One of the world’s most venerable; one of the world’s newest: the Vienna Philharmonic and the Symphony Orchestra of India. Two visiting orchestras, representing in one case a single European city indelibly associated with Haydn, Mozart and Schubert, on the other an entire, populous country of 1.3 billion people, with its own vital musical traditions but as yet little experience of symphonic classics. One orchestra (Vienna), still predominantly male, has many members born within a few miles of the city. The other has players from more than two dozen nationalities, but only 15 (of 89) are Indian. Each ensemble poses important conundrums about the place of western classical music in contemporary life.
India’s first professional orchestra chose Birmingham’s Symphony Hall to launch an inaugural UK tour, blessed by the civic encouragement of the city’s lord mayor and consul general of India, Birmingham. The audience, though not large, was diverse, with an Asian heritage presence that closely reflected Birmingham’s demographic outside the concert hall but rarely inside. In a city predicted to become “majority minority” soon, the arts will need to attract attendance from its many different communities. This is a way.
Founded in 2006 with help from the Tata family, the Symphony Orchestra of India is based in Mumbai’s National Centre for the Performing Arts, prominent among the country’s few concert halls (in this, and in other respects so different from China, which long ago embraced western music wholeheartedly). The story of the SOI, its efforts to build a music education scheme based closely on the Russian system (spearheaded by the orchestra’s Kazakh music director, Marat Bisengaliev), is long and intriguing. Many top soloists, and British conductors Zane Dalal and Martyn Brabbins leading this tour, have worked with the SOI already, boosting standards and confidence.
More important is its quality and the problematic matter of programming. Are they good? Is fusion the way forward? Even within the ensemble’s own ranks this remains an open question. Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture made an exuberant opening, and the choice of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Arabian Nights fantasy, Scheherazade, Op 35, had obvious occidental-oriental logic. Brass and woodwind showed their strengths. Strings still have to develop a fully integrated sound to take this new orchestra to the next echelon.
In Birmingham (and at London’s Cadogan Hall, but not elsewhere on the UK tour, where popular western repertoire was played), the centrepiece was Peshkar (2015), a tabla concerto by the maestro Zakir Hussain. Playing broadly tonal, raga-inspired melody, the orchestra provided context for the soloist’s rhythmic complexities. Peskhar means a composition for tabla. It’s also the name of a figure in the Mughal court. Here two musical traditions worked supportively together, without ever integrating, like a sturdy wooden frame around the intricacies of an Indian miniature. Hussain had a crowd of fans ready to cheer his virtuosity, but many left once they had heard him. As the SOI’s brave venture unfolds, we’ll be watching.
The Vienna Philharmonic, 177 years old, has the opposite challenge: to keep its tradition, handed down through generations, alive and forward looking. Its sound is unlike any other orchestra, literally because so many of the instruments are technically different, notably horn and oboe. You hear it instantly, but that singularity is not merely to do with reed type or bore size or finely controlled use of vibrato.
Witnessing the orchestra in Mahler’s Symphony No 9, a work of harrowing, almost punishing excess, is to hear a body of virtuosos thinking and breathing as one, daring in their variety, horn and piccolo serenading one another like different species of calling birds, second violins grinding out the diabolic scherzo waltz with weight and pliancy, all the strings weaving the sorrowful variations of the last movement as if from flatted gold. The Hungarian conductor Adám Fischer, jabbing, bobbing, writhing, whipping the air, didn’t look the easiest to follow but certainly got results. All that was missing was tenderness.
The purity of unaccompanied voices, occasionally joined by lute, singing early Renaissance music in the intimacy of the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is the best kind of aural solace. Members of the Sixteen sang lute songs by Thomas Campion and motets by Cornysh, Lambe and others. It’s part of a Shakespeare’s Globe season on what it means to be “English”. We’re all wondering, now more than ever.
Star ratings (out of five)
Symphony Orchestra of India ★★★
Vienna Philharmonic ★★★
The Sixteen ★★★★
