A dyed-in-the-wool orchestra wonk rummaging through, and listening to, 65 compact discs covering the last fifty years of the Vienna Philharmonic as recorded by those spiffy engineers at Decca: we’re talking hog heaven, pure and simple.
The Vienna Philharmonic isn’t just an orchestra. It’s the music world’s ultimate insiders club. You can’t get in merely by playing an ultra-hot audition. You play for the Philharmoniker when the Philharmoniker deems that you are good and ready, and that only comes if you’ve studied at the appropriate (local) conservatories, with the appropriate teachers (mostly members of the Philharmoniker), and you’ve put in your time in the pit of the Wiener Staatsoper. You will stay in the opera whether or not you’re swept up into the warm embrace of the Philharmoniker, but nobody qualifies for the big band without plenty of experience, Philharmoniker-style.
If you are of the wind or brass persuasion, odds are that you’re going to play one of the Philharmoniker’s instruments, and not your own—even though the odds are equally good that you’re already utterly comfortable playing such axes. The Philharmoniker’s unique tonal quality arises partly from those instrumental designs dating back to the orchestra’s founding in the mid-19th century. The rest of the world may have moved on to a newer style of trumpet or horn, but not the Philharmoniker. It worked for Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler, and a host of other great composers. It will work for you.
Among my favorite stories about the Philharmoniker concerns their first collective encounter with Stravinsky’s Petrushka. To say they were horrified would be putting it mildly. They were scandalized, disgusted, revolted, and just plain sick to their Viennese tummies. Dirty music!! they wailed, their noses wrinkling like a bunch of spinster schoolmarms faced with a burlesque act at the faculty luncheon. The Philharmoniker isn’t going to be anybody’s first choice for The Rite of Spring or Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite. Nowadays they can play all that stuff if they have to, but their hearts just aren’t in it. The Wiener Philharmoniker is the Beethoven orchestra par excellence, glorious in Mozart, Schubert, Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler, Richard Strauss, and stands forever unsurpassable in those sweet faded jewels by the Strauss family or Franz Léhar. You may think that last isn’t all that big of a deal, but just listen to (i.e., cringe through) one of those dear old things slapped out by some corporate American orchestra, then thank your lucky stars that Viennese gemütlichkeit is just a CD-spin or mouse-click away.
The Philharmoniker isn’t always an easy orchestra to get along with. In the hands of a surly conductor—or worse, some jackass who has decided to take on the institution’s long-standing traditions—they can dig in their heels and play lifelessly. But most conductors are smart enough to avoid offending the fine musicians of the Philharmoniker. You work with them, not against them, and they will conjure witchcraft.
Even if they don’t always like a conductor all that much, they can still play gorgeously. They had a somewhat restrained relationship with Pierre Monteux, but nevertheless his Haydn and Beethoven symphony recordings from the late 1950s with them are irreplacable in their spirit, clarity, warmth, and sheer élan. On the other hand, the musicians of the Philharmoniker took a very dim view of Hector Berlioz’s overheated egoism, and even Monteux couldn’t get much of a Symphonie fantastique out of them. Dirty music and all that.
My pigout on the Philharmoniker—which began, as I recall, sometime around the onset of puberty—is now in ultra-high gear thanks to Decca’s ear-filling and eye-popping box set of 65 CDs of the Vienna Phil in orchestral and instrumental repertoire. There isn’t a CD in the set that doesn’t reward numerous and attentive hearings, thanks to the incomparable artistry of the Philharmoniker and its conductors, all captured by the finest audio of its respective day. You can hear subtle changes in the group over the years. In 1950 the orchestra wasn’t quite yet at full strength after the depredations of the War, for example. But the Vienna Phil has changed less over the years than any other orchestra I can name, thanks to that deeply ingrained culture and meticulous guardianship of its own traditions.
Conductors vary, of course, in the sounds they draw from the orchestra. One gets the impression that they had a bit of a co-dependent relationship with Georg Solti, for example—maybe even edging into sado-masochistic. Leonard Bernstein, on the other hand, was clearly and delightfully their boy down to the tip of his baton. They were Karajan’s refuge when he was having marital difficulties up in Berlin. They softened up whiplashy old Fritz Reiner. And with concertmaster Willi Boskovsky on the podium, they could melt the walls with Strauss and Strauss and Strauss and Léhar.
It’s always worth remembering that the Philharmoniker has no permanent music director. There is no Große Enchilada up there handing down musical dictats. The Philharmoniker’s boss is the Philharmoniker.
I wonder what they’ll be like a century from now. They finally stopped being an exclusive boys’ club some time back, but they remain as Viennese as schlagopers. After all, women can go to those same conservatories, study with those same teachers, and play those same instruments. With any luck, they won’t be any different than they are now: still turning the Golden Hall of the Musikverein into sonic heaven, still the darling of Vienna society, still the purveyors of enhantment. Let us hope so, anyway. I’m not sure if I want to live in a world without the Wiener Philharmoniker. Of course we’ll have them forever thanks to all the recordings and broadcasts and videos. But I want them still there in the concert hall, keeping the torch lit and steadily adding to their rich legacy.
And I want some more recording engineers like Kenneth Wilkinson and producers like John Culshaw, men of taste and imagination who left posterity such a priceless heritage. Maybe we don’t have a Sofiensaal any more (fire) but we have a Musikverein, and we have the Philharmoniker, as Austrian as edelweiss and just as precious. May it bloom and grow forever.