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October 6, 2006
Music
A Jet-Setting Maestro Sets a Brisker Pace for Beethoven

By JAMES R. OESTREICH
LENOX, Mass.

IN his brisk new recordings of the Beethoven symphonies with the London Symphony Orchestra, the veteran Dutch maestro Bernard Haitink often sounds like a man in a hurry. And in some ways he has to be, if only to honor the many commitments he has let himself be talked into.

By the standards of conductors of his generation, Mr. Haitink, 77, was never much of a jet-setter. In the early and middle stages of his career, he devoted most of his efforts to long-term positions in Amsterdam (the Concertgebouw, now Royal Concertgebouw, Orchestra) and England (the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Glyndebourne Festival Opera and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden). He established himself in Vienna and Berlin, but he didn’t travel much to the United States or to Asia, partly because he suffered from jet lag.

That was then. Now Mr. Haitink is gaining ever greater prominence in the United States. He was here at Tanglewood this summer, conducting concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which he had served as principal guest conductor from 1995 to 2004, and coaching students at the Tanglewood Music Center.

Tomorrow evening he begins a weeklong survey of the Beethoven symphonies with the London Symphony at Avery Fisher Hall. Though complete cycles of the nine symphonies are hardly rare, the London Symphony had not done one in 21 years before it played them with Mr. Haitink at the Barbican in London last season, and the resulting recordings have left expectations running high.

Then he is off to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, where he has just assumed the position of principal conductor and will take on four to six weeks of concerts a season, starting next fall.

It could have been more. While searching for a music director to replace Daniel Barenboim, who left the Chicago Symphony in the spring, Deborah R. Card, the orchestra’s president, approached Mr. Haitink. The most unassuming of maestros, he demurred.

“I said, ‘Listen: music director, no, no, no, no,’ ” Mr. Haitink said in July at a home provided for him near Tanglewood, in a setting worthy of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony. “ ‘Far too old. It will be a scandal.’

“I told her, ‘If you need time to find a music director, I would really be interested to be your principal guest conductor.’ ‘No, that’s not what we want,’ she said. ‘We want you to have the title,’ et cetera. So we compromised at principal conductor.”

In Chicago, beginning on Oct. 19, Mr. Haitink will conduct Mahler’s Third Symphony. It is one of his calling cards, and a magnificent 1990 performance of it with the Berlin Philharmonic has just been released on DVD by Philips.

But first he has to get Beethoven out of his system.

Why Beethoven, and why now? Why would a conductor who has heard it all and done it all, too often to count, choose to immerse himself yet again in Beethoven at this late stage in his career? One can imagine all sorts of grand pronouncements on a wisdom acquired over the years that allows for a new perspective on these gnarly and stupendous creations, suggesting a meeting of minds between masters, if not an equivalence.

But Mr. Haitink, who aptly said that he is “quite known for not talking that much,” is not given to pronouncements, grand or otherwise.

“Well, you know, these things nearly always start on a commercial basis,” he said. Clive Gillinson, then the managing director of the London Symphony and now the executive and artistic director of Carnegie Hall, Mr. Haitink explained, wanted a Beethoven cycle for the orchestra’s series of recordings on its LSO Live label. The Beethoven recordings were made in 2005 and 2006 at the Barbican.

“The L.S.O. is famous for its big 20th-century pieces,” Mr. Haitink said, “and they are not known for their Beethoven. Not at all. Clive wanted to repair that, and thought that I would be the right man for it. And so it started.

“And the L.S.O. has a line to Avery Fisher Hall” ? more accurately, to the Great Performers series at Lincoln Center ? “and so it went on and on and on, and they wanted a Beethoven cycle.”

And so too, Mr. Gillinson, from his perch at Carnegie Hall, ends up as a mere onlooker at the final stage of the project he set in motion. But he remains gracious and proud of what he started.

Referring to the two schools of Beethoven interpretation, the conventional modern view and the antiquarian early-music approach, Mr. Gillinson, who used to be a cellist in the London Symphony, said that “Bernard draws all the threads together.”

“He has utter integrity,” Mr. Gillinson added, “and his career is at its absolute peak.” Whatever the role of commerce at the outset of the project, Beethoven quickly became a consuming passion for Mr. Haitink. He steeped himself in a recent edition of the symphonies by Norman Del Mar, published by the German firm B?renreiter. In particular, he paid more attention to Beethoven’s metronome markings than before, as a guide not only to tempos but also ? just as important, he says ? to the relationships among them.

In this respect and others, his concerns touched on those of the early-music movement in recent decades. “And yes,” he said, “I am not ashamed to say, I listened to some of the newer approaches, you know, because they are there. And sometimes I was deeply impressed, and sometimes I said, ‘Well, for that symphony that man should be in prison for a year.’ But that’s the thing. I learned a lot from this.”

Mr. Haitink ? who is not easily amused, or at least does not show it ? seemed tickled when told that this interviewer had been listening to some of the new recordings on the drive from New York, had got caught up in the animated tempos and had received a speeding ticket. He wanted to know which symphony was the culprit. It was the Second.

And the discussion led to the Sixth, the “Pastoral,” on the same disc as the Second. The timpani playing Mr. Haitink elicits in the storm movement is positively fierce and terrifying.

“Yes, maybe we overdid the timpani,” Mr. Haitink said, “but I think the storm is not just a picture. It has reality, this frightened anxiety. I have always loved the ‘Pastoral’ and always found it one of the most difficult of the symphonies, but what a wonderful piece.”

The difficulty, he said, lies in keeping the energy going, especially in the babbling brook of the second movement. “I really try to move it on,” he added. “It’s not only a matter of tempo that’s important, it’s a matter of ... is momentum the right word? It’s pretty close.”

Mr. Haitink sidesteps his inherent modesty only far enough to indicate that he is happy with the Beethoven recordings. “There are moments that I don’t recognize myself,” he said, “and I’m very pleased with that.”

Now he takes up his new duties in Chicago in what he calls the autumnal period of his life, and it is clear that he does not see this as a long-term proposition. “Every conductor,” he said, “including myself, has a sell-by date.”

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