Venice Chailly at La Fenice

“Not many people come to Monday concerts”, said the box office lady as I bought my ticket for this “concerto staordinario”. It wasn’t in the La Fenice programme, hence the “extraordinary” connotation and it seemed to be the first concert to be given by the new Venice Philharmonic Orchestra. In the event, I recognised most of the La Fenice Orchestra but this new orchestra was huge!!! However, the winning feature was the conductor – Chailly!

The orchestra was so large that it occupied half the stage and all of the platform which took up one third of the stalls area. They say that you need at least forty strings to play Brahms. Chailly had forty violins!!! But what I LOVED was the eight contrabassi!!! These plus the large cello section playing on the wood platform gave out a marvellous sound. Eight Contrabassi!!! You normally only get that number for Wagner these days. Stockowski would have loved it.

Placing the orchestra in this position means that there is NO reverberation time at all. But using an orchestra which combines concert performances with regular operatic playing means that they are used to playing in such a dry acoustic. The acoustic is SO critical as you hear every click of a woodwind key, every detail of the onset of every horn note and so on. You hear everything!! I LOVE that!!

Then there’s Chailly. He is a hyperRomantic when it comes to Schoenberg. The chamber concerto he conducted was SO romantic. It was a little strange to hear it played with such a huge string section but the La Fenice orchestra is used to controlling dynamics to balance the woodwind solos so the effect was even more romantic. The performance took my breathe away and the audience was, I think, truly astounded at how approachable he made this wonderful piece by Schoenberg. I did not expect this sort of performance of the Schoenberg.

But the Brahms!!!! This really was breathtaking!! The first piece on the programme had been the Academic Festival Overture before the Schoenberg so the whole of the second half was the Brahms Second Symphony. A wonderful reading of the Brahms – romantic as it can be – that wonderfully bass section – those exposed wind solos in that dry acoustic – the warmth of that huge string section – Chailly carried away by the music and obviously communicating this very successfully to the orchestra made for a memorably performance.

If this is any indication of what Venice is going to get in the future, they are very lucky. Hopefully they will put future performances in the La Fenice programme. I noticed that many of the front desk string players of the La Fenice Orchestra were on the second desks of the new ‘Philharmonic Orchestra’ so perhaps they imported some players from elsewhere in Italy for this show. But the best import was definitely Chailly!!!