Philharmonia Orchestra/Von Dohnanyi, Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Divine confusion

Hugh Macdonald, the authority on Berlioz, who wrote the programme note for the opening concert of the Edinburgh Festival, once described the French composer's music as "divine rather than human". It was not a lavish compliment. He meant that the music somehow doesn't come off as you would expect. The Te Deum, the main feature of this concert in the Usher Hall, requires a choir of 200 and a vast orchestra, with five cymbal-players and an organ. Obviously, it is meant to sound massive. But it doesn't. It sounds perverse and confused.

Berlioz believed that the organ should never play along with the orchestra. So, the piece begins with alternate loud chords by these two sound-sources, neither really helping the other to sound effective; you wait for the obvious joining of forces, but it never comes.

This is typical of the work's senseless austerity. This is music about music, the music of a great journalist (one whose writings did much to establish the reputation of Beethoven) who struggles constantly to tell us something, to make some eloquent and original message emerge from the performance, without anything finally becoming clear. The score repeatedly snatches failure from the jaws of success, and the conductor, Christoph von Dohnanyi, did not fight back. He marched forward purposefully and avoided sensationalism, taking the batter and rattle of percussion in his stride.

The Philharmonia Orchestra played finely, tastefully, with a touch of sangfroid. Only the Festival Chorus, augmented by the Prague Philharmonic Choir, betrayed a touch of strain, apparently aiming for grand effects that are not in the score. The tenor soloist in the "Te ergo quaesumus", Donald Kaasch, sounded equally hectic. Of course, with such a number of singers, there was a pretty broad sound at times, but another hundred, another thousand voices would never have achieved the massiveness that might have induced Napoleon III to commission a performance (he ignored the piece, to Berlioz's annoyance).

Yet, with its traces of café song, irrelevant shreds of woodwind and odd accentuation of the Latin words, the piece has a kind of accidental greatness, the testament of a unique but tangled mind. So it was a stroke of genius to precede it with Lutoslawski's Concerto for Orchestra. That, too, is a perverse piece, with a passacaglia on a static and unstructured bass, gusts of unconnected tail-chasing, unexplained happenings in the wind and episodes of chilly pastoralism.

But the Polish composer conveys some overall sense. It is a kaleidoscope, a flashing cityscape, a confusing scene glimpsed from the window of a Warsaw tram, perhaps. The orchestra played it with peppery ferocity. Perhaps it should have come second; Berlioz's incoherence, it seems, was leading eventually to exactly this sort of modernism.