Bernard Haitink (1929-2021)

[Brian]

I like this tweet memory of him from composer Matthew Aucoin:

"I once asked Bernard Haitink how he navigated a tricky vocal passage in Beethoven's 9th. His answer: "I go as fast as possible, so that no one knows what happened and it's over ASAP." what a giant."

https://twitter.com/aucoincomposer/status/1451352580022489088

[Pohjolas Daughter]

Sorry to hear the sad news. 

This was the first complete set of Vaughan Williams symphonies that I purchased (came recommended by a number of people) which I still enjoy:



I also enjoy this set of his Shostakovich symphonies:



PD

[bhodges]

I like this tweet memory of him from composer Matthew Aucoin:

"I once asked Bernard Haitink how he navigated a tricky vocal passage in Beethoven's 9th. His answer: "I go as fast as possible, so that no one knows what happened and it's over ASAP." what a giant."

https://twitter.com/aucoincomposer/status/1451352580022489088

What a fabulous snapshot.

One of the greats, by almost any measure. Yesterday the Concertgebouw posted a short tribute, using the final minutes of Bruckner's Sixth Symphony, recorded in 2018. The tribute is on YouTube, and here is the complete Bruckner 6, in outstanding audio and video.

https://www.concertgebouworkest.nl/en/bruckner-symphony-no-6

--Bruce

[Jo498]

I have very little Haitink although I have of course been aware of his work since I got into classical music in the late 1980s. Back then he was one of the "standard" conductors, quite present on discs and media but often overshadowed by flashier figures like Bernstein or Karajan and because of their large discography they kept dominating (in my perception at least) even after having passed away. And later, when I got into getting different recordings of repertoire there were again often more flashy or more urgently recommended conductors. So I have a bit of Bruckner and Shostakovich and (very good) accompaniment for Ashkenazy in Rachmaninoff and Brahms.
I almost forgot, I do have a lot of Richard Strauss in an odd box from some dutch newspaper with mostly Mahler and Strauss but I almost never listen to Strauss, unfortunately.

[bhodges]

Would graciously appreciate recommendations for great recordings of his. I don't have all that many.

Adding to all the praise for his Mahler and Shostakovich recordings (with the Concertgebouw), as well as his Bruckner. And if the Christmas Day Mahler DVD set is too difficult to find, most of the performances have been uploaded to YouTube. (And there's always the CD-only box.)

Here's the Mahler Ninth from that series, recorded in 1987:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKov5aN-XbM

--Bruce

[Pohjolas Daughter]

I like this tweet memory of him from composer Matthew Aucoin:

"I once asked Bernard Haitink how he navigated a tricky vocal passage in Beethoven's 9th. His answer: "I go as fast as possible, so that no one knows what happened and it's over ASAP." what a giant."

https://twitter.com/aucoincomposer/status/1451352580022489088

That's very amusing; thank you for sharing that. 

What a fabulous snapshot.

One of the greats, by almost any measure. Yesterday the Concertgebouw posted a short tribute, using the final minutes of Bruckner's Sixth Symphony, recorded in 2018. The tribute is on YouTube, and here is the complete Bruckner 6, in outstanding audio and video.

https://www.concertgebouworkest.nl/en/bruckner-symphony-no-6

--Bruce

Thank you for posting that link.  Looking forward to checking it out soon.

PD

EDIT:  There's a nice obit here:  https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/oct/22/celebrated-conductor-bernard-haitink-dies-aged-92

PD

[André]

One of my great regrets is that although I've been to the Concertgebouw 5 times, Haitink never figured in the concerts I attended  .

My very first recording of the Bruckner 8th is this set on Philips. I've used the grooves until the discs were grey.



Similarly, his Mahler 5th was my first exposure to that music and IMO has remained a benchmark for beauty, excitement, and lucidity. Both cycles (Bruckner and Mahler) are my benchmark recommendations. To me they are « the truth about Bruckner/Mahler » even though I prefer some rival versions of individual symphonies. His orchestral Strauss in Amsterdam was also magnificent. In truth, the COA has never sounded better than under his tenure. When he relinquished the directorship their sound changed (winds and brass especially) and became less characterful.

Later on some of his readings became softer-focused (Schubert 9 in Amsterdam, Beethoven with the LPO) and when he recorded under Decca the results lacked the luminous bite of the earlier Philips productions. From the 1980s his COA Tchaikovsky cycle is the standout IMO. Some performances may be more exciting but none, ever, made Tchaikovsky's orchestrations sound so translucently beautiful. His Vaughan-Williams Sea Symphony on EMI is a thing of transcendent beauty. Some think it's reserved, inward. I think it's attuned to the poetry of the score (words and music) more than most. His Elgar symphonies are not universally liked, but I love them. His Britten too, is superb: he captures the composer's blunt iciness better than many.

