Silver foxes

By and large, I'd rather hear the first two - Finnish conductor Jukka-Pekka Saraste and Swedish trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger (photographed by Marco Borggreve), whom I encountered together in a stupendous BBC Symphony Orchestra concert a couple of weeks ago - than the third, were he still alive. Whatever his good qualities, Herbert von Karajan was vain, tyrannical, egotistical and a control freak. I lost most respect for him when I saw that in all his carefully calculated films he has his eyes shut. The point is pithily made in the excellent 'Great Conductors of the Past' DVD where we move from the ocular knife-twists of Fritz Reiner to the narcissist Karajan and then on to the wonderful, eyes-wide-open George Szell. What an insult, said spirited BBCSO trumpeter Martin Hurrell when we brought this up in one of our BBC Symphony Orchestra class - 'I'd shut my eyes back, and what would he say to that?'

Well, many musicians lost their jobs for much less. John Bridcut's superb documentary screened on BBC Four brings a reality check to the Karajan myth. Yet weirdly I did shed a tear or two in the narrative of his death. It's a Greek tragedy, really, a saga of hubris finally brought low when the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra who had put up with his arrogance and personal disregard for so many decades turned against him. He went out hand in hand with the Vienna Philharmonic, who hadn't experienced the worst excesses, but still, just as nearly all politicians end their career in failure, so this musical operator who strove for godhood turned out only to be a man after all.

There are plenty of testimonies in the documentary to the special magic, and one contributor wondered whether collegial work with a conductor could ever reach the same heights as inflexible autocracy - to which the answer can be given with a one-word example to the contrary - Abbado. By the way, do get hold of the Lucerne memorial concert in his honour just released on Accentus. I wrote the notes, and a couple of days ago ten copies arrived in the post - most of them quickly earmarked as special seasonal gifts. Though the opening movement from Schubert's 'Unfinished' Symphony is played to an empty podium, Andris Nelsons pops up as a natural and again - unlike Karajan - a considerate successor.

I came to feel that most Karajan performances were more about him than the music - the glossy sound was applied indiscriminately, great when it worked, inappropriate when not. Oddly, I liked his Italian opera the best, above all his recordings of Don Carlo, La bohème, Madam Butterfly and Tosca (surprisingly, more the second one with Ricciarelli and Carreras - did ever an operatic love duet sound more swooningly sensuous than this Act One number). There were some luminous sounds in his later CDs; the documentary reminds us of the special way he lit the sunset epilogue of Strauss's Eine Alpensinfonie

I wish I'd seen him live. I stood outside the Festival Hall before his last London concert - Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht and Brahms's First Symphony - and was about to buy a ticket for £40 off a tout, only to hear a loudspeaker message to the effect that fake tickets were being sold, so I backed off.

The best antidote to the extremes of autocracy in the documentary comes from the humour of the players, above all James Galway, whose beard annoyed Karajan when he was a Berlin Phil principal, and so the 'maestro' replaced him on the post-soundtrack film with a colleague.

Bald players were given wigs; the audience was made up of cardboard cutouts. Most of the shots were from the four cameras trained on Karajan; usually the orchestra just appeared as the instruments, not the players (as in the case of the flautist who did appear; only his fingers were seen).

Did Karajan have friends? Not that anyone knew. Did anyone in the orchestra love him? No - there was respect, but not love. I won't go into further details: just watch and be charmed by the contributors, especially Galway, Anne-Sophie Mutter and Jessye Norman.

Now, thank goodness, it has to be about friendly collaboration. If you're a natural master, like Abbado, you just make the players think it's coming entirely from them. Among the best now, I rate Jukka-Pekka alongside Vladimir Jurowski as the conductor with the most supremely elegant and yet economical technique, the dour exterior concealing huge feeling.

I remember being hugely impressed by his comment about Prokofiev's Sixth Symphony, which he conducted some years back at the Barbican, that there was so much pain in it that he found it almost unbearable.

There's certainly unbearable tension in the subcutaneous horrors of the Third, its material taken mostly hook line and sinker with unchanged orchestration from the world of the infernal opera The Fiery Angel. What most amazed me at the concert the other week was the sound Saraste brings with him - silvery-steely, so apt for this work as it was last season for Shostakovich's Fourth. There's a spring-heeled quality, perfect rhythmic definition, avoiding portentousness but never lightweight.

I'll bet Brett Dean was impressed by the orchestral maneouvres in his Dramatis personae, inspired by Hardenberger, the trumpeter who gave the premiere and the performance we heard. With the rhythmic underpinning superbly negotiated by Saraste with characteristic clarity, this came across as the most impressive work of Dean's I've heard yet: some leave me cold, but there was an element of theatre here - as, we agreed in our pre-performance chat, there is to a degree in all music - which stopped it ever being mere mood-music.

