I was privileged yesterday to be invited to a celebration concert for the late and great Bernard Haitink who died last October aged 92.
I was not at the concert thanks to any musical connections of my own – I have come very late to music. I was there because of James, who, in the early 2000s, had made a number of hugely successful records with Bernard both with the LSO and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. When James died very unexpectedly in 2018 we held a celebration evening for him, to which Bernard contributed a short video.
Over the years I had met Bernard and his wife Patricia several times – but I was just one among the hordes crowding into the Green Room back stage after a concert. I doubt that either would have had a clue who I was.
But when they were asked by the LSO whether Bernard, who was already in his late 80s and quite frail, would contribute a few words about his work with James, they very kindly said yes. It was arranged that I should go round to their flat in Holland Park with a small video crew where we would record Bernard’s contribution.
They were already waiting when we arrived. Patricia said that she hoped we didn’t mind, but that Bernard, a man always known for preferring music to words, felt more comfortable reading rather than speaking straight to camera. I was so touched by the thought that had obviously gone into the short piece that we recorded – and I have included it below because it is such a lovely snapshot of the gentle, and gently twinkling, man behind the world famous conductor.
Haitink’s career was a slow burn from the late 1950s when he started as first violinist at the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic. Although by the early ’60s he had moved on to conducting, his experience as an orchestral player served him well as he instinctively understood how an orchestra worked and how to get the best out of it.
In 1961 he became the youngest ever principal conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra and in 1967 principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. In the 1970s he moved on to opera first as Music Director at Glyndebourne and then in 1987, on the departure of Sir Colin Davis, as music director of the Royal Opera House.
(For a proper evaluation of Bernard’s professional career see the many obituaries that appeared after his death – the late Robert Ponsonby in The Guardian for example – or a really excellent and fascinating piece by Nicholas Wroe, also in The Guardian, dating from October 2000).)
His reign at the Opera House coincided with the massive redevelopment of the house, dogged by delays and overspends and the exile of the company to the Albert Hall. But it also saw his epic performances of Wagner’s operas that many believed to be his greatest achievement.
Bernard’s career, like James’, spanned both the glory days of record making in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s and then, when the money ran out and downloads supplanted physical records, the new concept of ‘live’ recording by orchestra owned labels – a very different discipline from that of the recording studio. For the London Symphony Orchestra and their pioneering LSO Live label, Bernard conducted and James recorded a Beethoven cycle of symphonies in 2005/6 which remains one of the most acclaimed cycles on disc. They then went on to record, among many other projects, a Grammy winning performance of Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony on the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Resound label.
Only a year after he made his short recording for our celebration, Bernard retired from conducting, his last performances being at the Lucerne Festival in 2019. I think it was in the summer of 2019 that I saw them again, at Longborough Festival Opera, predictably at a Wagner performance although I do not now remember which opera. Bernard did look very frail but they were lovely and we stopped and chatted for a while on our way into the hall.
The celebration concert
The celebration concert took place at a rammed Wigmore Hall – not a free seat to be had – and featured just a tiny handful of the many thousands of musicians and artists that Bernard had worked with over his 70 years of music making:
Emmanuel Ax and Paul Lewis playing Schubert’s Fantasie in F, D 940
Frank Peter Zimmerman and Emmanual Ax playing Beethoven’s ‘Spring’ Sonata, Op 24.
(As Patricia said in her introduction, a day rarely passed when Bernard did not listen to some chamber music or some Beethoven – often to both.)
Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber singing and playing Mahler’s ‘Rückert Leider’.
Sir Thomas Allen reading from The Tempest
And then a chamber group made up of musicians from the Concertgebouw Orchestra, the LSO, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and the Royal Opera House ‘played him out’, as was only fitting, with Wagner – the Siegfried Idyll.
I am sure that the wonderful Wigmore Hall will have recorded it. Maybe permission will be given for it to be added to their very splendid Video Library.
Very interesting! I was also privileged to meet the dear man after he had been rehearsing at the Royal Opera House (before the Lottery Funding). I was having private singing lessons at the small practice rooms over the then Box Office, in Floral Street with Gillian Knight. I had met them all via the stage door and was introduced as a ‘friend’!