The Berlin Philharmonic gave its first ever concert in 1892, on 1 May. Since 1991, it has been marking that anniversary with a one-off May Day concert, which is given in a different historical-cultural centre in Europe each year, and which is televised live widely across Europe, though not in the UK. This set of DVDs documenting the first 25-year history of the Europa Concerts has been taken from these broadcasts. Though some of the performances are far more memorable than others, it makes for a fascinating collection. The recordings are generally first-rate, and are blissfully free of video gimmicks, voiceover introductions or commentaries, though there are no subtitles or printed texts for the vocal works. It’s the performances pure and simple, though a few of the discs include additional short documentary films about the cities in which the concerts took place. Those venues range from St Petersburg to Palermo, Istanbul to Oxford, with no fewer than three of them, for some reason, having been in Prague.
Concerts under nine conductors are included in the set. As you might expect, the Berlin Philharmonic’s two principal conductors over the quarter century concerned, Claudio Abbado and Simon Rattle, feature most prominently, but Daniel Barenboim conducts five concerts, as well as making two appearances as a soloist. Programmes tend to be determinedly populist and mainstream – there’s lots of Mozart and Beethoven, and quite a bit of Brahms; even the one concert that Pierre Boulez conducts, in the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, Lisbon, in 2003, includes a Mozart piano concerto, the D minor, K466, with Maria João Pires as the wonderfully fluent soloist.
There are, though, very special things here, especially in some of the 1990s Abbado concerts. The first Europa Concert, given in the Smetana Hall in Prague in 1991, is an all-Mozart programme, in which Abbado achieves chamber-music-like lightness and transparency in Symphonies Nos 29 and 35; three years later, he accompanies Barenboim on fine pianistic form in Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, while his last appearance in the series is in the 2002 concert from the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, in which an encore of the overture to Verdi’s Vespri Siciliani (after Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony) brings the audience to its feet. Barenboim conducting Plácido Domingo in the Escorial in Spain (including an aria from Verdi’s Don Carlos) is pretty special, too; so is Rattle’s programme from Athens in 2004, with Barenboim as soloist in Brahms’s First Piano Concerto, followed by one of Rattle’s party pieces, Schoenberg’s orchestration of the Brahms G minor Piano Quartet.
There are plenty more treasures; it’s a set to dip into and savour bit by bit. Some of the discs may not be so compelling, but the best are exceptional.
