Grosses Festspielhaus
Kindertotenlieder
Symphony no.5
Okka von der Damerau (mezzo-soprano)
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)
Mahler’s Fifth Symphony seems
perhaps to be his most difficult to bring off convincingly. Perhaps the only
entirely convincing performance I have heard in the concert hall – alas, I
never heard Pierre Boulez conduct it live – came from Daniele Gatti. Conductors as different as Simon Rattle and Daniel
Barenboim have struggled in different ways. Given more than a dozen years since
I last heard Barenboim, it seemed time to give him another try, not least given
the presence of the Vienna Philharmonic. (He can certainly excel in Mahler, not
least in the Seventh and Ninth
Symphonies.) The verdict, especially earlier on, remained mixed, at least for
me, although the audience greeted the performance with great enthusiasm. (Do
audiences ever not greet performances
of Mahler with such enthusiasm nowadays?) And, to be fair, its merits increased
as time progressed. I remain, however, to be convinced, that this is really
Barenboim’s piece.
My scepticism was probably strongest
in the first movement, perhaps the first part (movements one and two) as a
whole. Barenboim’s initial tempo was on the slow side, but not unreasonably so;
the problem was more the constant slowing from that (first) basic tempo,
leading the music to drag, sometimes to the extent of lacking much in the way
of pulse at all. For whatever reasons, his singular way with the Seventh – it really
should not work, yet it does – in which he treats the music almost as if it
were Brahms, seems quite at sea here; textures merely seem thick, rather than
revealing a myriad of colours within. Mahler’s great storms fared better, timbrally
too. In the second movement, the VPO seemed to temper its conductor somewhat,
although I still felt the music weighed down: not quite congested, but not
quite uncongested either.
The scherzo, by contrast, had a
good and proper sense of facing both ways, even if it would have benefited from
something more sharply defined. What we hear here is clearly what Barenboim
wants: I remain somewhat at a loss as to why, though. In the Adagietto, not inappropriately post-Wagnerian,
we heard something quite lovely indeed: tender, not at all overwrought, and
directed. Here, how could one not give thanks for the Vienna strings? The
finale likewise emerged with considerable charm and ebullience, not only
admirably clear but also directed. Irony? Not so much, but I am not sure that
has ever really been Barenboim’s thing.
Kindertotenlieder, which preceded the symphony, seemed to me
far more successful as a whole, Barenboim’s way with the music very different
indeed. It had me wish that he had approached the symphony, at least in part, in
similar fashion. Perhaps in part because he is a pianist, who has performed
these songs in that role too, he showed himself especially alert to
particularities of orchestral colour. Most notably in the opening ‘Nun will die
Sonn’ so hell aufgeh’n’, yet far from only there, individual woodwind lines in
particular pointed directly to Webern. This was modernist Mahler, which belied
lazy, downright inaccurate generalisations of such performance. There are
still, even now, people who describe Boulez’s conducting of such music as ‘cold’.
But enough of their hearts; this was surely Mahler that Barenboim’s great
friend and inspiration would have appreciated, as much for its harmonic
grounding in Wagner as for later-twentieth-century anticipations. Okka von der
Damerau proved an ideal soloist: clear, honest, with no need to impute further,
false ‘emotions’ of her own. Her experience in Wagner singing told too: in some
ways, this was, quite aptly, Mahler from Valhalla, the alleged tonal journey
from D minor to major as provisionally redemptive as that implies.
