United States Various: Yefim Bronfman (piano), Vienna Philharmonic / Yannick Nézet-Séguin (conductor). Cal Performances, Zellerbach Hall, University of California Berkeley, 5, 6 & 7.3.2025. (HS)
5.3.2025
Mozart – Symphony No.41 in C major, ‘Jupiter’
Mahler – Symphony No.1 in D major
6.3.2025
Schubert – Symphony No.4 in C minor
Dvořák – Symphony No.9 in E minor, ‘From the New World’
7.3.2025
Beethoven – Piano Concerto No.3 in C minor
R. Strauss – Ein Heldenleben
Yannick Nézet-Séguin has a long association with the Vienna Philharmonic, having guest-conducted the orchestra on several occasions since 2010. It showed in the synergy between his vigor and the responsiveness of the musicians during their three-day residence at Cal Performances at the University of California Berkeley.
The music director of the Metropolitan Opera (since 2017) and the Philadelphia Orchestra (since 2010), Nézet-Séguin demonstrated a strong bond with this venerable ensemble in a program centering on big orchestral works. A similar three-day residency for the Vienna Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall the previous week (with an entirely different program and Riccardo Muti conducting) had received rave reviews, so that made two conductors celebrated for their work in opera. Coincidentally, this involves the Philadelphia Orchestra as well, where Muti was the music director from 1980 to 1992, which overlapped with his nineteen years as principal conductor at La Scala in Milan.
Muti is known for strict attention to the details of an opera composer’s score, while Nézet-Séguin’s conducting style, at least as he demonstrated here in works by Mahler, Dvořák and Richard Strauss, leaned into freely shaped phrasing with tempo fluctuations – technically not rubato but mid-phrase ritards and accelerandos. He whipped up several long buildups to big climaxes and was able to produce soft music that caressed one’s ears. It sounded, well, operatic.
Although these propensities annoyed me in each program’s opening works by Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven, they cast fresh light on Mahler’s First Symphony and Dvořák’s ‘From the New World’.
The first program delivered glorious Mahler. Aside from scintillating playing from the orchestra, the performance underlined just how much opera meant to both Mahler and Nézet-Séguin. Although Mahler never actually wrote an opera, the art form deeply fascinated him. Late in his life he conducted the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and much of the material he developed in his symphonies stemmed from his abundant vocal music. Song cycles on the folk texts collected in Das Knaben Wunderhorn provided fodder for his first five symphonies. (No.1 used music Mahler wrote to his own lyrics for Songs of a Wayfarer, music inspired by Wunderhorn.)
Nézet-Séguin’s approach to this symphony was vigorous. Even the opening measures, with their quiet pedal tones and bird calls, suggested anxious anticipation. Balances wove the elements together but clarity was not always achieved. When the first movement’s jaunty tune emerged, enhanced by the conductor’s penchant for unexpected hesitations, it never quite shook off the sense that it was tiptoeing its way through something mildly scary. Even when the music built to a loud climax, it never quite felt triumphant, at least not until the finale.
The distant trumpet fanfares in the background early in the first movement were so distant that they never quite punched through. Even in the louder recapitulations later in the movement, retaining that sense of distance made Mahler’s world feel just a bit more chaotic, and when the fanfares returned full force in the finale, it made them feel like they had broken free.
The second movement Ländler tromped and bounced along without a care in the world. The third movement’s wry funeral march, a minor-key ‘Brüder Martin’ tune (better known as ‘Frère Jacques’), unfolded with an uncanny naturalness as it made its way through the orchestra. The klezmer music that interrupts this dirge hit all the right nuances without overdoing it.
There is a quotation from Wayfarer that ends the funeral march movement, familiar to anyone who has heard the song cycle. It creates a special moment, and Nézet-Séguin drew out the hesitations. That created another telling contrast when the loud, almost chaotic opening of the finale jumped in without pause. Once past a lovely iteration of the sweet melody in the strings, Nézet-Séguin revved up the intensity. The brass section found a rotund texture for the fanfares that reappear several times, finally declaring victory in a particularly rousing finish.
By comparison, the Mozart Symphony No.41 that opened the concert never seemed to settle into a Mozartean groove. Perhaps Nézet-Séguin wanted to foreshadow the frenzy of the Mahler, but a constant tugging at tempos and dynamics overdid it at several points. Best was the third movement Menuetto, in which the Trio unfurled with grace.
