Recording of the Week, Kirill Petrenko conducts Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Symphony

When Kirill Petrenko was announced as Chief Conductor designate of the Berliner Philharmoniker back in June 2015, the appointment struck many as a rather left-field choice: with his modest discography and very low media-profile, the self-effacing Omsk-born conductor seemed something of a David to the Goliaths of the front-runners, Christian Thielemann and Andris Nelsons. Nor does he boast a proven track-record as an orchestral conductor – though he’s won huge respect during his tenure as Music Director of the Bavarian State Opera, the Berlin job is in fact his first senior position with a symphony orchestra. But any doubts as to whether the Berliners have picked the right man should be swiftly swept aside by this quietly astonishing account of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony, recorded live in 2017 and released on the orchestra’s own label to coincide with the launch of their first season with Petrenko at the helm.

Petrenko has launched this new recording partnership with the most mainstream of repertoire, and from that first, familiar phrase I knew that this was a reading that was going to challenge my preconceptions about the piece – though it could scarcely be more different than Teodor Currentzis’s fire-and-brimstone account of the work on Sony, released at the end of 2017. The first movement unfolds with an almost Classical restraint: phrases which are usually elongated to ratchet up the pathos early on remain tellingly unstretched, accelerandos happen so organically that you barely notice until you’re full speed ahead, and heart-on-sleeve portamento and vibrato are not so much conspicuous by their absence as straight-up unnecessary when the strings are encouraged to sing with such simple expressiveness. Petrenko may have learned his craft in the opera-house, but no smell of greasepaint lingers in the atmosphere of this recording.

Nor does he over-emphasise the balletic qualities of the score: the melancholy broken-backed waltz of the second movement exudes wistful grace, certainly, and the strings and upper woodwinds execute their first-movement arabesques with absolute clarity, but there are no heavy-handed reminders that the music sprang from the same pen as Swan Lake and The Nutcracker (as is the case on several rival recordings).

It’s in the final few pages, though, that Petrenko’s understated sincerity is most overwhelming in its emotional impact: if Currentzis conjures up a tortured genius experiencing a rather performative dark night of the soul, Petrenko presents us with a suffering Everyman who gradually realises that no-one is listening and abruptly drops off the radar altogether. I was reminded of that Henry David Thoreau quotation about the majority of men living lives of quiet desperation, and in all honesty it took me a little while to collect myself enough to head over to the orchestra’s Digital Concert Hall to watch Petrenko giving a rare interview about his thoughts on Tchaikovsky. You can watch this for free, but I mean this in the most positive sense when I say that you don’t need to bother: Petrenko is such a consummate musical communicator that everything he has to say is perfectly self-evident from the performance itself, from his commitment to stripping away the accumulated interpretative traditions which are hard-wired into himself and the orchestra to his unwillingness to ‘inflate…manufacture, or elaborate’.

At 44 minutes, the playing-time is undeniably ungenerous, and it’s a pity not to have the Mozart Haffner Symphony from the same concert – but it’s difficult to feel short-changed when confronted with music-making of such immediacy and integrity. I came away from this Pathétique with a Petrenko/Berlin wish-list of several pages in terms of repertoire I’d love to hear from them - and though the conductor remained typically reticent about recording plans in last week’s press conference, those who’ve expressed consternation about his decision to choose a Romantic warhorse for their debut album together may be as enthused as I am by his plans to programme music that hasn’t hitherto been associated with the Berliners, including Suk, Glière, Hartmann, Zimmermann and Kurt Weill. One of the world’s greatest orchestras is in safe hands, but also imaginative ones.