Writing for a personality makes such a difference: several of the contemporary concert works I've enjoyed most over the past decades have been concertos: Widmann's ad absurdam for Sergei Nakariakov, Magnus Lindberg's Clarinet Concerto for Kari Kriikku, now this. Of course there's entertainment value in the Ivesian meeting of marching-band music and a thornier idiom towards the end, inspired by a scene from Chaplin's Modern Times, but the instrumental ideas are always fresh and haunting. And I want to hear it again soon - which should be possible when it's finally broadcast (I thought it went out live on 5 December, but that slot was taken by a BBC Philharmonic concert, so it must be scheduled some time soon)..

Meanwhile, unmissable on the Radio 3 iPlayer for the next three weeks, is the recording of the last and, for me, the most astounding orchestral concert of the year,  Sakari Oramo's championship of Rachmaninov's Spring, Nielsen's Second Symphony and Busoni's Piano Concerto with one of the few soloists able to master it, Garrick Ohlsson.

I'd taken the students through 'The Four Temperaments' the previous evening, and we came out on a high, as we did at the concert's interval, but to my amazement the Busoni trumped even that, if only because it's like nothing I've ever heard, and like most folk there I'd never heard it live. I try to articulate my confused thoughts about it in my Arts Desk review.

As a coda to the year, though, and to the first concert, nothing could have been more spellbinding than Saraste's encore to mark Finnish Independence Day and the impending Sibelius celebrations, the magical 'Scene with Cranes' adapted from the incidental music to Kuolema. What could be spookier than the introduction of two clarinets to the string textures for the sound of the accompanying birds? Here it is as a wintry epilogue, albeit not in Saraste's audience-stilling performance. Leif Segerstam was always going to be slower, but he's still a master.

Beethoven in excelsis, Mozart down the toilet

Our Stockholm trip was not quite as planned. Originally centred around an interview with Sakari Oramo, on sensational form in recent Beethoven and Shostakovich as the BBC Symphony Orchestra's Principal Conductor, the schedule changed with his indisposition. J and I were still free to go, but the concert had gained another brilliant Finn, Jukka-Pekka Saraste (pictured below, like Radu Lupu lower down, at the very concert by photographer Jan-Olav Wedin - dead impressed that the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra has one on hand for each event).

Thanks to Saraste, the change from new Swedish work and Berwald symphony to an all-Beethoven programme was not the disappointment it might otherwise have been. And we still had a new production of Don Giovanni at the Stockholm Operan to look forward to. But what a painful experience that mostly was, in contrast to the electrifying concert.

I'd seen Stockholm's Konserthuset, home to aforementioned RSPO, on a dark November visit to a contemporary music festival some years back, but not really clocked its idiosyncrasies. Which begin outside with Ivar Tengbom's blue 1926 neoclassical facade, singular by day albeit hemmed in by the unattractive developments around Sergels Torg

and by night,

and continue in its deco interior, full of variable statuary and peculiar detail (what, I wondered, was with the faun orgy in one bas-relief?). Guess this is Papageno guarding one side of a staircase.

And at the back of the balcony, a gallery of distinguished busts lines the doorways. The first, as was right, turned out to be Franz Berwald, whose Sinfonie sérieuse I was sorry to be missing as I've never heard it or any of the other three symphonies live (but I do like my Gothenburg/Järvi set).

While the grand master at the other end was honorary Swede (and, up until the age of 11, I think I'm right in saying, exclusively Swedish-speaking Finn) Sibelius with Stenhammar behind him.

The hall's rather a beauty, I think, with discreet state-of-the-art modernisation. Certainly it sounded to be of rare acoustic freshness (tends to be Gothenburg's all-wood Konserthuset which gets all the praise). That might have been partly down to the RSP's airy sound, or the light Saraste brought into it, but this was another of those extra-London occasions where you hear the music with the roof off, as it were. Another photographer, Mats Lundqvist, also captured our evening.

I'd never really watched Saraste's technique. It's as lovely and lucid as Vladimir Jurowski's; everything you see you hear (absolutely not the case the other week with the albatross-like Michael Tilson Thomas). Saraste had one peculiarly remarkable physical gesture of seeming to pull the first violins in to him at the ends of phrases when he needed to. And he starts with no false flamboyance, only a Finn's let's-get-on-with-it alertness. That was especially true of the opening chords of both the Leonora No. 2 Overture, complete eventually with trumpet from the top back of the auditorium, and the Seventh Symphony. Its dynamism was totally focused, details from ppp to fff clearly delineated, shorter crescendos especially amazing. I'll write no more about it here other than to say that it was one of the three freshest Beethoven symphony performance I've heard - Oramo's Eroica the other month and Ilan Volkov's fluid but not hurried Pastoral at the Proms being the others (I'd probably choose Ticciati's Fifth, too, if I liked the symphony better).

