As the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra begins a new era under Sir Simon Rattle, Tully Potter heads to the archives to explore the changing sound of its famous string section

[Reprinted with the kind permission of The Strad, March 2002.]

From 1913 onward the Berlin Philharmonic -Orchestra has been documented more than any other orchestra. With such an embarrassment of riches, would it be possible to trace how “the Berlin string sound” has changed over the past 90 odd years? I viewed the assignment with apprehension, but in the event the recordings told their story -astonishingly clearly.

One hesitates to use the word anonymous about a group of such quality, but it does suggest itself. While ensembles from Dresden, Leipzig, Prague, St Petersburg and especially Vienna have kept distinctive string tones, the Berlin strings have moulded themselves to the imprint of each conductor. The reasons for this are not difficult to find. Apart from the early days when Joachim and Nikisch were in charge, the BPO’s conductors have been pianists rather than string practitioners. Moreover, whereas the -orchestras in the other cities drew their players from close to home, Berlin was never a great centre of string teaching and the BPO drew its players from all over Germany; its front-desk artists came from even further afield and, in the past four decades, the catchment area has been worldwide.

My second major finding concerned portamento, which has always been a natural part of the BPO way of playing. I assumed I would find masses of heavy portamento on the earlier recordings and it would gradually reduce as the -decades went by. In truth, it has stayed more or less -constant throughout, except for the Karajan era when it actually -intensified. With vibrato, on the other hand, it was as I -expected: the earliest records showed a relatively straight sound, and both the abundance and the subtlety of the -players’ vibrato increased as they moved through the 20th century.

The first major BPO recording, made on 10 November 1913, was Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony under Arthur Nikisch. A pianist and former professional violinist, -Hungarian-born Nikisch had then been principal -conductor for almost 20 years and was responsible for bringing the orchestra into the big league. It is difficult to get a full idea of what the orchestra was like from this relatively dim -acoustic recording but there are revelations. Not only is it amazing how good the double basses are in the Scherzo, it is amazing that they are there at all — most acoustic records substituted tubas and bassists were expected to double on the brass instrument. Here at least a handful of basses are scrubbing away with accuracy and rhythmic precision. -Another revelation is the modesty of the all-pervading portamento. Nikisch made two further recordings with the BPO after the First World War, when he also recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra. Amazingly, you hear much more pronounced portamento from the London players than from those in Berlin. Yet I assume Nikisch was making much the same sort of gestures to both -orchestras. In general the BPO string playing under Nikisch, by players virtually all trained in the 19th-century way, is well tuned and flexible.

From 1921 Deutsche Grammophon recorded the BPO with great regularity. In that year, apart from the last records with Nikisch, a beautiful version of Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll was made under Leo Blech. It is remarkable because it is played one-to-a-part, as the composer intended, and the handful of string soloists play with a lovely light tone and much sensitivity. To make ends meet the -orchestra was hiring itself out to all and sundry, but the string playing was still of good quality, as you can also hear from acoustic records of two overtures, Beethoven’s “Coriolan” and Mendelssohn’s “Hebrides”, made in 1923 under Berlin’s best native conductor, Bruno Walter. The sound is still light and clear and the tempestuous passages in the Mendelssohn are played with ease. Nevertheless, one can believe those old-timers who used to say that the best players worked in the Opera House in Unter den Linden.

The man who pulled the BPO up again was Wilhelm Furtwängler, who took over in 1922 on Nikisch’s death and stayed until his own death in 1954, with a two-year break after the Second World War. For Furtwängler the string sound seems to have been merely an incidental. Nevertheless, he did encourage a tremendously weighty string tone, helped by his famously palsied beat; and I suspect that in places he allowed free bowing, although I have not noticed any on the available snippets of film — they tend anyway to focus on the conductor, although you can catch glimpses of legendary concertmasters such as Gerhard Taschner and Siegfried Borries. Like most Austro-German orchestras the BPO has always been a “heavy drive” for its conductor, -playing fractionally after the beat, and Furtwängler -exploited this trait.

