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Wow, Joe, after giving off the air of a musical elitist from time to time, I'm surprised you would characterize the Berlin Philharmonic's collective gestures as "swaggering" as if they were all completely intoxicated. Perhaps it is this collective movement that allows this orchestra to maintain the highest level of ensemble I have heard from any orchestra. It is not by accident that on many occasions I have heard this orchestra refered to as the largest chamber group ever.

BTW, lownloud, I too think that this is the finest orchestra in the world. I have had the pleasure of hearing them live twice, one of those times being the greatest concert-going experience of my life (Abbado conducting Beethoven 5 & 6). Truely amazing.

I was in Berlin last year and heard the BP play Strauss' Heldenleben under Simon Rattle, along with Beethoven's 4th Piano Concerto with Alfred Brendel at the instrument.
It is a concert I shall never forget, this huge orchestra (for Strauss) playing together as closely as a string quartet. I loved the sound of their brass too, with the german rotary trumpets.
The Berliner Philharmoniker are surely the best orchestra I have heard. I still haven't heard the Wiener Philharmoniker live, but it is on my ToDo list.

Much better, Joe.

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I'd like to take issue with the general direction of this thread. The "best" orchestra? It's all well and good to make value judgements comparing general playing levels of various orchestras, but 'counting clams' aside, orchestras are much like people: they have different characters, some to our liking, and some not. That has little to do with whether they're the "best" or not.

That said, while I can appreciate Berlin's level of artistry, they're not to my taste.

lownloud wrote: Maybe it was the fact they were playing Mahler 6

I used to work under a Russian conductor who, when the crowd would give a standing ovation at the end of a performance, he'd hold the score up high, so folks could rightly acknowledge a huge part of the artistry they'd just witnessed. I wish more conductors would do this, rather than accepting the glory for their interpretation.

Swaggering...

A clarinet duo came to our college once to perform a concert (or was it a "recital"?), and they moved around so much, and with such pomposity, that I had to stop watching because I was about to laugh. That was no good either, because the music sounded as if it were chosen for its technical demonstration, and not for being listened to. Either I watched and was amused, or I kept my eyes shut and was bored.

They were moving from their brains, not from their hips. It looked like they had practiced the movements, going, "Ok, for this passage, I need to wave like I'm a blowing cattail weed, in a clockwise direction... and for this link, I need to bounce forward, culminating on the A in the third beat..." They had these perpetually "serious" facial expressions, and one even spread his feet, stamping with his left foot, trying to look like Hamlet with a clarinet stuck in his mouth, at the peak of a phrase.

I've seen plenty of players (mostly from our woodwind studio) that would move just for the sake of movement, but shoot, this was retarded. I wish I had video of it all.