July 26, 2009: Virtual Proms

As Janos Gereben pointed out on San Francisco Classical Voice, the BBC Proms season has begun;  and this summer the concerts are available for "virtual listening" through BBC Radio 3 and the BBC iPlayer Web site.  Between my personal interest in Gustav Mahler and the fact that, following the Opening Week offerings, the San Francisco Symphony will begin its season with a three-week Mahler 09 Festival, I decided that it would be appropriate to begin my own virtual attendance of the Proms with the fifth concert in the series, which took place on July 20 and featured Bernard Haitink conducting the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) in a performance of Mahler's ninth symphony.  Since this is a symphony that Michael Tilson Thomas has conducted in two recent San Francisco Symphony seasons, it seemed like a good way to get the listening skills in shape for the coming Festival.

Stylistically, Haitink differs significantly from Thomas.  While Thomas tends to take a highly visceral (but still faithful) approach to the scores (a quality that I have found absent in the recent LSO Live CD recordings, on which the conductor is Valery Gergiev), Haitink is more austere.  It is a tribute to the quality of the technology the BBC is using that one can appreciate his subtle gradations of soft dynamics even in audio streamed over the Internet.  This is evident from the very beginning of the symphony, in which all the gestures are kept at a subdued level until the first crescendo seems to build itself beyond the endurance of human breath.  Thomas' approach to this crescendo is just as intense, but Haitink magnifies the tension by narrowing his dynamic range until it emerges far more radically than Thomas did.

My only regret is that this is an audio-only feed.  (The above image is a static photograph.)  I have seen Haitink conduct Mahler only once, about 25 years ago when the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam performed the seventh symphony in Carnegie Hall;  and watching him certainly helped me to negotiate the complexities of that particular symphony (as did watching the two decidedly different readings of this symphony by Thomas in recent San Francisco Symphony seasons).  The good news is that one can watch Haitink conduct this seventh symphony in the current archives of the Berliner Philharmoniker Digital Concert Hall;  but, where the ninth is concerned, we must content ourselves with the BBC's audio quality to grasp Haitink's approach.  Fortunately, that quality is more than adequate for a virtual concert experience;  and I have every reason to believe that it will be the same for all other Proms broadcasts this season.