A week in Mahler

Barely a month goes by at the BBC Music Magazine* without a new Mahler recording or two to review, and the releases have been accumulating in the second of the two anniversary years. Do I ever get sick of the limited diet? Hand on heart, no, since these symphonies remain the supreme challenge of the orchestral repertoire - unless the performance happens to be lifeless from the start, which means there's an awful lot of unsatisfying listening ahead.

In terms of live performances, it's as well to ration, which means choosing wisely. I knew, for instance, that Belohlavek's Sixth would be the one to hear this year, since his long-term BBC Symphony Orchestra cycle has been so uniformly excellent, considered and - unusual for the unassuming Czech - exciting in spurts. This week there have been three concert events I'd have been stupid to miss, even at the cost of having to interweave them with three recordings in what might have been Mahlerian overkill.


After Nezet-Seguin's orchestrally inspiring Das Lied von der Erde last Saturday, the Rattle Berlin cavalcade began, or rather the full-orchestral part of it did, with rather more out-of-this-world Mahler - and Stravinsky - than I'd anticipated. So I was in a state of unnatural excitement about Wednesday's performance of the Third (photo of the morning rehearsal by Alexander Newton - at last I realised why I knew the name of Amihai Grosz, pictured right; he's the very lovely viola player from the Jerusalem Quartet, which he left for the Berlin Phil last autumn, and one of the world's best).

Alas, so perfect was Rattle's latest Mahler Third in detail, so attentive did he prove in getting the best from every orchestral soloist, contralto (the astounding Nathalie Stutzmann) and choirs, and then came that finale. I'd hoped for so much but it just didn't begin to compare with the arching, mobile adagios I'd heard when Belohlavek started his cycle, when Salonen took me by surprise with how far he'd come in an incandescent Philharmonia performance, and of course when the Lucerners included it in their cycle with Abbado.

Even that BPO/Rattle Fourth began to seem just one notch below the flexible best that can be achieved when on the Wednesday I finally caught up with Abbado's Lucerne performance on DVD.


The snag there is a seemingly demented and undersupported Kozena, but I feel I've moaned enough about her here and I get more unfriendly feelings off my chest in the BBCMM review, which will be in the April issue (as I wrote, you can always switch to the bewitching Juliane Banse on Abbado's other DVD Fourth with the superb Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, and just ignore the Ruckert Lieder here, which I endured so you don't have to). Curate's egg Jukka-Pekka Saraste completed the roster of the half-dozen performances I experienced this week, with a spacious, lushly phrased and well paced Oslo Sixth undercut by a far less convincing Ninth (guess Saraste has yet to get the measure of his Cologne orchestra). Again, these are BBCMM subjects, so the chapter and verse will eventually follow.


Anyway, at the last minute I decided I still hadn't had enough so we'll be going, after all, to Pappano's espousal of Das Lied in the Schoenberg chamber version at the Cadogan Hall tomorrow, with the little interlude of an American tragicomedy at Covent Garden tonight.

It's a risk above all because I've never liked to hear the mezzo replaced by a baritone - Mahler's second-best option - but, remembering the depths Thomas Hampson achieved with Pappano in the 'Strange Meeting' denouement of the Britten War Requiem (alas, his companion, Bostridge, did not), I reckon it might just work.

*have you voted for their 2011 awards yet? Please do so here, on condition that you take notice when I whisper 'Melnikov', 'Petrenko' and 'Rusalka' in your ear.

Bells and farewells

Invited composer and Radio 3 presenter Robert Worby to talk to my BBCSO City Lit class last night - one of the few folk who can discuss really complicated things lucidly. Indeed, I'd go so far as to say he is to contemporary music what that real gent Brian Magee is to philosophy. The subject was something of a bete noire for me up to now, Brian Ferneyhough, prior to an 'immersion day' at the Barbican, and the students were gripped, though not perhaps entirely converted. If only the composer wrote as intelligibly about his head-music as Robert speaks. And just look at the crazy complexity of Ferneyhough's writing for string quartet.


