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Special sound dressed in proud history

May 28 2003

Essential movements only ... Herbert Blomstedt conducting.

As Australian audiences await their first taste of one of the world's most famous and venerable orchestras, Roger Covell traces its origins in Leipzig.

Expect to hear notably full and rounded orchestral tone, metaphorically inclining to the gleam of polished red cedar and mahogany rather than the bright paleness of modern wood finishes, when the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra gives its first Sydney concerts at the Opera House next week.

The Gewandhaus players, based in a city that has a long history as a powerhouse of musical, literary and dramatic activity, are proud of being one of the few surviving representatives of an older type of continental European orchestral sound and are determined to preserve it.

Like the Vienna Philharmonic and the Dresden Staatskapelle, but unlike the Berlin Philharmonic and most other central European orchestras, the Leipzig players insist, for example, on the use of German trombones. Though these may be less piercing and brilliant in attack, their champions swear they are richer in tone and blend better as a group than their almost-universally used American counterparts.

Similarly, the orchestra's clarinettists play a German (Muller) style of clarinet instead of the Boehm instruments in almost-universal use elsewhere, while the trumpet section likes to produce a darker tone than usual.

Trombones, as it happens, will be absent from the first two pieces on the orchestra's first Sydney program in the World Orchestras series next Thursday and will appear only in the last two movements of its third and final item, Beethoven's sixth symphony; but trumpets and clarinets will be present most of the time.

The trombones will come into their own in Richard Strauss's A Hero's Life at the orchestra's second concert on June 7.

Gewandhaus strings also have a distinctive sound: "... always full and round", according to the orchestra's distinguished musical director, Herbert Blomstedt, though he is quick to add that they can play extremely softly.

He compares their sound with that of the strings of the San Francisco Symphony, where he was music director for 10 years in succession to Edo de Waart and where he made an outstanding series of Decca recordings.

"The San Francisco strings are wonderful players, true virtuosos, and their sound has a brilliant shine, but on occasion there's some thinness to it. That thinness is never heard from the Gewandhaus strings."

Why are the Gewandhaus players so intransigent about keeping their tonal identity? There could be any number of reasons. This identity was one of the few things their elders and predecessors could hang on to during the Nazi regime of the 1930s and 1940s and the paranoid banality of Soviet-style rule in East Germany. How must it have felt for many of the players active before World War II when the Nazis banned the music of Mendelssohn, the young composer of genius and inspirational musical director who had taken Leipzig and the Gewandhaus to the front rank of European music-making a century earlier?

Mendelssohn's transformation of the orchestra and of the patterns of European concert-giving helped give Leipzig's musical life a lustre that drew musicians from all over the world.

The magic of Leipzig's reputation and of the conservatory Mendelssohn founded was still potent when the young Australian musician-writer who called herself Henry Handel Richardson went there to study in the late 1880s and drew on her experiences in her novel of musical life, Maurice Guest.

The Melbourne-born Alfred Hill, a prolific composer of concert music and opera known mainly today for his Maori-based song Waiata Poi, was another Leipzig pilgrim and played in the Gewandhaus Orchestra at least once when Brahms conducted it.

It's not likely to be an accident that the first music heard from the orchestra in Australia will be one of the astonishing masterpieces of Mendelssohn's well-spent youth, his overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The orchestra will assemble one of the larger bodies of instrumentalists to tour Australia (and Malaysia and Singapore) when it leaves Germany on Sunday with 124 players, one American-born Swedish conductor, three stage staff, four administrators, five tonnes of instruments (including two harps and six timpani) and a journalist from the Leipziger Volkszeitung.

On the concert platform, as he conducts his orchestra in Leipzig's Gewandhaus concert hall, Blomstedt is a spare, quietly commanding figure, marking the beat with his baton in large units of time wherever possible and using his left hand precisely for detailed cueing. Specific comments on interpretation are out of place here; but further observation is not likely to disturb the impression that Blomstedt makes no movements on the platform beyond those essential to his signalling and that he has a prodigious memory.

The Gewandhaus Orchestra's touring contingent of 124 instrumentalists is two-thirds of its total strength of 185.

This huge body of players is, like that of the Vienna Philharmonic, needed for various duties, among them the supply of an orchestra for Leipzig Opera. Another duty is to provide the instrumentalists for weekly performances of cantatas at Leipzig's awe-inspiring church of St Thomas, where Bach was cantor for 27 years.

Historians of the Gewandhaus Orchestra like to take its origins to 1743, within Bach's lifetime, when a group of public-spirited merchants sponsored orchestral gatherings in the inner city.

The name Gewandhaus (literally, garment house) did not attach itself to the concerts until they found a regular home in the city's cloth hall in 1781.

After that, the roll call of composers, instrumentalists and conductors who appeared with the orchestra is overwhelming, as is the number of eminent musicians associated with Leipzig by birth or residence.

The interior of the third Gewandhaus, built in 1981 to replace the Gewandhaus destroyed by bombs in 1943, has turned out reasonably well.

The exterior is another matter. Its tawny top layer makes it look like a glass box sunk under the weight of an excess of fruit jelly. But I don't want to sound hard to please about a city that offers such pleasant surprises to a visitor.

Leipzig's bomb sites have been rebuilt, improvised into car parks or allowed to turn green with a pleasing lack of regimentation. Its historic buildings have been restored lovingly.

Pedestrian precincts and cycle paths, always a sign of a city in good hands, are prominent and look like becoming more so.

The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra performs at Sydney Opera House next Thursday at 8pm and on the following Saturday at 4.30pm. Details on 9250 7777 or




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