The second program gave us the same sort of contrast between a less-than-elegant Schubert Symphony No.4 and an electrifying Dvořák Symphony No.9. Nézet-Séguin seemed to imbue the ‘New World’ aspects of the Dvořák with an anything-goes attitude that came off as distinctly American, especially with the tunes reminiscent of African-American folk music and Native-American melodies and rhythms, even though they were original to the composer. The conducting emphasized every tempo change and dynamic shift.
The deep string tone that this orchestra is famous for emerged in the opening movement, which built in surges to an impressive climax. The famous second-movement Largo found a welcome specificity to each phrase that somehow fit together into something luxurious rather than mannered (even if the famous English horn solo had a raw edge to its tone rather than a satiny quality). The strings’ reiteration of the melody, in contrast, was soft, subtle and sublime.
The throbbing rhythms in the Scherzo bounced along with unexpected grace, and the spirited finale, with its surges and ebbs, felt like a race car weaving through traffic until it reached a victorious finish.
The encore, Dvořák’s Slavonic Dance No.1, provided an appropriate victory lap, not only for the performance but for Nézet-Séguin’s birthday (his fiftieth). The orchestra serenaded him with an impressively well-played ‘Happy Birthday’ song, and the audience chimed in, singing with remarkably accurate intonation. In response, the conductor told the audience that as a young musician he dreamed of conducting the Vienna Philharmonic – and pronounced the orchestra’s iteration of the song as the best he had ever heard. (And he didn’t even have to conduct it.)
The first half of the concert offered Schubert’s Symphony No.4 in C minor, the product of a nineteen-year-old composer and more rarely heard than his Nos.5 through 9. There is a reason. Though its pleasant tunes fit neatly into standard classical forms, little of it is memorable. Nézet-Séguin did his best to emphasize anything he could find to make more of it. In the end the performance felt like a nice warmup to the main event to follow.
The final night had no such cavils, as both pieces delivered the goods. To begin, the venerable Yefim Bronfman took on Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.3 with his usual attention to detail and just enough flair to make it personal. The connections in tempo, rhythm and orchestral nuances paid dividends in an admirable performance. Best was a meditative, suspended-in-air approach to the slow middle movement, in which both soloist and orchestra caressed the harmonies and languid melodies.
As an encore, Bronfman offered a shimmering account of Robert Schumann’s ‘Arabeske’, a lovely reflection of how Romantic-era concert piano music began to evolve after Beethoven.
In keeping with the week’s theme of ‘bigger music is better’, the second half was a richly aromatic performance of Richard Strauss’s outsized tone poem, Ein Heldenleben. Yes, another maximalist performance of a big orchestral work, but more to the point it displayed the richness and depth of the Vienna Philharmonic’s sound.
The strings were at their most sumptuous. Violins pierced the dense orchestration at the top of their range without screeching. Violas, cellos and basses contributed dark reverberations of their own, never losing the agility of the melodies. The brass intoned their final choruses with burnished tone and shapely articulation, and woodwinds teamed up for chords with a distinctively lush cast. The effect was miraculous, a testament to how the orchestra’s sound alone can create a powerful aura.
Albena Danailova, one of four violinists listed as concertmaster on the roster, took the concertmaster’s chair for this evening. (Rainer Honeck did the honors laudably for the first two programs.) She made a dazzling mini-concerto of the extended, expressive violin solo in the ‘The Hero’s Companion’ chapter of the hero’s life that the piece depicts. Whether she got this assignment because the music is meant to portray a woman, or simply because she could play it with precision and warmth, it was for me the highlight of the evening.
If Nézet-Séguin applied his own interpretations of details in the Mahler and Dvořák symphonies, he seemed content to let the elements of Strauss’s score speak for themselves. Nézet-Séguin caught just the right balances in the dense opening demonstrations of musical heroics to bring out the key lines. The solemn ‘Hero’s Works of Peace’ came through as quietly heartfelt, with all the references to the composer’s previous works outlined clearly. The piece concluded with an appropriately noble finish.
Before introducing the encore, Nézet-Séguin thanked the Berkeley audience and got as far as saying, ‘Our wish is that our greatest act of resistance, with what’s going on in the world…’ before he was drowned out by the audience’s cheering. Turning to the encore, he began, ‘After one Strauss, maybe we go to the original one’ and led Johann Strauss, Jr.’s Rosen aus dem Süden (Roses from the South). The piece is as expansive, intricately fashioned and lustrous as ‘the original’s’ more famous The Blue Danube. It was a pointed reminder that this remarkable orchestra also represents the home of the waltz and that Nézet-Séguin will conduct the Vienna Philharmonic’s 2026 New Year’s Concert.
Harvey Steiman
Featured Image: Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the Vienna Philharmonic © Drew Altizer Photography