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The Berlin Philharmonic has had a parade of stellar music directors, including Hans von Bülow, Arthur Nikisch, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Herbert von Karajan, Claudio Abbado and Simon Rattle.
In June 2015, the orchestra selected Kirill Petrenko to succeed Simon Rattle as music director, and the Russian native took over the post in 2019-20, and he has quickly gained kudos for his insightful and incisive interpretations.
Right from the start, he bucked the contemporary stereotype of the accessible, media-friendly maestro, as Michael Cooper made clear in a 2019 profile in the New York Times. “If the old school of forbidding, aloof maestros was succeeded by new generations of determinedly accessible ‘anti-maestros’ who saw outreach of all kinds as central to their jobs, does that make Mr. Petrenko — with his focus on pure music-making and the standard repertory — a kind of … anti-anti-maestro?”
Petrenko’s music-first approach has been a huge hit, and he is set Nov. 10-22 to lead his first U.S. tour with the Philharmonic, a five-city trip that includes a Nov. 16 concert in Chicago as part of the Symphony Center Presents Orchestras series.
“I’m really very much delighted to go with my orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic, to America,” he said during a recent virtual press conference from Berlin. “I have spent a lot of months in New York, conducting at the Met [Metropolitan Opera]. But really this is my first time doing such a big tour with one orchestra.”
Born in Siberia in 1972, Petrenko moved with his family to Austria when he was 18, and he completed all of his musical education in that rich musical milieu. He began his career in 1995, leading an opera in Voralberg, Austria, and went on to a series of opera posts in Austria and Germany, including general music director of the Komische Opera Berlin during 2002-2007 and the same post with the Bavarian State Opera in Munich during 2013-21.
On the topic of his impact on the orchestra in his first three years with the Philharmonic, Petrenko said it is too soon to say. While he does want to put his stamp on the orchestra’s sound, he made clear that he does not want to fundamentally alter it. He described that signature sound as big yet very transparent and light — one that is compatible with a range of styles.
“This orchestra should sound always like Berlin Philharmonic, but always different, concerning different styles,” he said. “It should sound different in Debussy and Brahms but still we have to maybe refine again our connection to the main tradition of German-Austrian works, for example, Mozart, Brahms, Richard Strauss, Mahler and Schubert. But this is a long journey. This sort of work will take at least five or six years more, and then we can talk about what happened, what changed, what we preserved, what we would like to achieve, what we’d like to transform, what we’d like to develop together.”
The orchestra will perform two different programs on this American tour. One encompasses three works, including Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Symphony in F-sharp Major, Op. 40, and the other consists solely of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 7 in E Minor (1904-05). This latter offering will be heard in Chicago. Petrenko calls the Seventh Symphony that “most enigmatic” of Mahler’s works, one that is very demanding for both the orchestra and the audience.
It is not played as often as Mahler’s First, Fifth or even Sixth symphonies. Among the reasons for this inattention is what Petrenko called the “problem” of the last movement with its satirical dissonances. “Mahler said, ‘My humor, it’s a special sort of humor.’ Not everyone can understand this. And as he was preparing his tour in America, he was asked which symphony would he would like to start with. Maybe the Seventh, because it was composed at that period? And he said, ‘No, if I go for the first time to America, I don’t want to play the Seventh Symphony, because it’s difficult to understand. Let’s take the Fourth.’ Now in, in our tour, we are going with the Seventh Symphony, because we have played it already on tour [elsewhere], and I think we have found a special interpretation.”
Each of the Mahler symphonies is a world unto itself, Petrenko said, and “you live one whole life” across the expanse of a performance. “You never know what happens on the way, but still you try to live this piece as Mahler would do it, because for Mahler, was music was something essential, something existential,” he said. “And for him, between the first and last note, really the whole world came together from the ancient stones of some universe. ... And at the end, if you said, ‘OK, this life tonight was the right one, and we brought some challenge to the audience, but also some joy listening and playing,’ then we can relax and [proceed to] the next dates and next journey.”