Radu Lupu had star billing, looking rather different above from the posters showing him some considerable years younger than he is now. I haven't heard his mastery live for even longer than that - not sure he comes to London any more, if he has I've missed him - and his Beethoven Third Piano Concerto showed why other pianists respect him so. It was all perfectly placed, nuanced, projected; and yet with the kind of mastery that says, "this is absolutely how I do it now". No encore, either, despite the automatic standing ovation from the elderly but very enthusiastic audience. Quite a few stood for the Beethoven Seven too, myself included.

What happened between the concert and the opera needs at least one more post to the delights of a long walk out along the royal park island to the Thielska Galleriet (all will be revealed soon, though I promised the same about Edinburgh and Bordeaux, and still those city walk descriptions hang fire). The stupendous interior of the Storkyrkan beside the Royal Palace - Stockholm's cathedral in all but name - deserves more future time, too, not least for its overwhelming Renaissance statue of St George and the Dragon and its gilt royal pews.

Here I had the serendipity of turning up shortly before an organ recital at 1pm. Michael Waldenby was playing mostly Bach, with interludes from son Carl Phillip Emanuel and Jon Ludwig Krebs, to follow the composer's birthday.

To my shame I didn't know the Prelude/Preludes and Fugues in question: no great organ man I. But J S can be refused in no sphere, and what a gift he offers to the organist's pulling out all the stops in the big D major Prelude, turning over the stomach with its sudden turn to the bad and then infinitely postponing the triumphant cadence in an extended surprise coda. Absolutely magnificent.

So around the old town and over the bridge to the Opera House, neither fish nor fowl as a statement of rather drab 19th century pretension. But it has a prime setting, and canoeists were riding the rapids beneath.

Posters were inviting, for who would deny that Ola Eliasson looks like a handsome Don Giovanni? Public reception had been wildly enthusiastic, too; the day after the performance our hosts delighted in our incredulity that Norwegian Ole Anders Tandberg's production was the No.1 'must see' on the Stockholm arts scene according to one Sunday paper.

Well, all I can say is that I'd even welcome back Kasper Holten's hit and miss Royal Opera production after the dizzying ineptitude of this one. It starts with a row of toilets: maybe the Swedes have never heard about Bieito's ENO Ballo in maschera with courtiers on the bog - not a bad start to a show of diminishing shock-returns. This one immediately alienated my support: any production is going to lose me which leaves not a hint of ambiguity about whether Donna Anna was right to cry rape - that indeed, she's having fun, as she was in the Holten production and here, with Leporello filming entwined legs from the gap under the toilet door. And, what a surprise, the only director who's ever got it right for me has been a woman, Deborah Warner at Glyndebourne, who conveyed in no uncertain terms that when a lady says 'no' after a certain point, for whatever reason, she means it.

But this was only the start of the inconsistencies Tandberg posed the audience. The women get a poor deal, as usual: Donna Anna is an hysterical self-harmer, Donna Elvira - who arrives with her suitcase in the public lavatory - a repressed nymphomaniac and Zerlina a psychopath who straddles Don Giovanni at gunpoint in 'Là ci darem' (he ends up shot, of course: no hell, only a corpse for the ladies to keen over). No idea why. Was Eliasson's libertine more sinned against than sinning? Didn't really care, because his character never began to add up.

Much worse was the overall level of the singing and playing. OK, so Malena Ernman was a last-minute replacement for Elin Rombo, whose Elvira may have been high quality for all I know. Ernman's was not, nor were Yana Kleyn's pneumatic-drill Anna nor Sara Widén's colourless Zerlina. Eliasson mistook near-inaudible recit for suave sotto voce, though to do him credit he's the only Giovanni I've ever seen to play the mandolin for the serenade, which meant his breath control went to pot. His Leporello, Luthando Qave, sang coarsely and offered no leavening wit. It all looked unappealing, too, so all credit to Markus Gårder's photography (three specimens reproduced here) for making it seem stylish.

Which leaves two saving graces - Linus Börjesson's Masetto (pictured above with Widén), much the best of the Swedes coping with the Italian in the recitatives, more virile and charismatic than Eliasson if not as obviously cute, and the star, Michele Angelini (pictured below) as Don Ottavio: a true Italian (Italo-American) tenore di grazia, full throttle when needed but superbly elegant in ornamentation. His variations in the da capos of the arias - thank God we got them both - were a model of style which any tenors incapable of making their own should note. Honour bound to return for Act Two, unlike J, I consoled myself with the hope of 'Il mio tesoro' - not guaranteed if the pure Vienna version is being given - and was not disappointed.

 
One other plus: the onstage wind band for the supper, infinitely better than their fluffing counterparts in the pit. Lawrence Renes conducted without style or elegance - disastrous for Zerlina's two numbers - though at least there were no extreme tempi. Only the opposite pole of bad tradition, as opposed to bad supposed 'innovation', from the Novaya Opera's Prince Igor aka Carry on Up the Dnieper visiting the Coli this week was worse; but at least the musical values were higher. And that, I hope, is the last snark you'll find from me on here for a while.