Barbican Hall
Symphony no.9
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Mahler’s Ninth Symphony is not a young person’s work—a young person as conductor, that is, not as listener or indeed orchestral musician. There will be exceptions; there always are. It is not, though, a work to be rushed into; frankly, no Mahler symphony is, though that has not stopped many. That is not, of course, to say it need be an old person’s work; Mahler, after all, was in his later forties when he wrote it. Coincidentally or otherwise, Claudio Abbado was more or less – very slightly less, I think – the same age when he first conducted it. It benefits, at least, from a degree of maturity: musical, but also emotional and intellectual. Serious musician that he is, Sakari Oramo has wisely left it until last. There was no doubting, though, the preparation that had gone into this, his first time conducting the work. He had its measure and communicated it well to a packed Barbican audience, drawing out the best from the BBC Symphony Orchestra, of which he is now its longest serving conductor. I hope we shall hear it again from him before long, but this was an auspicious, well-considered, and well-timed debut, taking nothing for granted and thereby resulting in a fresh, convincing performance of a work whose confrontation with mortality and what might lie beyond can, given the present state of the world, rarely have spoken more personally or necessarily.
The opening was tentative and uncertain in the right way: that is, such was its mood, not a characterisation of the playing. The vast Andante comodo, often accounted Mahler’s single finest sonata-form achievement, built slowly and, by contrast, certainly. Yet, almost before one knew it, there came the first great orchestral cri de cœur, with all its multivalence and complex ambiguities. The music continued to sing, as it must. Variegated string playing, articulation in particular, was detailed – Mahler’s instructions are nothing if not detailed – and yet without fuss. How malevolent the darker timbres and harmonies sounded. I was put in mind of an observation by Adorno concerning Parsifal, so rich in implication for late Mahler in particular, of ‘eine düstere Abblendung des Klangs’, a ‘lugubrious dimming of sound’ that yet left space, even necessity, for agonies, such as those of Parsifal in and after Wagner’s second act, to play out. This was especially the case for the wind – shades of Kundry as ‘rose of Hell’ – even to the extent of according to an edge, in context rather than by design, to the purity of Daniel Pailthorpe’s flute solos, and certainly to those harp phrases (Elizabeth Bass and Elin Samuel) on the threshold of the Second Viennese School. The greater trajectory was all there, but it was properly built from detail; a broad brush, if every appropriate, could hardly be less so. Form and, if one may call it this, musical narrative unfolded with an urgency that had everything to do with understanding and nothing to do with minutes on the clock. Urgency does not and never should equate to mere speed. If, just occasionally, I felt that climaxes might have opened up further, in retrospect that single-mindedness was amply justified; far better that than sentimentalism, and there is no single way here. More importantly, the music peaked neither too early nor too frequently. Grief-laden, yet anything but mawkish, it seemed to suggest, even to say: this is how the world is. And it is, is it not? When consolation came, it had been earned and came from within. A sense of return at the movement’s close was not a case of full circle, but of revisitation given what had passed in the meantime.
Oramo and the orchestra offered a splendidly deliberate foundation, its strength and integrity almost Klemperer-like, on which the ambiguities of the scherzo could rest, and/or from which they could grow. Overused it may be, but it is difficult not to reach for the word sardonic. Puppets danced above the abyss, somehow suspended from something that would not let them fall, something or even someone that may not, perhaps cannot, be named. Bruckner night at Wozzeck’s tavern ceded, or at least shared the stage with, sounds of the Prater and, more distant, more insidious, strains of Götterdämmerung. A Ländler corroded and transformed: what did it mean? And again, who might say? Yet, that it had meaning, whether or no it could be put into words, could hardly be doubted: a Viennese dream that not only permitted but demanded interpretation.
The Rondo-Burleske, ‘sehr trotzig’, raged with a malevolence that may have been intrinsic or may have reflected a world to which the music ‘itself’ reacted. There was, at times, especially earlier on, a smile too, though by the close it would be but a bitter memory. Again, there was an impression of marionettes playing out their drama, or it being played out for them, through them. Who pulls the strings? Driven equally by harmony and counterpoint, it offered a final Mahlerian tribute, beleaguered and yet in its way triumphant, to Bach. Marching bands would not, could not fall silent. Indeed, for a few heartrending moments, the world of the Third Symphony seemed if not to return, then to be fondly recalled, only to be banished by something closer to the spirit of the Sixth.
The finale followed attacca, its opening as rich in compassion as in texture and in string sentiment expressed with – not dependent on – vibrato. There were still daemons to be exercised, but there was, it seemed, a God—and He might just aid us. Clear reminiscences of the first movement made clear the nature of the journey we had taken. Violin tone was transmuted from gold into silver, even for a moment into ice that chilled the bones. There would be no easy to path, yet we could trust that there was one. Stoically, Mahler summoned the reserves to keep going. For the lights might be going off – one could hear and almost see them, one by one – but there was no alternative. The Mahlerian subject somehow, somewhere remained, a voice of humanity, the hymn’s ‘still small voice of calm’, or even a peace that passed all understanding. Having passed through a weird twilight zone, metaphysical (Wagner, Schoenberg, and others) and even political (Nono, I fancied, might have divined the Gramscian ‘Now is the time of monsters’), and having refused to let go, humanity spoke—and sang. In a ghostly revisitation of Haydn’s Farewell Symphony, there was a flicker: maybe of hope, maybe even of peace, unquestionably of something. Music bore witness.
(The performance will be broadcast on BBC
Radio 3 on Thursday 16 October at 7.30 p.m.; it will be available for thirty
days thereafter on BBC Sounds.)