He did not record with the orchestra until 1926 but through the late 1920s and early 1930s there were records not just with him but with composers such as Pfitzner and Strauss and conductors such as Erich Kleiber, Jascha Horenstein, Carl Schuricht and Hans Knappertsbusch. None of these, with the exception of Kleiber, valued -precision any more than Furtwängler did; but with electrical -recording having arrived in 1925, you can hear the transparency Pfitzner achieved in his own Liebesmelodie in 1932. From Knappertsbusch in 1928 comes real Wagnerian weight in excerpts from Die Meistersinger; and Johann Strauss pieces from the Viennese Kleiber make revealing comparisons with similar repertoire he recorded with the Vienna -Philharmonic, showing that the Berliners, for all their -quality, could not compete with the Viennese for flair and finesse.

The Nazi racial purges of the early 1930s did not -affect the BPO’s sound, as only a few top players were ousted. The records of the Nazi era, many made by the technically advanced Telefunken company, show the orchestra consolidating its reputation for making a remarkably solid but -often imprecise sound. Some guest conductors struggled — Sir Thomas Beecham could hardly keep the players together in his vastly overrated set of the Magic Flute — but Victor de Sabata made a magical series in 1939, achieving a precision missed by his rivals. In Kodály’s Dances from Galanta the strings play like an enlarged gypsy band, with crystal-clear detailing even at high speed, a good example of their ability to adapt when motivated by a great conductor. The accompaniment dished up in concertos always had a good basic sound, too. In the Brahms B flat major Piano Concerto played by Elly Ney in the same year and conducted by Max Fiedler, who had known the composer, there is the genuine feeling of a body of excellent strings playing quietly, with the grainy sort of tone Furtwängler promoted.

By now the BPO had changed its seating pattern from the Nikisch days, when the two violin sections faced each other at the front. Furtwängler followed quartets of the time in placing the violas at the front on the right, with the first and second violins together on the left and the cellos on the right at the rear. Just after the war, the Romanian Sergiu Celibidache had the cellos front right, which may account for the slightly bass-heavy sound of his few recordings with the orchestra. But by then much else had changed, with the old Philharmonie destroyed by bombing and the orchestra — now a showpiece of a divided Berlin — making do with a cinema, the Titania Palast.

Furtwängler did not often tackle string music pure and simple with the BPO although there is a good Eine kleine Nachtmusik from 1936-7, lacking only the tonal individuality of a post-war Vienna Phil. What is extraordinary is a concert performance of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge from the Titania Palast in 1952. Here is the shaggy Furtwängler sound at its most intense, with tremendous reserves of tone for the climaxes and both upward and downward portamentos executed with fierce concentration. Gluck’s Alceste Overture, from a concert a year earlier, also has immense power in the string passages.

The death of Furtwängler let in Herbert von Karajan, who had very different ideas. He did introduce new blood — in the viola section, for instance, the late 1950s saw the arrival of Italian solo violist Giusto Cappone and the fine Japanese player Kunio Tsuchiya. But, the ultimate control freak, he seemed to want the entire BPO to blend so that everything sounded homogeneous. Karajan certainly refined the sound but the result could be curiously negative. Take the Brahms B flat major Piano Concerto, recorded in the Grünewaldkirche in 1958 with Hans Richter-Haaser as -pianist. The soft strings here sound like a diaphanous -negligee: all the life has been sapped out of them. How much more like real musicians they sound when Ferenc Fricsay directs them in the same work in 1960, with Geza Anda. In works for strings alone Karajan’s skill as an embalmer could be disastrous. The serenades by Dvorák and Tchaikovsky sounded glutinous, and even Strauss’s Metamorphosen, which he had recorded memorably with the VPO in 1947, seemed turgid, not helped by having more than the -prescribed 23 players.