Late in his career he came to perform and record Haydn's oratorios and Beethoven's Missa Solemnis as well as any who ever did, plus some more Mahler and Bruckner (an extraordinary 5th) with the BRSO. I count these as among the finest ever made. They ring true like few do.

[Herman]

Strangely, the most memeorable Haitink concerts I heard were both Mahler symphonies, and I don't even really like Mahler. But I did at the time I heard these.

The first was Mahler 7 with the London Philharmonic, in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, something like 1991. It was a uniquely dark and gloomy Seventh, in the first mvt. Blacker than black.

The other one was Mahler 6 with the Berlin Philharmonic at a BBC Prom in '97 or '98. I heard it over the radio sitting in the car in Southern France at night. The finale was in cre di ble.

If I could recommend one set of discs it's the Boston SO Brahms cycle, including the piano cto with Emmanuel Ax.

[vers la flamme]

I have a couple of his later recordings with the Bavarian RSO: Bruckner's 5th and Mahler's 3rd. They're both excellent. Need to check out more of these late recordings.

[Artem]

He was my introduction to Mahler's music.     RIP Maestro.

[Symphonic Addict]

His Shostakovich legacy is one that I treasure the most. Also, his recording of Walton's 1st is very close to my heart. It made a titanic impression on me when I listened to it for the first time. I said: wow, those are the timpani! Good job, folks! And the whole orchestra as well, without doubts. He stamped passion, good taste, energy, grandeur, rigurosity and good handling of the different sections of the orchestra.

His Brahms, Beethoven, Bruckner, Mahler is undoudtedly masterful. He knew his stuff.

[LKB]

The most memorable symphonic performance I've ever attended was with Haitink and the Concertgebouw, in 1982. The piece was Mahler's Seventh.

Since I've recounted this occasion elsewhere in GMG, I'll merely sum up:

This concert was an impossible dream. The Mahler was the only work on the program, and it was delivered with such high standards of interpretation and execution that nothing I've witnessed live from Berlin, Vienna or any other orchestra has matched it.

RIP, and thank you, Maestro.

[Mirror Image]

His Shostakovich legacy is one that I treasure the most. Also, his recording of Walton's 1st is very close to my heart. It made a titanic impression on me when I listened to it for the first time. I said: wow, those are the timpani! Good job, folks! And the whole orchestra as well, without doubts. He stamped passion, good taste, energy, grandeur, rigurosity and good handling of the different sections of the orchestra.

His Brahms, Beethoven, Bruckner, Mahler is undoudtedly masterful. He knew his stuff.

His Debussy is also top-notch. I still return to his performance of Pelléas et Mélisande when I'm in the mood for this work. Also, his recordings of the orchestral works on Philips still remain as vibrant as any of the others I've heard since hearing his performances.

[The new erato]

I have the same Bruck er 8th LP set as Andre.....

[André]

I have the same Bruck er 8th LP set as Andre.....

Back in the early seventies it was daring !

[Scion7]

I have so many records by him.  One of the greats.
He had a long, productive life.   R.I.P. 

[Spotted Horses]

I have so many records by him.  One of the greats.
He had a long, productive life.   R.I.P. 

I looked through my listening notes for mentions of Haitink and that recording of the double concerto is one that I commented changed my view of the work, making it come alive for me. Even as an accompanist, Haitink could find the heart of music.

[vandermolen]

From WAYLTN thread.
The Walton (Symphony No.1 with the Philharmonia Orchestra) is most interesting - a granitic/epic performance but I'm not sure that I'd want to play it very often. I thought that the opening movement was terrific and enjoyed the alternative take (slower than usual) on the second movement (rather like Previn's EMI recording of Shostakovich's 10th Symphony) but the slow movement was very very slow and, at times, I felt that it was dragging. The conclusion of the symphony was very fine indeed. No complaints about the live VW recording so far - very idiomatic performance of Symphony No.5 (1994 recording) - haven't got round to 'Antartica' (1984 recording) yet:

[André]

Bump.

I've purchased the Decca/Philips big box of Haitink's Concertgebouw recordings last year. 113 CDs plus 4 DVDs (the Mahler Kerstmatinees concerts). I just unsealed the box a couple of days ago. I've been listening to and admiring his COA recordings since the early Seventies.

Haitink is one of my very favourite conductors (along with Karl Böhm, Pierre Monteux or Eugene Ormandy). Not that Haitink exceeded any specific conductorial qualities I crave, like Stokowski, Munch or - to a lesser extent Giulini, Karajan - but like Stoki or Munch, Haitink brought an unparalleled amount of dedication, humility, honesty and objectivity to whatever scores they chose to interpret.

