Obviously, 92 is a good and very advanced age to get to, and so, in a sense, it wasn’t very surprising to hear that Bernard Haitink had died, on Friday. But it is still sad to see another part of my teenage years of coming to classical music – and always thereafter –passing away, after Solti, Abbado, Kleiber and others. He was perhaps the last of that stellar group of conductors brought into prominence particularly by the recording industry from the 1960’s to the 1990’s .
I saw him conduct mainly in the 1970’s and then more recently from about 2008 onwards (in between I was working overseas or with family responsibilities, so my concert-going was much more selective). I remember his Mahler 2 at the RFH and many Proms – Mahler 1, 2 ,3 , 5 , 6, and 9; Bruckner 2, 5, 8 and 9, as well as Tchaikovsky, Britten, Dvorak and many others from the 70’s. More recently I heard a Mahler 9 with the LSO in about 2009, a Bruckner 9 with the VPO in about 2012, an astonishing Mahler 3 with the LSO in 2016, and then several concerts in the 2017-19 period: a wonderfully relaxed Brahms 2 with the LSO in 2017, a Schumann 2 with Gustav Mahler Chamber Orchestra in 2018 and a Mahler 4 with the LSO finally in 2019. The one time I heard him conduct Wagner was ‘Siegfried’ in 1990 at ROHCG, with Rene Kollo as Siegfried – a fine performance, I remember.
I think my biggest disappointment is never to have heard him in the opera house apart from that one Wagner performance. I missed his entire tenure at Glyndebourne and the rest of his time at Covent Garden.
I think I probably took him a bit for granted when I was younger. Only in the last 15 years did I fully appreciate the way he could create a special aura over a piece, so that its structure was clearly expounded, and the performance seemed absolutely ‘right’; and at the same time he encouraged the players to a pitch of intensity in a performance I have rarely heard in the concert hall, and with only a modicum of expressive gestures. What I noticed, sitting in a RAH Choir seat for that memorable Mahler 3 in 2016 , was the power of the cue-in glances he gave to members of the orchestra as they played – both encouraging and vigilant. That performance, though slow by the clock (105 mins, someone said) was utterly transfixing – the music of the first movement flowed unselfconsciously; the great chasm of the third movement, when the scurrying of the animals seems to suddenly die away and you’re left with a sense of the immensity of the universe, was shocking; Sarah Connolly in the 4th movement was unbearably moving in the Nietzsche song, and the final movement just grew and grew in waves of sound that were overwhelming at the end. That performance was a great tribute to Haitink’s art. On the other hand, I’m ashamed to say that, while my South Bank Centre account assures me that I went to – or at least bought – tickets for – a concert in September 2009 consisting of Haydn’s Clock Symphony and Bruckner 7, with the Chicago Symphony, I have absolutely no memory of this event. I wonder why this is?…..maybe Haitink was sometimes too easily taken for granted and it is only now he’s gone that we shall realise what we are missing.
I hope the BBC will repeat the splendid documentary they made of his life soon
R.I.P.
John's musical journey 