Every period-instrument outfit has its shtick – its own version of what “historically informed performance” might mean. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment plays music from an increasingly generous historical tranche (Stravinsky beckons next season) but always on instruments dating from the same period as the works being performed. Except when they don’t.
This performance marking the OAE’s 40th anniversary was not about imagining what certain compositions might have sounded like to their first audiences. Instead, it reproduced the exact programme of a concert held in Vienna on 7 March 1897. The 19th-century concert was the latest instalment in a series run by the eminent conductor Hans Richter, which turned out to be the final concert ever attended by Johannes Brahms, who died aged 63 just under a month later. Today, in an alternative take on music-historical reenactment, we thus heard Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, Dvořák’s Cello Concerto and Haydn’s Symphony No 73, “La Chasse”, played in that order, with the auditorium lights still up, and on instruments all dating from Brahms’s time.
The result was a performance that was never less than stylish and energetic, showcasing both the OAE’s well-oiled musical machine and the flamboyantly dynamic musical leadership of conductor Maxim Emelyanychev. The Haydn was an unlikely treat to hear on 1890s instruments, the sound hyper-focused and vivid, with Emelyanychev revelling in the thrill of the finale’s chase. As the soloist in the Dvořák concerto, cellist Steven Isserlis ranged from the wildly impassioned (bow noise periodically obscuring pitch) to the heart-squeezingly gentle, with the fastest passages dispatched as if no more than impish scampering up and down the fingerboard.
Brahms’s Fourth Symphony was positively classical in its light vibrato, piquant articulation and carefully variegated dynamics. Only Emelyanychev’s occasional, irresistible pushes onwards through phrase endings parted ways with a familiar catch-all “period” style. A canonic favourite today, the symphony was only 12 years old in 1897 and would have been entirely new to at least some of its Viennese listeners, still provocative to others. I missed a greater sense of the work’s potential to provoke shock or wide-eyed wonderment from an ensemble with such a longstanding, revelatory tradition of musical risk-taking.
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