My Musical Career – Part Fifty-One

The Year 1996

Well, I have come to the year 1996, and I am happy to say that I will have much less trouble in giving a more detailed account of this year as I have it fairly well documented. 1996 was a very busy year for the orchestra and myself musically, even it was kind of barren when it came to recording. The reasons for this will become apparent later on in this blog. This will most likely be a “two-parter”, as there was quite a lot going on during the year, what with concerts, tours, Mariss Jansons’ heart attack onstage near the end of a concert performance of La Boheme as well as attempt to find an alternative recording venue for our recording.

In recounting the events of 1996, I have to say as eventful and musically rewarding as it turned out to be, it was somewhat chaotic, mainly due to the illness of our chief conductor. When he took ill at the end of April, 1996, orchestra management had to scramble to get a replacement for him for both tours and concerts. This, plus the uncertainty of how long he would be sidelined, meant putting off recording plans and making other adjustments, not an easy task under the best of circumstances.

Mariss Jansons was the orchestra’s chief conductor during all of my fifteen seasons with the ensemble, and he was indispensable to its artistic growth from day one in 1979 when he conducted his first concert as chief conductor on the sixtieth anniversary of the orchestra’s foundation, until the day he conducted his last concert in 2002. He always gave one hundred percent of himself in rehearsals and concerts — indeed, it may be said that he lived for his work. His intensity was amazing, and it made all who worked with him give that much extra. His rehearsals were businesslike and demanding, and the results proved the wisdom of his methods. His concerts were exciting and of the highest quality. While we in the orchestra enjoyed “riding the wave” of his fame, we also worried not a little about him. We felt that he drove himself a little too hard at times, and in the back of our minds we felt that it was not a matter of “if” he was going to have a physical breakdown, but “when”.

We were fortunate to have secured the services of Manfred Honeck as principal guest conductor. He made a very good impression on the orchestra the previous season in a fine performance of Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5 in B flat, Op. 100. His subsequent career has proven him to be a major talent, and he is now music director in Pittsburgh, an orchestra than Mariss Jansons was also associated with as music director from 1997 until 2004. He filled in for several of Mariss Jansons’ previously scheduled concerts and tours, including the summer Festival tour to the BBC Proms and Edinburgh. We were also fortunate to have the Finnish conductor Sakari Oramo to fill in for Mariss with a pair of concerts in May and a short tour to Brussels and Amsterdam in May.

Spring 1996

Let’s start with the what I call the Spring season of 1996. Musically, the spring season started off quite well.
Herbert Blomstedt, the Swedish conductor who was world-renowned and had been a conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic back in the 1960s–and had conducted most of the world’s great orchestras– had just stepped down from the helm of the San Fransisco Symphony. He had been away from the Oslo Philharmonic for thirty years before returning to the orchestra as a guest conductor back in 1992 with Mahler’s Symphony No. 9.
In January of 1996 he returned with performances of Franz Berwald’s Symphony No. 4 in E flat and Anton Bruckner’s unfinished Symphony No. 9 in D minor. Blomstedt was then and even now in 2022 a conductor of enormous musical stature. He is now in his 95th year and is still actively guest conducting, and he has been a frequent guest with the OPO over the course of the past twenty-five years. Musically, the Bruckner was the highlight of the series. Blomstedt knows Bruckner and how to make the music soar. The Berwald was less familiar to the orchestra, but it came off well – no surprise with a great maestro in command. Needless to say, his concerts were a good start to the year.

The conductor Sakari Oramo, who later succeeded Sir Simon Rattle as principal conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, made his first appearance with the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra just after the Blomstedt series conducting music of Arne Nordheim, Jean Sibelius and Gustav Mahler. Arne Nordheim’s Monolith opened the program the program and was followed by a movement from Jean Sibelius’ Lemminkainen Suite: “Lemminkainen and the Maidens of Sari”. The concert closed with Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, “Titan”. It was a very good concert – it was always musically rewarding to play music of Sibelius and Mahler, and the Nordheim work was challenging enough to keep us on our toes. Sakari Oramo gave a good account of the music and of himself – so much so that after Mariss’ health crisis he was invited to step in for two concerts and a short tour in May. As a matter of fact, we took this program on a quick one-concert trip to Tromsø, which is several hundred miles north of Oslo. The country is beautiful. The mountains aren’t particularly high, but they are a bit craggy and the contrast between them and the fjords is marked and just magnificent. I had made a trip with the orchestra once before in April 1986. The natural setting makes it extremely attractive. We played in the Kulturhus, which was the same venue that we played in nine years previously. The acoustic was a lot better than that of our hall in Oslo. So the concert came off acoustically better than the Oslo series. It was fun to be up in northern Norway, even if only for a night.

Bernstein and Berlioz

The end of January brought the return of Marc Soustrot to the OPO’s podium. Marc Soustrot was a regular guest conductor with the orchestra and a very fine musician. He conducted us in performances of Messiaen’s Turingalila, Saint-Saens’ Samson Delilah (in concert performances) among many memorable visits. The last concerts he conducted with us prior to this visit was the concert in Harstad (Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique) and the 1995 Summer Concert at the Holmenkollen in Oslo. For this visit, he brought two interesting programs. The first featured future OPO concertmaster Elise Båtnes as soloist in the Serenade for Violin, Strins, Harp and Percussion. The concert series opened with Halvor Haug’s Silence for string orchestra, and closed with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 in C minor. The concert went very well, with Elise doing her usual top-notch job. The Bernstein is not easy, and even though it went well, I wished at the time that we had one more rehearsal – as it happened, it was nearly perfect. I used my Leedy-Anheier conversions for the Beethoven and was very satisfied with the result. Even though they were were equipped with plastic heads (Premier hazys), they produced an excellent sound. On those timpani, the Premier heads were the way to go. Soustrot’s interpretation of the Beethoven was spot on. It had the required substance and yet had the “swing” to it to keep it from getting too heavy-handed.
The following week’s series was a special treat: Berlioz’ The Damnation of Faust, with Keith Lewis as Faust, and the excellent Jean-Philippe Lafont in the role of Mephistopheles. Carsten Stabell sang the role of Brander, and Randi Stene was magnificent in the role of Margarethe. The chorus was superb. They sang their hearts out. I don’t remember hearing them sing as well as they did during those concerts. Since there were two timpanists, I used my cable drums and the big Light chain, while my assistant used the Light Met Bs. The cable drums sounded just great and I was getting more and more satisfied with them with each concert in which I played on them.

Gary Bertini

The noted conductor Gary Bertini conducted the orchestra in March for two weeks. His first program consisted of two works: Alban Berg’s Lulu Suite made up the first half, and was followed by a terrific performance ofJohannes Brahm’s Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98. Bertini had conducted us on several occasions in previous seasons and was a superb musician. He was one of those conductors who in his understated way made each concert special, and these two weeks were no exception. The Berg and Brahms came off splendidly, as did the following week’s offering, nothing less than Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. And all this with Gary Bertini being plagued with an inflamed arm during the Mahler week. Notwithstanding, Bertini, who was a noted interpreter of Mahler’s music, brought off a deeply felt performance of the Mahler. And the previous week’s Brahms was superb – up to that time, I don’t remember having participated in a better performance of the symphony.

Earlier, I said that this post would be a “two-parter’, and I was correct. April 1996 was an eventful month and I will leave that and the rest of the year to the next part. In the meantime, enjoy this performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony under the direction of Gary Bertini with the Vienna Symphony. It will give some idea of what sort of musician he was. Enjoy!