few times, each time softer. It was a simple effect, executed with utterly unified subtlety.
The violinist Vilde Frang, a late replacement for an injured Hilary Hahn, played with sweet but lithe, direct tone. While she didn’t stint the second movement’s emotion, she stayed restrained, in keeping with Petrenko’s approach, never tipping into schmaltz.
You always get the sense that this orchestra’s members are listening to one another. In the first movement of Dvorak’s Seventh, the sleek heat the violins achieved was a precise echo of the texture of the flute from which they were taking over the line.
The Philharmonic has a lean sound but was capable of rhapsodic warmth in the second movement; the Scherzo had one foot in an elegant ballroom, the other in a hearty country dance. In a Finale of burly vigor, there was still unaffected gentleness in the upbeats of the second theme.
On Monday came a celebration of Bruckner’s 200th birthday, and a valuable one: The sprawling Fifth Symphony, over an hour long, isn’t heard very often in New York. (The concert is available to stream from WQXR.)
The conductor Christian Thielemann, a Bruckner specialist, has written of the Fifth that “the whole symphony seems quite happy,” but Petrenko’s performance with the Berliners was even cheerful. I have rarely heard less solemn Bruckner.
This Fifth was pastoral, playful. In a brisk Scherzo, the return of the ländler dance, which had been charming in its first incarnation, was almost murmured, Petrenko keeping his arms at his sides and swaying gently. With the orchestra taking its cue from the perky clarinet solo at the start of the great fourth movement, the enormous fugues emanated joy, not severity.
Petrenko didn’t go for extreme spaciousness; even if it rose to radiant climaxes, this version of the symphony generally felt like a chapel, not a cathedral. This was Bruckner with danciness and a surprising variety of color, right up to Petrenko bringing down the rest of the orchestra to let the flute line sail out in the final moments.
From the first movement, there was tonal fullness across the ensemble, and flowing ease; what can be plain tension in the middle movements between triplets and duplets was here felt subconsciously, if at all. The orchestra’s agility is such that it can shift from pummeling roar to shining chorale to turbulence to hush, each turn precise and graceful.
The Philharmonic’s New York visit coincided with the unveiling back home of substantial planned cuts to Berlin’s culture budget, including a 10 percent reduction (around 2 million euros, or $2.1 million) to the crucial subsidy the city provides the Philharmonic.
If those cuts go forward, they would be bad news not only for Berlin, but also for the rest of the world, which looks to this orchestra as a beacon of everything that classical music can mean, everything that was embodied in these Carnegie concerts: craft, community, a vibrancy that emerges from deep respect for the past.
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