Proms on Four: Orchestras of the World - Bamberg Symphony Orchestra BBC Proms

The world's greatest orchestras, at the world's greatest classical music festival. The BBC Proms.

For the first time this year on BBC Four, we're devoting

every Thursday evening to the orchestras visiting

the Royal Albert Hall from abroad,

to enjoy their individual interpretations

and their unique musical approaches.

Every year, the BBC Proms showcases the very best orchestras

and soloists from around the world,

and over the eight weeks we'll be hearing eight of Europe's orchestras,

all of which were formed during the 20th century.

Tonight, to start our mini-season within a season, an orchestra

with a rich, fascinating history,

the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra,

whose home is a picture postcard city in Bavaria in southern Germany.

It will be performing one of the most popular,

one of the most romantic symphonies -

Gustav Mahler's Fifth.

The Bamberg Symphony Orchestra

was formed in 1946 in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Musicians from the German Philharmonic Orchestra of Prague,

together with other German musicians who'd been forced to flee their homes,

settled in the medieval city of Bamberg,

which had survived the war unscathed.

It was the first German orchestra to tour after the war,

when it gave three concerts in France

with a programme of Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner.

Since then, for the last seven decades, the orchestra has

continued the German symphonic tradition both at home and abroad,

and it's now considered Bavaria's cultural ambassador to the world.

Appropriate, then, that it is the country's most travelled orchestra.

Since 2000, the orchestra's musical director has been an Englishman, Jonathan Nott.

Now, there is absolutely nothing unusual

in British conductors working all over the world,

but what is more unusual is that while Jonathan's musical education

was at Cambridge and the Royal Northern College of Music,

he built his career in Germany.

He joined the traditional German career ladder known as the Kapellmeister system,

a sort of musical civil service in which you work your way from

job to job through a hierarchy of local opera houses and orchestras.

Well, earlier I talked to Jonathan about the sound

of this orchestra we're going to hear tonight.

I met this orchestra in 1999 for the first time, and was immediately

impressed with the sort of sound that they were making, which I've

described in many different ways -

some of which I regret.

But a German-sounding orchestra, usually all the sound world is

created from the lower frequencies, so the string sound

will come from the basses, so I'm constantly saying

we'll let the basses lead if we have a crescendo in all the strings,

you can't play any louder than the basses have just played.

And then to try and choose a sound quality which is not so...

You can choose whether you can make brilliant music

or whether you can make dark, mahogany-sounding music.

I personally like this mahogany-sounding music

because in the repertoire that I ended up by doing, which is a lot of German romantic music,

it enables you to express sort of nebulous things,

it's sort of an inner cooking of sound,

sort of a strata of rocks that gets pressed and it sort of glows,

rather than diamonds, and, you know, razzamatazz.

And I think that helps, to have a sort of...

If you're trying to express something which is four shades white and one shade black,

which is happening all the time in most of German repertoire, and certainly Mahler,

then it gives you sort of an extra colour.

And so I'm always finding that it's not the first trumpet that plays loudest, it's the third trumpet.

Everything's coming from root - I mean,

the longest string in the orchestra's obviously the bass.

That element of sitting into a sound,

letting something grow from the earth upwards,

is something that I've grown very much to love.

So how is Mahler's Fifth Symphony going to sound

played by you and the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra?

Well, what's lovely about this particular repertoire

is that we as a unit, as a conductor and an orchestra,

have grown together through this repertoire over many years now,

and I think the nice part of that is you get more and more daring in

what you want to say. And these pieces are never...

seem to me each time I look at it, I find something that I wasn't expecting before,

which means there's always something new to say, which means there's always more surprises.

So we always have a big fight about exactly what we're going to say in the Adagietto,

but I hope that that will be the most plastic music-making

that you could possibly imagine - it's neither slow nor fast, it just happens.

And then I hope that the last movement, which is always a slight problem because it's a happy ending

and not many people like happy endings in Mahler symphonies,

you have this fantastic Wunderhorn song, and then all the material from the fourth movement.

So I hope that we won't make it just simply razzmatazz, that there's

going to be some element of...teasing and, a love element in there,

and you're coming from the deepest darkness of a Trauermarsch.

But it needs to be Viennese, it needs to have this schmaltz,

it needs to sort of be suave and sophisticated, and in fact,

I'm sure that the scherzo, for example, has to have, it's like the scherzo of the Ninth,

you have a Landler, a sort of peasant dance at the beginning,

and then the second idea is a waltz, which is a very high society, sophisticated...

So he plays with those two elements of dance.

I try very hard to make them speak, bar by bar by bar,

and yet my job is somehow to find one arch over these five movements.

So I hope you should be able to

find a symphony that we all know really very well,

but it still should be crazy and daring

and incredibly sad and incredibly happy,

and, you know, a whole world in one hour 15 minutes, you know?

And Jonathan will shortly be taking to the stage

to join his orchestra, to conduct Mahler's epic Fifth Symphony.

It was composed over the summers of 1901 and 1902,

and it's in five movements.

It's perhaps best known, though, for its fourth movement, the much-loved

and beautifully lyrical Adagietto,

written as a love letter by Mahler to his young wife Alma,

and later made famous in the film Death In Venice.

APPLAUSE

And here comes Jonathan Nott,

to conduct the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra in Mahler's Fifth.

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

Mahler's Fifth Symphony.

The Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, so joyfully conducted by Jonathan Nott.

What a performance - that achingly beautiful Adagietto,

then that freewheeling final movement.

Jonathan leaving the stage there

to this extraordinary response in the Royal Albert Hall.

He looked a little dishevelled, didn't he?

I'm not surprised, the amount of passion he put into that performance.

He seemed to love and live every note. What an expressive man.

And that emotion obviously translated to the audience

and to every player on the stage, as well.

Well, that is all for tonight

but there's information about all the music, all the performers, on the BBC Proms website,

and don't forget you can hear every Prom live on BBC Radio 3.

I hope you have enjoyed this evening as much as we all have here, it's been pretty emotional.

Do join us again tomorrow at 7:30 on BBC Four, Samira Ahmed will be here

to introduce a performance of Rachmaninov's haunting

Second Piano Concerto, so don't miss that.

I'll be back next Thursday with a Prom by our next

Orchestra of the World, the Santa Cecilia Orchestra from Rome

conducted by Sir Antonio Pappano.

So, with all that to look forward to - from me, Katie Derham

and all of us here at the Royal Albert Hall, goodnight.

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