Barbican Hall
Mahler – Symphony no.7
London Symphony Orchestra
Daniele Gatti (conductor)
Daniele Gatti had not
conducted the LSO since 1996, so it was more than time to put that right. The
orchestra has not always recently had the happiest of times with Mahler:
nothing to do with the orchestra itself, everything to do with largely
uncomprehending conducting by Valery Gergiev. This concert, however, made it
clear that the LSO remains a Mahler orchestra to be reckoned with. Gatti, whose
Philharmonia
Mahler Fifth in 2012 was the finest performance I have heard ‘live’ of a
work that often proves problematical in performance, turned his hand with
excellent results to its still more problematical sibling.
The first movement opened and
in general – but not always – proceeded in deliberate fashion: not quite
Klemperer, but with some of his doggedness, if not his plain-spokenness. If I
say that its great span seemed longer than usual – and I suspect that it was –
I do not mean to imply that such length was an impediment, far from it. But
rather this was a reading whose weight entailed effort; it was quite rightly
not a journey to be embarked upon, or indeed to be continued, at all lightly.
For what it is worth, a performance that began at 7.35 finished at about 9.05. Sitting considerably farther forward than I usually do, indeed farther forward
than is probably ideal, with only two rows between me and the stage, the
orchestral effort was revealed to me in more than usually physical fashion. But
as so often, there are compensations: for the losses in blend, there were gains
in well-nigh overpowering immediacy – and, at times, sheer volume too. In a
performance which set the scene for the rest of the symphony, Gatti did not
take Daniel
Barenboim’s path, which to my initial surprise, has turned out to work
extraordinarily well both live and on CD, of transforming Mahler’s symphony
into something more akin to Brahms, in other words of forcing the material to
make sense. Instead, Gatti revelled in Mahler’s discontinuities; this was, one
might say, whether consciously or otherwise, a veritably Adornian reading.
Lest I be misunderstood, I do
not mean something merely chaotic; there has, in a sense, to be an overall line
posited before discontinuity can assert itself in positive fashion. That there
most certainly was, and that it most certainly did, the LSO’s virtuosity
enabling it to follow him and to lead us. Moreover, the echoes of the Sixth Symphony
resounded perhaps more strongly than ever I have previously heard: partly, I
think, a result of the deliberate tempo, partly a result of the almost
superhuman effort with which the strings dug into their instruments, and partly
a result of a sure harmonic understanding which guided the discontinuous
progress almost as a parody of the earlier work: a parody which wanted to
match, which was doomed to fail, and which yet in that failure revealed
something different.
The three inner movements
were rightly taken as parts of a greater whole. Here the full garishness,
horror, and sweetness of nightmares whose truth we never quite come to believe
in were properly revealed, as much through orchestral colour as command of line
and rubato. Wherever we were led, there was no doubt that this was the
intention. Rhythms recalled old Vienna – or should that, at least in Mahler’s
case, be new Vienna? – and the parade ground. Mahler’s scoring registered with
the greatest sensitivity: I can rarely have heard the mandolin so clearly and
with such Don Giovanni-like subversion, and the cowbells sounded miraculously
from the distance with an atmospheric perfection I should have thought quite
beyond the Barbican’s acoustic. If night fell with relative – and this is
certainly only relative – normality at the opening of the first Nachtmusik, and all manner of deathly
creatures haunted the scherzo, the
disturbing charms of the second Nachtmusik
beguiled, seduced, and, in context, unsettled at least as much as what had gone
before. With this symphony, and in this performance, nothing was ever quite
what it seemed – but consciously, or perhaps sub-consciously so.
The Meistersinger echoes of the finale tried, as they would, to wake us
from the nightmare, but that nightmare or those nightmares perhaps proved all
the more difficult to dispel on account of their ambiguities. When Bernstein,
for instance, in his magnificent but very different final recording, lets loose
the spirits of Hell, one feels that that is just what they are. Here, the daemons
were unclear, and we were unclear who or what they were – which is perhaps why
they never really left the stage at all. The end was properly inconclusive;
Mahler’s symphony had been made strange once more.
