Barbican Hall
Mozart:
Symphony no.35 in D major,
KV 385, ‘Haffner’
Thomas
Larcher: Nocturne – Insomnia
Mahler:
Das
Lied von der Erde
Elisabeth Kulman (mezzo-soprano)
Stuart Skelton (tenor)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Sakari Oramo (conductor)
A strange concert, this, in
which the Barbican Hall proved Mahler’s enemy in particular. In a
half-reasonable world, London would have a decent orchestral concert hall; let
us hope that plans to give the London Symphony Orchestra a new home will come
to something sooner rather than later. The LSO sounds transformed when heard
elsewhere – even at the more than problematical Royal Albert Hall for the
Proms. Other orchestras, even when, like the BBC Symphony Orchestra, they play
at the Barbican with some regularity, often experience greater difficulties.
Woodwind playing in particular here sounded distinctly odd, even crude, at
least from where I was seated; the sound could not remotely have corresponded
to how the musicians were ‘really’ playing. A new hall cannot come soon enough.
The two pieces in the first
half suffered less. Mozart’s Haffner
Symphony had an excellent start, the first movement cultivated, warm, nicely
phrased, and directed – if occasionally a little fussy. Its tonal and motivic
drama registered with strength and meaning, having one marvel at the composer’s
concision. The Andante had many
similar virtues, yet ultimately Sakari Oramo’s vision had one missing both
warmth and charm. It was very much on the fast side: not necessarily a problem
in itself, had it yielded more. This was Mozart progressing efficiently rather
than having us enter a garden of delights. If the minuet and trio were at times
also a little plain, their direction was clear. The finale, alas, was driven so
mercilessly as to lose much of its humanity. It can be taken as fleet as you
like, but speed should never be an end in itself, still less a cause for
hardening. If only the three succeeding movements had been at the same level as
the first.
Thomas Larcher’s ensemble
piece, Nocturne-Insomnia, was written
in 2007-8 and revised in 2017. Its two parts correspond audibly and
meaningfully to the two words of the title, so much so as to offer something
not so very different from a post-romantic tone poem. We heard a keen ear for
harmony and how to make broadly tonal harmonies sound once again new(ish). What
one might have expected to sound commonplace here sounded hard-won, the first
part strangely reminiscent of a Bruckner Adagio.
The music wound down, as it had, in retrospect, wound up, leading us far from
what we had been led to expect, insomnia upon us. Even the coda of apparent
sleep at the close, high string harmonics and accordion, sounded provisional,
ready to be disrupted.
Larcher’s piece received, for
me at least, the most compelling performance, Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde only intermittently convincing, let alone
moving, until the great final movement. The ferocity of the opening took me by
surprise, although it was probably more a matter of the congested Barbican
acoustic than anything else. Stuart Skelton had no difficulty making himself
heard in this ‘Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde’, although his performance here
and elsewhere was not without effort. (I suspect he may not have been well.) There
was, rightly, bitter anger to be heard at times, for instance when he told us
of the ‘wild-gespenstische Gestalt’ amongst the graves. At any rate, his
diction was excellent, set against admirable orchestral clarity from the BBC SO
and Oramo. The orchestra sounded as if framing a finely-etched painting in ‘Der
Einsame im Herbst’. Set against the fine burgundy pinot noir of Elisabeth
Kulman’s mezzo, all that lacked was a sense of the orchestral moments of painting
coming to life, of movement rather than a frieze. It is autumn, after all, not
winter. The third movement, ‘Von der Jugend’, would have benefited from greater
charm, however ironic, though its chinoiserie was piquant enough. By now, alas,
Skelton seemed all too audibly to be struggling.
Oramo’s stiffness of gear
change in ‘Von der Schönheit’ sounded strange, as did the blatant vulgarity of
the brass sound (again, perhaps partly the fault of the acoustic). It all
sounded a little too close to Shostakovich. The more overtly inward moments of ‘Der
Trunkene im Frühling’ fared better, the rest oddly unsettled. Nevertheless, the
darkness of the opening to ‘Der Abschied’ sounded a necessary note of fatal
certainty, at first a sharper-etched successor to the fourth movement of the
Third Symphony, before proceeding along its own, very different path. The
brook, ‘der Bach’, suggested a now unattainable Beethovenian pastorale: our
glance back towards something no longer possible. If balances were often less
than ideal, there remained something plausible to the alienation that even that
elicited. At last, I realised what had truly been missing (as well as a better
hall): a sense that this was symphony as much as song cycle. It was too late
for that really to be put right, but the close, from that long orchestral
interlude onwards, vouchsafed a taste of that richer alternative.
