Pianist Yefim Bronfmann and conductor Manfred Honeck with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in the Kursaal Meran: explosive applause (Photo: Damian Pertoll)
The pianist Yefim Bronfmann shone at the South Tyrol Festival Merano with Rachmaninoff's 3rd Piano Concerto and Manfred Honeck made Mahler's puppets dance with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.
By Hubert Stuppner
The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, which experts count among the American “Big Twelve” (New York, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Minnesota, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Baltimore) presented itself at the south tyrol festival meran with a program that, in terms of the works and their instrumentation, could not have been more popular and glamorous: a program that top US orchestras like to offer when they go on tour: Rachmaninoff and Mahler, not Gershwin and Bernstein. Just as the Viennese, when they travel to Japan, also travel with “Rach Drei” and Yefim Bronfman as soloists. Is the repertoire also shrinking in favor of a kind of luxury classical music? Appearances are deceptive. A look at the “2022 USA Orchestra Repertoire Report” tells a different story: from 2015 to 2022, the 189 US orchestras played a total of 5,470 works with numerous new pieces (composers of color living and deceased) – an increase of 400 percent!
It is also not the orchestras' fault when they perform in the request concert format in the summer. Between late summer and early autumn, according to Hölderlin, “Grant me a summer, you mighty ones!” And an autumn for mature song” – the best orchestras are not concerned with expanding the horizon of experience, but rather with the high gloss with which they celebrate the masterpieces as the lasting possession of humanity.
Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto, which has the highest density of keystrokes per second of all other piano concertos, belongs to this type of preferred classical music. The millions of YouTube likes provide the criteria for this choice: the Third Rachmaninoff Concerto with Argerich-Chailly was viewed 5.1 million times in 13 years, the same concerto with Trifonov-Chung 2 million times in 6 years, and the one with Bronfman and Gergiev 1.7 million times in 20 years. Mahler's “First”, the youthful, carefree and summery symphony, is viewed even more often: with Dudamel, in 3 years, 6.8 million times clicked, with Bernstein, in 3 years, 6.7 million times, and with Abbado in 9 years, 2.5 million times.
Yefim Bronfman also played Rachmaninoff's 3rd Piano Concerto, a luxurious instrumentation. In pianist circles, the first movement up to the cadenza is often measured like a 100-meter race: who is the fastest up to this point? According to this certainly questionable ranking, Rachmaninoff himself (in 1939 with Eugene Ormandy and a total duration of 30 minutes) came in first with just 9 minutes. Horowitz follows, who in his 33-minute recording with Fritz Reiner from 1930 is only 18 seconds behind Rachmaninoff for the same section. With Gergiev and the Viennese on a tour of Japan in 2004, Bronfman is in third place at 9:42 minutes. However, 17 years later, in another recording, he was already at 10:42. The ageing Horowitz, after his comeback with Zubin Mehta, was only slightly better than Bronfman 17 years after Japan, with a total time of 10.26 in a total duration of 42 minutes.
It is true that no other concert over the decades has stretched its duration as much as this one. There are a full 24 minutes between Rachmaninoff (30 mins.) and Kissin (54 mins.). In between are probably the most beautiful recordings with Gilels, Weissenberg, Van Cliburn, Argerich, Volodos and Trifonov, among others.
In Merano, Bronfman, now 66, confirmed his class with a total duration of almost 38 minutes. He thanked the enthusiastic audience with an encore, the G minor Rachmaninoff Prelude op.23/5 “Alla marcia”, which is also called the “warlike” one after Gilels played it for the Russian soldiers in the war against Nazi Germany.
The concert reached its climax in the second part of the evening, when the chief conductor of the Pittsburgh Orchestra, Manfred Honeck from Vorarlberg, took Mahler's “First” to task with the audience and orchestra like a circus tamer and made Mahler's puppets dance to everyone's delight. In this lively symphonic panopticon, Viennese air blew from start to finish and thoroughly mixed up the usual clichés. The conductor spared neither the musicians nor the music, tackled the heavy passages hard, gave the wind instruments hell at times, then went after the strings again and held all the strings of the polyphonic action in his hands. He conducted with all his limbs, with his legs, with his neck, with his elbows and everything, as if in the blink of an eye. Mahler's music sounds so lively when it takes a step back into nature, from which it comes, and a step forward into literature, with the chirping of flutes and clarinets. This is called reification and in truth means sensualization.
In this way, Honeck told Mahler stories that other conductors can only dream of. At times she is very inward and tender, at other times cheeky and rustic: a dramaturgy in which she is constantly making faces, sulking in between and then coming back quietly and whining. All the polite curtsies and “kiss the hand!”, Viennese humor and Viennese flattery were wonderful. It was music like at a summer open air concert, sometimes flower parade, then again at the Wurstelprater.
If Mahler's saying “I only love people who exaggerate. Those who understate don't interest me” ever applied to a concert, it applied to this one. Where is Manfred Honeck's hat? He played viola with the Vienna Philharmonic and later became assistant to Claudio Abbado. But his understanding of Mahler probably comes from Bernstein, who in the 1980s made Vienna “Mahlerian” and made the restless Mahler acceptable in symphonic Klezmer style and in the romantic “Kapellmeister Kreisler” habitus. The explosive applause proved him and the phenomenal Pittsburghers right.
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