Sorry to hear that!
Well, there aren't that many really good conductors around anymore, so I guess orchestras have to take what they can get...Elder reminded me a lot of Eschenbach in his clumsy gesturing which didn't really transmit to the orchestra.
Anyway, the concert tonight was very good. Not really special, but very solid and good. The orchestra played very well on the whole, especially the violins and the basses pleased with crisp and finely chiseled playing although the middle string sections were competent, but rather pale and didn't fill out the sound very well. The result was a slender and well articulated, but anemic string sound. The brass was basically very good, but while they actually sounded very good in pianos, the pressed and thinnish sound they produce in f and ff may be relatively "loud", but it fails to fill the room. The sound more pokes at you from behind the orchestra than really coming at you in a broad wave of sound. A couple of weeks ago, I heard the Orchestre National de France, and with about half the brass section (they played Tchaikovsky 5), they managed to fill the room much more with glowing, well projecting brass sound. There was some very exquisite woodwind playing, although the bassoon with its very prominent and extended solo part in the last movement failed to really project with its rather choked sound.
Musically, it was an evening of solid, it slightly understated music making. The Haydn (101, "The Clock") was reasonably refined and there was some very finely articulated playing from the strings in the slow movement, but overall, it was more a powdered wig cliché kind of Haydn, the kind which substitutes real insights into the music with just general niceness and some "sensitive" touches here and there. It was obvious that while Haitink knew what should come next, he hadn't really reflected on the many fine details in the score, so they all just kind of jogged past the listener.
In the Shostakovich, he also let the music pretty much speak for itself, or rather, play the orchestra for itself. Haitink is without doubt an immensely experienced and professional conductor who avoids random and vain effects, and in a world in which there are many posers on the podium, we have to respect that. But then, at 78, he doesn't seem to have gained or be interested in realizing the kind of detail insights other well aged maestros have/had. The music was well executed and he contributed his tried and tested small repertoire of gestures to the orchestra playing although that didn't have much of an effect. He has exactly 1.5 facial expressions - the cheese face (#1) and then the cheese face with a flicking of the neck (#1.5) which apparently indicates that he wants things somehow animated. Then he has about 2.5 conducting gestures - the wrist flick, the note-quite-so-flicked-wrist, and for the left hand, the little fist which he shakes in the air from time to time. Whether he did that or not, did not have any noticeable effect on the orchestra. He didn't seem to know the piece too well either, or maybe he has forgotten much about it, since he had his head in the score for extended periods of time and gave a number of wrong entries and dynamic indications (professionally ignored by the orchestra members who came in at the right time anyway and delivered). The very long, subdued coda almost fell apart but the orchestra members, especially the basses and the timpani, kept the pulse alive he failed to provide.
Still, a rather pleasant evening, if not exactly the kind of flattening experience one would expect from hearing live this incredibly original and daring, very disturbing and multilayered work.
My most positive impression was Carnegie Hall. A wonderful hall with a really stylish, elegantly understated look and slightly glassy and reverberant, but still very good acoustics.
On the whole, I still think Haitink is good for the orchestra. While I wasn't really overwhelmed by anything I have heard from him in a long time, on disc or in recent live concerts (Bruckner 7 in Chicago last year, Schubert 9 with the BSO 2 months ago, and tonight's concert), it still has to be respected that what he does with the orchestra is basically solid, honest musical work. I talked with some members of the bass section who I have known for many years. One of them I hadn't met since the mid-90s and when I mentioned that we had last met when they came to Berlin with Barenboim, he said "I am glad Barenboim is gone!" and everybody nodded...
