Helmut Müller-Brühl and his Cologne Chamber Orchestra turned out a fine collection of Bach orchestral music for Naxos, and are also contributing to the label’s ongoing Haydn symphony cycle. The three works on this CD have been cleverly chosen: both symphonies have slow movements featuring concertante (i.e. solo) strings, and the Sinfonia Concertante itself, of course, does much the same throughout (with the addition of solo winds as well). Müller-Brühl directs all three works with a perky efficiency that does not preclude a measure of the necessary humor and charm, but as Louise Lasser said to Woody Allen in Bananas: “Something’s missing.” That something, for want of a better word, is “character”.
Now before anyone jumps to conclusions, I want to make it perfectly clear that I’m not one of those classical music lovers pining away for some long-lost golden age when men were men, women knew their place, and dictatorial conductors could do no wrong. Such a time never existed, and even if it did, Haydn (especially early Haydn) played no part in it. Up until the postwar period, much as with Baroque music, we had no performing tradition at all for the first products of the Classical era. They simply weren’t played. We owe our present enjoyment of this music to performer/scholars such as Paul Hindemith, Charles Mackerras, Antonio de Almeida, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Antal Dorati, and numerous other artists who, during the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, showed us what we had been missing, and so led inevitably to the current abundance of historically informed explorations of this repertoire on both period and modern instruments.
Like many conductors of Classical pieces today, Müller-Brühl uses modern instruments played in what we now understand to be “period style”. And like so many other conductors today, his versions of these works seem to be less interpretations in the positive sense than they are accumulations of performance techniques and mannerisms. It’s as if each work came with the same owner’s manual: take (optional) small timpani played only with wooden sticks, minimize string vibrato, choose generally fast tempos, clip all phrase endings, observe repeats wherever possible, employ the bare minimum of necessary performers (especially strings)–and presto! Instant Classical Symphony!
Only it seems that Müller-Brühl has ignored a critical point. This music covers approximately 35 years of Haydn’s musical development; the three works aren’t identical, nor should they sound so. Can you tell, for example, that Symphony No. 13 (a delightful piece that features the main theme from the finale of Mozart’s much later Jupiter Symphony in its own last movement) uniquely employs four horns? Where are they? Why such feeble woodwinds, given Haydn’s very different treatment of the section in each piece? Why not celebrate the difference in sound between Symphony No. 13’s timpani and extra horns, the chamber music textures of No. 36, and the full classical orchestra with trumpets and drums opposite four soloists in the Sinfonia Concertante? And did Haydn mark every single forte orchestral interjection in the principal theme of the same work’s finale as a crescendo, mezzo-forte to fortissimo? And should this mannerism apply to similar moments in the two earlier symphonies as well?
In short, it’s not enough to have the right ingredients. You also have to know how to mix them correctly, and this understanding of each work’s unique formal proportions, dramatic energy, and instrumental color is what I call “character”. Either you have it, or you don’t. Müller-Brühl, on this evidence, doesn’t. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the performance parameters he establishes virtually guarantee a certain very respectable level of quality in execution and a consequent absence of interpretive perversity. So, do I praise these performances for their generic stylishness and for getting the notes right, or do I condemn them because this very generic quality ultimately homogenizes three different pieces, sounds mannered, and merely hints at the music’s expressive potential? After all, we aren’t exactly spoiled for choice in this repertoire, even today. On the theory that others will find the approach more agreeable than I did, I’d offer a cautious recommendation. At least at the price, there’s little risk in having a listen. But if you already own this music, you’ll find little new or enlightening here.
