Pablo Heras Casado and Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin Reviews

30 Oct 2024

Tagesspiegel (online), Frederik Hanssen

“Guest conductor Pablo Heras-Casado lifts the often oppressive weight from this 80-minute colossus [Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony]. By stripping away the text of all that’s darkly Catholic—the Almighty’s dramaturgy of fear, the devout Christian’s emotional prison of repressed impulses, confession, and penance—he brings the piece out of the church, into the light, into nature, where the sun burns, shadows fall sharply, storms may break, and raw forces come into play.”

“And suddenly, everything makes sense; the often disparate-seeming pianissimo-fortissimo contrasts of the composer coalesce into an organic whole. The slow movement breathes freely, the music pulses with vitality, as if one can feel the fresh breeze that blows here, gaining strength in the Scherzo, stirring things up—even unsettling the coziness of the interspersed rustic Ländler passages.

“In the final movement, the gaze turns toward the sky, where no stern Godfather awaits but an infinite expanse—and Bruckner’s intricate fugues become the polyphony of the cosmos. Grand, almost unleashed, the DSO plays under Heras-Casado’s energetic gestures. ‘They blew the roof off,’ as they say in English about such stellar moments: they made the roof lift.”​

Berliner Zeitung, Peter Uehling

“Pablo Heras-Casado, however, manages the most exciting performance of the work for a long time.(…) Heras-Casado’s tempi are faster here and there than those of Petrenko or Thielemann, but above all he phrases with explosive dynamics instead of just rocking them back and forth rhythmically: Suddenly Bruckner sounds young, exuberant, but also captivatingly intelligent.”

“But how sublimely and excitingly Heras-Casado also succeeds in the general pauses! Finally a conductor who wants to learn something new about this composer in the Bruckner year, instead of just carrying him to Valhalla in a representative manner.”

Berliner Morgenpost, Mario-Felix Vogt

“For Bruckner’s 5th Symphony (…) Heras-Casado also opted for a more transparent and streamlined sound with fluid tempos, which made the monumental four-movement work (…) surprisingly accessible. Even the beginning was absolutely fascinating, as the Spanish conductor had the double basses pluck at the very threshold of audibility in pianissimo. This created a maximum contrast with the following forte motif, with its rich brass section.

“The Adagio had a nice forward momentum, and in the Scherzo, the contrast between the electrified, tense beginning and the charming, creamy dance-like passages was convincing.”

“In the final movement, Heras-Casado shaped the beginning beautifully, like a sunrise gradually leading into bright light. Remarkably, the DSO’s brass section sounded so clean and tonally unified here that one could easily overlook a few minor imprecisions in the violins during the unison passages.”