One of the many dimensions touched upon was that of space, how RW's great inspirer Stockhausen especially distributes his forces. Robert spent quite a bit of time pointing out how we've been here before in most of the details, and in this case of course our man Berlioz was the pioneer (well, after Gabrieli, at any rate). In last Wednesday's electrifying performance of the Symphonie fantastique, the brilliant Yannick Nezet-Seguin paid special attention to the handful of spatial effects. So an oboe replied to the shepherd's cor anglais from a box high on the right side of the auditorium - not offstage, but ethereally hovering aloft, thus conjuring up a mountain landscape like this one in Verbier rather than the flat plains I've usually visualised in the Scene aux champs.


And the bells for the witches' sabbath were not only placed offstage left, with the doors spookily opening on an eerie white light, but doubled with a gong each for extra resonance. You can only see one of the gongs in the picture above, but here's percussionist Ignacio Molins demonstrating (he also rattled the military drum after the execution of the March to the Scaffold before leaving the platform for his final contribution). I heard the sound as if in the next room from the LPO office while waiting to go on for my talk, when in fact it was at least 30 yards away, and went to investigate. This is the result, all 21 seconds of it (mostly reverb).



The concert was a great event from the first, exquisite notes of Ravel's Sleeping Beauty to the last witchy stomp, drawing a roar from the crowd (Anna Caterina Antonacci's Cleopatra was riveting, too, though the double basses stole that particular show). My friend Edwina, whom I saw sitting some way away clapping her hands high above her head, said she thought it was the best concert she'd ever been to.

So we had to go back on Saturday to hear Yannick conduct Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, even though the Arts Desk's chokka music allocation meant it couldn't be written up there. The companion work, Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola, was not a happy experience: YNS's lively, graceful conducting sat uneasily with the precious, effete playing of Stefan Jackiw and Richard Jongjae O'Neill (very weak viola sound from him). I could only think of Julian Rachlin and Lawrence Power at the Mackerras Memorial Concert, and wondered why the LPO hadn't settled for its excellent leader, Pieter Schoeman, and guest principal viola Tom Dunn.


No matter; we were there to hear how Sarah Connolly and Toby Spence fared in Mahler's most profound eastern philosophising. And the answer was, very well indeed. We know that our Toby's no heldentenor, but I beg to differ with the home Siegfried: in my view, he did ride the orchestra, acted out the feelings much more vividly than he used to and served the porcelain delicacy of the third song very well indeed (I well remember Jon Vickers crashing bear-like through that. Must have been with Rattle and Jessye Norman at the Proms. And I see, eeuch, Sir Si's forthcoming Birmingham Das Lied will be with the hardly up-to-the-Abschied Lady R, Magdalena Kozena).

La Connolly certainly pushed all the right buttons, found the right breath control and all the colours. And yet. There's still not the individual sound you got with Dame Janet, nor the sense of going deeper which nearly broke my heart when Christianne Stotijn - a mezzo with a much less secure technique - unfolded her meditational Farewell with Ivan Fischer and the Budapesters back in 2008. What really carried it all, for me, was YNS's marvellous sensitivity with every phrase, his cushioning of the singers, the sheer chamber-musical sweetness he got at the end of 'Von der Schoenheit'.


It was so nearly perfect, and yet I have to admit - a bit grudgingly, because I was cross with Tom Service among others for implying that British orchestras aren't as edge-of-seat exciting as their grandest continental counterparts (it's the conductor, Tom, always the conductor) - that in sound if not spirit the Berlin Phil under Rattle went just that bit further on Monday. In the wider scheme of things, I believe that Nezet-Seguin's care over every detail is bound up with just a bit more sweep and phrase-lifting than Rattle's micromanagement. But something had happened with the Mahler Fourth: I suggested in the Arts Desk review that he and the Berliners had learned a greater sense of playfulness, partly through recording that gorgeous Nutcracker. Here he is with some of his handsome players at the Barbican - two of the three leaders on the front desk. Both photos are by Mark Allan (and by the way, who was that infuriating unofficial photographer in pink whose clicks could be heard from rows back at the beginning of the Fourth Symphony's poco adagio?).


I left wishing I'd signed up for more of their four-day residency (couldn't make the Schubert last night because of the Ferneyhough class). And then it turned out that colleague Alexandra couldn't make tonight's Mahler 3 (plus interesting prefaces from Brahms and Wolf). So I jumped at that, and now I can't wait. Because, despite any perceived shortcomings, oor Simon does know his Mahler. And on Monday night, although I sat through the performances feeling rather objective, the words just came pouring out in the review and then I couldn't sleep, there was so much to process.