Classical: Calm after a storm

THE PHILHARMONIA Orchestra have a new "Honorary Member", the first since Otto Klemperer - which is to say that it means something. And yet, what percentage of the public at large will ever have heard of Kurt Sanderling? That's significant. That tells you something about his career, his priorities, his brand of music making. It's never been about him; his way has always been the quiet way. He's 86 now, and has the look - the big handsome face, the thick wavy hair - of an erstwhile matinee idol. The walk to the podium may look like it's getting longer, but once in place, once in command of the role he knows best - that of empowering his players - the years visibly fall away.

He seemed literally to bestride the tempestuous opening tutti of Brahms' D minor Piano Concerto, a rejuvenated colossus pulling himself up to his full height, swaying with the music's prevailing winds. The force was in the colour - horns stopped-down to their elemental low registers, long bows in the strings, substantial tone as opposed to volume. With the pellucid second subject - the still centre, the eye of the storm, if you like - such was the luminosity, the rarified quality of the pianissimo he achieved, it was as if we were somehow now inside the piece, hearing it from the composer's perspective. Pianist Andras Schiff heard it that way, too. His reading was more about spiritual than physical storm and stress. The great double-trill and double-octave fusillades were never about to subject this Steinway to any significant seismic distress. Classical constraint and a sense of proportion governed all the theatrics. This was a performance that looked back more than it looked forward. The abiding nobility of the adagio (wonderfully at peace with itself) inhabited a world that both Schiff and Sanderling knew well from their Beethoven encounters - a world where the special relationship between keyboard and lower strings, between Schiff's reflective droplets of sound and the near-silence of pedal notes sunk almost too deep to hear, took us to the threshold of romanticism, but not beyond it. Even the finale, bounding back to Bach with more than its customary relish, seemed to meet Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony coming the other way.

Sanderling's reading of Beethoven's Second Symphony required more than a little adjustment to ears now attuned to the leaner and meaner machinations of "historically aware" period performances. It's hard going back now to this well-insulated and, by implication, grander sound and manner. Beethoven that is clear, robust, purposeful, characterful (and in that the Philharmonia woodwinds were very much key players here) is always a pleasure. But when two trumpets collide in an explosive dissonance which blows the lid off the first movement coda, you want to know about it from an 18th, not 19th century perspective.

The Philharmonia Orchestra is currently in residence at the Royal Festival Hall