Dedication is something we take for granted, but let's think about the other qualities I've mentioned:
- humility: not exactly what we'd expect from the likes of Karajan, Solti, Bernstein, Gergiev, Furtwängler, Toscanini, Szell, Reiner and most of the Greats. They thought they were invested with a divine/quasi-divine mission of Enlightenment, Education.
- honesty: definitely applies to all of the above, but sometimes 'honesty' is thought as a quality, while 'humility' is regarded almost like a flaw. And yet there is no honesty in music without a large dose of humility. Why then is there such a huge dose of ego in musical performance ? That is an entirely different debate of course, but one thing that I admire above all else is the combination of humility, honesty and objectivity in musical interpretation.

Do humility, honesty and objectivity are synonymous with strict adherence to written score and/or performance history ? The matter of tempi and dynamics comes to mind immediately, as these were not always notated in 18th-19th century scores. Many niceties of interpretation were taken for granted, and the expression of a work's mood was often something left for the conductor/instrumentalist to figure out. That's where honesty becomes a prime requirement, one which sometimes caused many an artist to achieve stardom, only to become criticized later on: Mengelberg, Stokowski, even Bernstein or Karajan come to mind. Even the über purists of the Authentic movement have been (are) criticized (they were first greeted as if coming down a Heavenly cloud): Harnoncourt, Antonini, Brüggen, Leonhardt. Nothing is sacred anymore, and it's a damned good thing.

So, these qualities remain: humility, objectivity and honesty. No other conductor has encapsulated them all in two hands and a stick as Haitink has. Not that his interpretations transcend all others - far from that. Haitink was risk-averse, non-confrontational, non-iconoclastic (a musical prude actually) but always looking for the score's meaning and keen to understand it in view of the latest tendencies.

Haitink knew musical understanding was in constant (and rapidly evolving) flux and he was always open to new thoughts on the matter. OTOH his personal views on many works seem to have crystallized (fossilized ?) in the last two decades of his life. While his Beethovens kept getting fleeter and more trenchant, his Bruckners and Mahlers became more and more granitic, severe and (my own feeling) joyless. Joyful Bruckner ? Life-affirming Mahlers ? Other conductors proved that it was both possible, but equally 'honest' and 'objective'.

Haitink is a conductor we have been following throughout our life as a young, energetic, musically correct neo-objectivist (post van Beinum and in the same vein as Colin Davis in the the 1960s-70s) to a more centrist, beautiful-sound hedonist in the 1980s, to a decidedly statelier (tempi), slightly more forceful (phrasing, accenting) and favouring burnished sound (Dresden, Berlin) conductor.

The Haitink Big Box contains everything that was included in the Philips Symphony Edition (LvB, Schumann, Bruckner, Mahler and Tchaikovsky complete symphonies), but also the complete Shostakovich symphonies (half of them with the LPO) but also dozens of discs the conductor recorded as 'singles' for the Philips label. The notes tell us that things were not always rosy between the COA management and their sometimes feisty star conductor. The LvB symphonies were recorded at the end of the Eighties, a full 5 years before Haitink was to return before the orchestra's podium. Amsterdam was basically Haitink-less between the mid eighties to the mid-nineties.

I've been at the Concertgebouw 5 times, and not attending a Haitink concert has been one of the great regrets of my life. Harnoncourt (Mozart), Russell-Davies (Prokofiev), Myung Whun-Chung (Bruckner), Tilson-Thomas (Sibelius), Daniele Gatti (Mahler): all were very good but I would have traded them happily for a Haitink presence on the podium. I know he could sometimes be dull and pedantic (that was rare), but honesty, objectivity, experience and tradition were in such a high proportion in his performances that I'd have come out of the hall knowing I'd have experienced the music in the best possible way (although I have to say I don't think even Haitink could have bettered Russell-Davies' Prokofiev's 6th).

Not to be missed among the conductor-focused  notes are the comments on the qualities of the Amsterdam orchestra: unparalleled IMO in terms of ensemble playing, plasticity of sound and unequalled ability to balance strongly individual sections (winds, brass, strings) into an incredibly euphonious, creamy yet leonine collective sound. Much of those qualities attributable to Haitink's 27-year conductorship. Before him (under van Beinum) the orchestra had more pungent wind and brass, more differentiated, less blended string sections, capable of a strong sound projection but less pleasant to the ear - a matter of changing listening standards ?

[Der lächelnde Schatten]

Bump.

I've purchased the Decca/Philips big box of Haitink's Concertgebouw recordings last year. 113 CDs plus 4 DVDs (the Mahler Kerstmatinees concerts). I just unsealed the box a couple of days ago. I've been listening to and admiring his COA recordings since the early Seventies.

Haitink is one of my very favourite conductors (along with Karl Böhm, Pierre Monteux or Eugene Ormandy). Not that Haitink exceeded any specific conductorial qualities I crave, like Stokowski, Munch or - to a lesser extent Giulini, Karajan - but like Stoki or Munch, Haitink brought an unparalleled amount of dedication, humility, honesty and objectivity to whatever scores they chose to interpret.

