SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Brahms: Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77

Shostakovitch:Symphony No. 15 in A Minor, Op. 141

As the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra's Director General Jan Raes pointed out last year in his interview with Bas van Westerop for Seen and Heard International, the orchestra's distinctive sound is closely associated with the Concertgebouw building itself. 'If Rotterdam is energetic,' he said, 'then Amsterdam is more velvet, more rounded.'  He then added that 'Rotterdam is sometimes an orchestra of soloists and Amsterdam an orchestra of people working together to find a homogenous sound.'  Well, he would know; he was also General Director in Rotterdam for four years before moving to his current post.

It was a particular privilege then to hear 'the best orchestra in the world' in its own hall for the very first time after more than 50 years of concert - going. This Sunday afternoon concert coincided with a planned trip to see Kaija Saariaho's opera Emilie at Het Muziktheater, Netherlands Opera's home in Amsterdam and the opportunity  to hear it was simply too good to miss: especially since the concert was directed by Bernard Haitink, the orchestra's Principal /Chief Conductor from 1961 to 1988.

According to the Concertgebouw's web site Bernard Haitink himself had said at some time that the Concertgebouw building was the best instrument in the orchestra that it houses. There's no argument  at all on this point;  the hall's acoustic is clearly associated with the  velvety orchestral quality that Jan Raes described.

Frank Peter Zimmerman played the familiar Brahms violin concerto with such commitment and effortless ease that  he made the work seem newly appealing. He produced such a wonderful array of colour and expressiveness for each movement that the work's many moods - especially the first in which the cadenza was subtle and almost menacingly dark at times - had a quality of freshness and spontaneity  that was a delight to hear. Mr. Zimmerman  was rewarded with a prolonged standing ovation from almost everyone present in the sold-out concert hall.

Shostakovitch's quirky final symphony is  a famous enigma of course.  The composer is reported as having described the first movement  Adagietto as 'a toyshop with plenty of trinkets and knick-knacks  - absolutely cheerful' and the many repetitions of the quote from Rossini's 'William Tell' overture certainly seems to support this description, at least at first sight. But Shostakovitch is always more subtle than he often admits  and behind his apparent naïveties (cf his Ninth Symphony), something darker is almost always present in his writing, often as not related to his turbulent clashes with the Soviet authorities. Hence this particular quotation, I suspect, borrowed from an opera about a Swiss freedom fighter  and also famously used by  the US television series, 'The Lone Ranger'  which has a similarly virtuous hero.  The intent isn't only joie de vivre.

The dark second movement, with its quotation of the 'fate' motif from Wagner's Ring, its grave chorale for brass, its trombone glissandi and  lamenting cello solo, is anything but joyful -  full of menace in fact  - and the third movement provides only a brief respite before the even more enigmatic finale. There we find extra references to Wagner's 'fate' theme as well as his Tristan und Isolde, to twelve-tone rows and to Strauss's Heldenleben among other sources. Typical Shostakovitch orchestral grandeur mixes with the often mentioned ticking clocks until the symphony finally dies away by returning full circle to the spare celesta notes with which it began. If there is hope left to us in the end, this symphony seems to say, then that hope is extremely faint.

Under Bernard Haitink's direction, the orchestral sound was everything that Jan Raes had promised - velvety, homogenous and perfectly crafted at every turn. If there's a quibble, then it's a  only a very small one; occasionally, especially in the Brahms concerto, the sound was almost too tidy and polite. Which factor was responsible for this, the hall's intrinsic acoustic, the orchestra's extraordinary precision or Bernard Haitink's conducting is impossible to say after a single hearing.

Bill Kenny