Conductor Günther Herbig is an East German emigre who lives in Michigan. Primarily associated with American orchestras, he has made only sporadic UK appearances, though recently he's become a guest with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. At last year's Edinburgh festival, when he conducted a reconstruction of a marathon 1808 concert that included the premiere of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. Here he returned for a curate's egg of an evening that showed neither him nor the orchestra quite at their best.
His programme placed Beethoven's Eroica alongside Berg's Violin Concerto. Both are studies of grief. The Eroica mourns its imaginary hero in the pomp and ceremony of public ritual. Berg's Concerto, dedicated to "the memory of an angel", is a private reflection on the death, from polio, of Manon Gropius, the teenage daughter of Alma Mahler and her second husband Walter Gropius.
Even though Herbig has impeccable credentials for Beethoven, it was his Berg that proved more impressive. He persuasively charted the work's stance, which peers back through Mahler and Beethoven to the more consolatory spirituality of Bach. He reminded us that the Concerto was written contemporaneously with Lulu and that Manon forms a chaste counterpart to the opera's erotically monstrous heroine. Herbig's soloist, the astonishing Chantal Juillet, matched his approach, allowing the lines to sing with operatic rapture before wafting heavenwards with a serene yet lacerating beauty.
But Herbig underplayed one key moment, shading down the violent third section in which Berg portrays Manon's final illness in music similar to his depiction of Lulu being torn to bits by Jack the Ripper. The horror and outrage were blunted and the work's impact was reduced.
A similar unwillingness to take emotional risks characterised his Eroica. He rightly made the Funeral March the core, taking it with a relentless tread that built with density. Elsewhere, however, he aspired to the purely monumental, pulling the lurching outer movements towards a safe sameness of mood. The RSNO's playing here was scrupulous rather than committed. The Berg Concerto - in which velvety strings and sculpted woodwind accompany Manon's passage through life to death - suits them infinitely better.