Dedication is something we take for granted, but let's think about the other qualities I've mentioned:
- humility: not exactly what we'd expect from the likes of Karajan, Solti, Bernstein, Gergiev, Furtwängler, Toscanini, Szell, Reiner and most of the Greats. They thought they were invested with a divine/quasi-divine mission of Enlightenment, Education.
- honesty: definitely applies to all of the above, but sometimes 'honesty' is thought as a quality, while 'humility' is regarded almost like a flaw. And yet there is no honesty in music without a large dose of humility. Why then is there such a huge dose of ego in musical performance ? That is an entirely different debate of course, but one thing that I admire above all else is the combination of humility, honesty and objectivity in musical interpretation.

Do humility, honesty and objectivity are synonymous with strict adherence to written score and/or performance history ? The matter of tempi and dynamics comes to mind immediately, as these were not always notated in 18th-19th century scores. Many niceties of interpretation were taken for granted, and the expression of a work's mood was often something left for the conductor/instrumentalist to figure out. That's where honesty becomes a prime requirement, one which sometimes caused many an artist to achieve stardom, only to become criticized later on: Mengelberg, Stokowski, even Bernstein or Karajan come to mind. Even the über purists of the Authentic movement have been (are) criticized (they were first greeted as if coming down a Heavenly cloud): Harnoncourt, Antonini, Brüggen, Leonhardt. Nothing is sacred anymore, and it's a damned good thing.

So, these qualities remain: humility, objectivity and honesty. No other conductor has encapsulated them all in two hands and a stick as Haitink has. Not that his interpretations transcend all others - far from that. Haitink was risk-adverse, non-confrontational, non-iconoclastic (a musical prude actually) but always looking for the score's meaning and keen to understand it in view of the latest tendencies.

Haitink knew musical understanding was in constant (and rapidly evolving) flux and he was always open to new thoughts on the matter. OTOH his personal views on many works seem to have crystallized (fossilized ?) in the last two decades of his life. While his Beethovens kept getting fleeter and more trenchant, his Bruckners and Mahlers became more and more granitic, severe and (my own feeling) joyless. Joyful Bruckner ? Life-affirming Mahlers ? Other conductors proved that it was both possible, but equally 'honest' and 'objective'.

Haitink is a conductor we have been following throughout our life as a young, energetic, musically correct neo-objectivist (post van Beinum and in the same vein as Colin Davis in the the 1960s-70s) to a more centrist, beautiful-sound hedonist in the 1980s, to a decidedly statelier (tempi), slightly more forceful (phrasing, accenting) and favouring burnished sound (Dresden, Berlin) conductor.

The Haitink Big Box contains everything that was included in the Philips Symphony Edition (LvB, Schumann, Bruckner, Mahler and Tchaikovsky complete symphonies), but also the complete Shostakovich symphonies (half of them with the LPO) but also dozens of discs the conductor recorded as 'singles' for the Philips label. The notes tell us that things were not always rosy between the COA management and their sometimes feisty star conductor. The LvB symphonies were recorded at the end of the Eighties, a full 5 years before Haitink was to return before the orchestra's podium. Amsterdam was basically Haitink-less between the mid eighties to the mid-nineties.

I've been at the Concertgebouw 5 times, and not attending a Haitink concert has been one of the great regrets of my life. Harnoncourt (Mozart), Russell-Davies (Prokofiev), Myung Whun-Chung (Bruckner), Tilson-Thomas (Sibelius), Daniele Gatti (Mahler): all were very good but I would have traded them happily for a Haitink presence on the podium. I know he could sometimes be dull and pedantic (that was rare), but honesty, objectivity, experience and tradition were in such a high proportion in his performances that I'd have come out of the hall knowing I'd have experienced the music in the best possible way (although I have to say I don't think even Haitink could have bettered Russell-Davies' Prokofiev's 6th).

Not to be missed among the conductor-focused  notes, comments are the qualities of the Amsterdam orchestra: unparalleled IMO in terms of ensemble playing, plasticity of sound and unequalled ability to balance strongly individual sections (winds, brass, strings) into an incredibly euphonious, creamy yet leonine collective sound. Much of those qualities attributable to Haitink's 27-year conductorship. Before him (under van Beinum) the orchestra had more pungent wind and brass, more differentiated, less blended string sections, capable of a strong sound projection but less pleasant to the ear - a matter of changing listening standards ?

One of the Haitink recordings that changed my musical outlook for the better was this one:



Not only is this recording my absolute favorite performance of Das Lied von der Erde, but it opened up my ears to the work which the famed Klemperer recording simply did not. I'm forever grateful for Haitink and his championship of Mahler throughout his career.