The Berlin Philharmonic are in London tonight and tomorrow at the Proms, days after closing the Edinburgh international festival in thrilling style. It was their first visit to Scotland in over 20 years, but the orchestra and their chief conductor, Kirill Petrenko, are regular Proms visitors; their Royal Albert Hall concerts are always season highlights. Tonight there’s Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony paired with Elgar’s Enigma Variations, a piece that’s still an astoundingly rare visitor to this orchestra’s concerts; and tomorrow, the safety-first repertoire warhorse is Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, but it’s paired with Scriabin’s brilliantly unhinged Third Symphony.
But what does being the “best” mean? And how and why have the Berliners acquired, and held on to, their globe-topping orchestral reputation for so many decades, through changes of conductor and personnel, political upheaval and technological transformation? Their history is controversial.
In 1933 the Berlin Philharmonic (founded in 1882) became the Nazi-sponsored Reichsorchester. Its four Jewish members, including the orchestra’s leader, Szymon Goldberg, were forced into exile. As Das Reichsorchester, its performances were used for flagrantly political ends on radio broadcasts and on film, at the opening of the 1936 Olympics and during the Nuremberg rallies.
An aryanised Austro-German canon was favoured: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner and Wagner, while Jewish composers such as Mendelssohn, Mahler and Schoenberg were banned. Their conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler was a public critic of the Nazi regime (you can see him shake Joseph Goebbels’ hand at the end of an apocalyptic performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in 1942 with what looks like satanic disdain), but none of the orchestra of the time can escape the facts of how it was used to underpin the myths of German cultural supremacy as the public face of the Nazis’ fascism and genocide. What happened in the post-war years was nothing short of miraculous, in how conductor Herbert von Karajan was able to present the Berlin Philharmonic as a vision of de-Nazified modernity.
He shored up the idea of the orchestra as the sound of the freedom of West Berlin – something that was architecturally as well as musically unmissable when Hans Scharoun’s futuristic Philharmonie concert hall was built for the orchestra in the early 1960s, just west of the Berlin Wall. Karajan used all the powers of technology to turn the Berlin Philharmonic into pioneers of recording and film, and put them at the vanguard of the digital age on CDs and on Laserdiscs. (Remember them? The 12-inch gold plates of the audio-visual future in the 1980s.) And the orchestra continues to outstrip its opponents technologically: its Digital Concert Hall is today a model of how orchestras can stream concerts, widen access, and generate income.
But if you’re looking for an index of exactly why this might be the best orchestra on the planet, that’s much harder to define. The Berlin Phil does not lead the orchestral world in terms of repertoire development – far from it. The coming season features its former viola player Brett Dean as composer-in-residence, but a few other world premieres aside, there’s Mahler galore and programmes that don’t stray beyond their usual 19th and early 20th-century stomping grounds.
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