The art of noise

The orchestra of orchestras in terms of sheer musical originality and revolutionary interest is currently Jonathan Nott’s Bamberger Symphoniker, which is soon to arrive at the Edinburgh International Festival from its home base near Nuremberg, arousing for the third time in recent years the highest expectations.

On the first occasion it mixed Bruckner with Helmut Lachenmann, the modern German master of strange whispering and grating timbres and other unconventional sonorities. Out of this, in 2005, grew a five-day residency that yielded a riveting Tristan And Isolde at the Usher Hall and a haunting tribute to Gyorgy Ligeti, just before his death, in the form of the Poeme Symphonique For 100 Metronomes, lined up across the softly illuminated platform and gradually, like a faltering heart, winding down through diminishing speeds and rhythms until their ticking drifted into silence.

This year – as with the rest of the festival – the focus, in various oblique ways, will be upon the mysterious east, with the tintinnabulations of another modern masterpiece, Messiaen’s Chronochromie, along with the japonaiserie of the same composer’s Seven Haikai and the violence of Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin in one programme, and a Ravel triptych, with the Concerto For Left Hand as centrepiece, in the other.

The orchestra, founded soon after the Second World War in a lovely old German town that had escaped allied bombing (and where ETA Hoffmann had once been director of music), began in a spirit of earnest optimism under the conductorship of the distinguished but dull Joseph Keilberth. Though his old recording of Wagner’s Ring Cycle recently won fresh acclaim, he was, in my immature experience, a merciless routinier. His death, at reputedly the very point in Act Three of Tristan where Felix Mottl, an earlier Wagnerian, had famously dropped from the podium in 1911, was perhaps the one memorable moment of his career.

Among his successors were the expert Glasgow-born Beethovenian James Loughran and the valiant Parsifal exponent Horst Stein. Then, in 1993, the orchestra got a fine new hall followed seven years later by the arrival of the Solihull-born and Cambridge-educated Jonathan Nott, who had worked with the Boulez ensemble in Paris but had conducted very little classical music.

Although, like Donald Runnicles, he had trained productively in various German opera houses, almost every performance he conducted of a Schubert, Schumann or Brahms symphony was a first for him – “it was how I discovered the symphonic repertoire” – and he and the orchestra moved in the most creative of ways up to a thrilling Mahler cycle, now in the process of completion.

On arrival in Bamberg, his first act was to reseat the orchestra, splitting the violins to left and right in order to achieve a fresh clarity of sound, and placing the cellos and basses in front of him and left of centre – just as Deneve has done in Scotland. It made a huge difference, and it made the players listen to themselves anew.

Then in 2004 he founded Bamberg’s triennial Gustav Mahler conducting competition, whose first winner was the then still unknown Gustavo Dudamel. Last year it was won by a young Latvian called Ainars Rubikis, who will be directing a late-night chamber version of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony in Edinburgh when the orchestra is here in September.

But it was to hear Nott himself rehearsing Mahler’s vast and notoriously difficult Seventh Symphony along with the graphic complexity of Charles Ives’s Three Places In New England – a very typical Nott combination – in preparation for a forthcoming concert in Vienna that I recently visited Bamberg and spoke to him after the sessions. These, it seemed to me, had gone strikingly well, with not a moment wasted on unnecessary discussion (though he speaks fluent German) or repetition.

The 1400-seat hall, on the banks of the river Regnitz, may be a dual-purpose culture and congress centre but it is a model of its kind, renovated two years ago, with warm, luminous acoustics and a great ambience. Both inside and outside, it is not unlike Perth’s new auditorium, but the platform has the visual asset of a gleaming modern organ as backcloth. The place is a pleasure to sit in and, with an extraordinary 10% (8000 people) of the local population as subscribers, Nott’s artful juxtapositions of old and new music are clearly to the public’s taste. He has now conducted, he says, Ligeti’s Piano Concerto more often than Beethoven’s Emperor.

In the international hotel conveniently housed in a modified palace on the other side of the river, and connected to the hall by a pedestrian bridge, I spoke to a member of staff who reflected admiringly on how things had developed during the Nott regime. Then the 49-year-old Nott himself bustled in and we sat for a while on the terrace before the heat of the sun prompted us to move into the lobby for the rest of our talk.

Though he lives with his wife and three children in Lucerne, which boasts an even better modern hall, and where he has been conductor of the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra and “artiste etoile” at the Lucerne Festival, he maintains a small apartment in Bamberg but finds the hotel a handy meeting place.

His contract, he says, is likely to be extended to 2013, though he would like it to continue until 2016, so long as he and the players do not become “bored or complacent” with each other. Observing their interplay, not least in the Ives, had made this – to my eyes – seem an unlikely possibility.

As for the Mahler, it brimmed with a positive, articulate confidence that boded well for the performance ahead. It seems a pity that this work, still a rarity in Scotland, is not coming to Edinburgh. But perhaps it will come next time – for surely, by 2013, this outstanding orchestra and conductor will be back here once again.

Meanwhile young Robin Ticciati of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra has been appointed principal guest conductor, with three characteristic programmes in his first season, giving him exactly the sort of experience he needs if Glyndebourne’s newly appointed music director is to keep developing his concert work.

It will be, says Nott, “our British season in Bamberg”, with Ticciati conducting Stravinsky’s Apollo and Ravel’s La Valse, Sir Andrew Davis dropping in with some Elgar and Britten, and Nott himself in a programme of Elgar, Sullivan “and others” entitled Pomp And Circumstance.

Bamberg Symphony Orchestra play the Usher Hall, Edinburgh, on September 2 (Messiaen and Bartok) and September 3 (Ravel) at 7.30pm; they also play a late- night concert at the same venue on September 1 (Mahler) at 10.30pm. Visit www.eif.co.uk.