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The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, always welcome visitors to the Proms, are big hitters reserved for the final week of the season. Last night, the first of their two concerts, paired Berg and Bruckner, displaying their incomparable assets of sonic beauty and technical polish.
It didn’t start well, however. The three movements chosen from Berg’s Lulu Suite (made by the composer in 1934 to popularise his opera) encompassed love scenes, the transition to the finale in the fateful attic where Lulu is murdered by Jack the Ripper and the grisly death itself. So languorous was Franz Welser-Möst’s handling that any of the sexual shenanigans that’s never far away in the opera seemed more like post-coital torpor. Berg’s ardent, richly lyrical harmonies were heard as through a veil, while the angularities that give the music such an anguished quality were smoothed out to the point of blandness.
