Haydn combined with new music: Jurowski is the avant-garde of conductors

How to bring the burning questions of the time into the concert hall or on the opera stage, Vladimir Jurowski forms something like the avant-garde among conductors. His second season as chief conductor of the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin (RSB) was under the motto "Man and his living space". Nature and the environment: He was initially ridiculed for this, but as the demonstrations of "Fridays for Future" gained more and more popularity, the RSB and its programs suddenly became at the center of the action. Yurovsky, who was born in Moscow in 1972 and emigrated to Germany with his family in 1990, repeatedly condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine; until 2021 he had conducted the State Academic Orchestra in Moscow. At the beginning of March, he staged Sergei Prokofiev's "War and Peace" at the Munich State Opera, where he is General Music Director, together with director Dmitri Tcherniakov, under the auspices of the war in Ukraine.

In Berlin, at the beginning of Holy Week, a memorable performance of Joseph Haydn's "The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross" followed. Jurowski and the RSB asked six composers from crisis regions, Ukraine, Russia and Iran for short pieces that correspond to Haydn's meditative movements. Haydn wrote it for a passion ceremony in Cádiz, published it in versions for string quartet, for orchestra and later also with text as an oratorio. In the Chamber Music Hall of the Berlin Philharmonie, the orchestral version now formed the framework for a collage of works, which Jurowski performed with a sure feeling for dramaturgy.

Memories of monk singing

Consistently powerful, speaking music has emerged, audibly grown out of an existential need, far from all academic self-reflection. Like excursions, the new works follow directly on from the "seven sonatas with an introduction and at the end an earthquake" – the subtitle of Haydn's work. Oleksandr Shchetynsky from Ukraine wrote with his "Agnus Dei" (which, like Haydn's pieces, remains wordless), a work that combines confusion and hopeful brightness. As if on desperate aberrations, the orchestral parts wander around seemingly disoriented and yet the sound becomes brighter and brighter the more the woodwinds come to the fore – right up to a church window luminaire, as we know it from the music of Olivier Messiaen. And yet soon the timpani hits, hard and brutal, as if it were gunfire.

Victor Copytsko from Belarus is inspired in "Tropus" by the strict setting of Renaissance music, evokes memories of monk's singing, but at the same time brings in a surprisingly folkloristic color with the Belarusian cymbalom (played by Nadzeya Karakulka). Victoria Poleva's "Music is coming" is one of the most amazing contributions of the evening. In the style of late Romanticism, she takes up the language of Gustav Mahler's "Adagietto" from the Fifth Symphony, without it having to be understood as a stylistic disguise. The Ukrainian's piece seems like a manifesto of longing for peace, harmony and beauty.

The roar of timpani and trumpets

In "Sitio... Lacrimae" directly recalls the motifs from Haydn's preceding Fifth Sonata ("I thirst"), dry pizzicati are enriched with col-legno clatters of the strings (i.e. played with the wooden side of the bow), sound mists in the winds are stored above them. A fragile world into which the ringing of a bell resonates as well as the instrumental outcry.

Boris Filanovsky's "Consummatum est" gradually rises from the faltering grumbling in cor anglais and bassoons to a melody in bright regions. As if frightened angels were singing. With "De Profundis", the Iranian Sara Abazari finally leads to Haydn's final earthquake, with sounds of trembling humidity and soon the roar of timpani and trumpets.

The RSB with Vladimir Jurowski once again proved its stylistic versatility, which does justice to Haydn's luminous passion music, always immersed in hopeful form, as well as the musical language of the respective premiere. Finally, the evening itself becomes a manifesto: about the power of contemporary music and about the concert hall as a place for decisively set messages. At the end, Jurowski spoke of a "rich, emotionally rich evening". That was a friendly understatement.