When Karajan simply made music, however, as in Liszt’s tone poem Mazeppa from the Jesus-Christus-Kirche in 1961, the difference was startling. This piece demands swirling string figuration one moment and a shimmering effect the next, both of which were delivered with dazzling panache. Or take the Scherzo of Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony — it may be too smooth, but the control is awesome.

During the Karajan era influential critics wildly overpraised the BPO, leading to an air of arrogance among the well-paid players. When other conductors tried to do anything they were often thwarted. Lorin Maazel, a violinist, succeeded once or twice — a fine Schubert “Unfinished” — and Eugen Jochum was respected enough to get sonorous Bruckner out of the players. He also restored ruggedness to the Brahms piano concertos with Emil Gilels. Rafael Kubelík, son of a violinist and a fair fiddler himself, achieved an interesting Schumann Fourth in which the sound was gentler than in Furtwängler’s full-toned studio recording; but for the “New World” the players turned on the stodge, as they did for George Szell in his accompaniment to Pierre Fournier in the Dvorák Cello Concerto. The orchestra’s Classical style suffered. Whereas Jochum and Hans Rosbaud coaxed lithe Haydn symphonies out of it in the early Karajan days, Karl Böhm’s Mozart cycle sounded too safe and well upholstered. Violinists Wolfgang Schneiderhan and David Oistrakh, who recorded Mozart concerto cycles with the orchestra, were unwise to try directing these sluggish -musicians themselves.

In the Claudio Abbado era, from 1989, the players were no longer sure of such fat salaries and a younger-looking band began to emerge. Though a pianist, Abbado had grown up in the ambience of his father Michelangelo’s fine violin playing. He took the refined Karajan sound and brought muscle back into it, slimming it down and making it both less sentimental and more human. Sometimes too easy--going, at his best he achieved a limber, clean sound, well displayed in performances of Hindemith, a composer for whom he had always shown a liking. It was interesting to find him getting more sympathetic tone from the BPO than Hindemith himself had been given back in 1955!

The new Abbado BPO was able to summon up an -athletic response for Seiji Ozawa in a 1992 live recording of Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, and tough, energetic playing for Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s live Schumann Fourth in 1995. The climax of the Abbado era was a much-praised Beethoven symphony cycle in which the string playing seemed to go back to where we had started with Nikisch — a modest, -resilient tone with some portamento but without too fulsome a vibrato — although with greater technical skill, flexibility and control. In 1980 Sir Simon Rattle inherited a City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra much improved by his predecessor, and he is now the beneficiary of Abbado’s decade in charge.

SELECTED RECORDINGS

Arthur Nikisch complete recordings including Beethoven Fifth Symphony. Symposium 1087/8
Leo Blech Wagner Siegfried Idyll. Pearl GEMS 0024
Bruno Walter Beethoven Coriolan and Mendelssohn Hebrides overtures; also many early BPO recordings by various conductors. DG LP 2740 259
Bruno Walter Mendelssohn “Hebrides” overture. DG 459 000-2
Hans Pfitzner Pfitzner Liebesmelodie. DG 459 001-2
Erich Kleiber Waltzes by Strauss, Neuberger and Weber. Biddulph WHL002
Victor de Sabata Brahms Symphony no.4, Strauss Tod and Verklärung. DG 423 715-2
Max Fiedler Brahms Piano Concerto no.2 in B flat major. Biddulph WHL003/4
Wilhelm Furtwängler Beethoven Symphony no.5, Egmont Overture and Grosse Fuge. DG POCG-2362
Herbert von Karajan Prokofiev Fifth Symphony. DG 463 613-2
Herbert von Karajan Liszt Mazeppa. DG 447 415-2
Rafael Kubelík Schumann Symphony no.4. DG LP 138 860
Seiji Ozawa Bartók Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta; Viola Concerto. DG 437 993-2
Nikolaus Harnoncourt fourth symphonies by Schumann and Schubert. Teldec 4509-94543-2
Claudio Abbado Hindemith Kammermusik nos. 1, 4 & 5. EMI CDC5 56160 2
Claudio Abbado Mendelssohn “Italian” Symphony. Sony SK62826