Philharmonia/Hrůša - Mahler, 13 November 2025

Royal Festival Hall

Symphony no.7

Philharmonia Orchestra

Jakub Hrúša  (conductor)

A little light relief here for Jakub Hrúša, in between Covent Garden performances of The Makropulos Case. That Mahler and Janáček should sound very different will hardly surprise, though the distance between Kalischt and Hukvaldy is not necessarily so great, even in compositional terms. There has long been something – have been some things, for let us not essentialise – special about the ears many Czech musicians bring to Mahler; one has only to think of Rafael Kubelík, let alone the Czech Philharmonic. Hrúša’s way with Mahler is different, indeed different from any I can recall hearing, yet full of interest and created with a collaborative determination that knows not only what it wants but how to get it. The Philharmonia must also, of course, be credited with that accomplishment. Most successful readings of the Seventh Symphony, at least in my experience, tend to rest on bringing coherence to what, rightly or wrongly, many find a tendency that pulls in the opposite direction. Highly contrasting examples would be Daniel Barenboim’s surprising – and surprisingly successful – treatment of the work in dark, post-Brahms fashion and Pierre Boulez’s more brazenly modernist, yet no less steely command of line, timbre on equal terms with rhythm and harmony. A reading that was merely incoherent would be little more than that. One that revelled in rather than attempted to solve its enigmas, perhaps with more than one might expect of Boulez’s musical hindsight, yet imbued with other varieties of its own, was what we heard here: crazier than Barenboim, arguably more so than Boulez too, and more theological to my mind’s ear than, say, the quite different house-of-horrors readings of Leonard Bernstein. 

The opening of the first movement already signalled something intriguingly different. Slow in tempo yet febrile, it drew one in, brass vibrato somewhat Slavic, and more generally dark in orchestral tone (definitely more Barenboim than Boulez—or Bernstein, for that matter). Here, it seemed was an extended fin-de-siècle orchestra experiencing twentieth-century hallucinations that, over the course of the symphony as a whole, would increasingly wrest control from a fast-vanishing past. Basic tempo firmly established, deviation, be it early flexibility or later abrupt change, registered in relation to that; much the same could be said for the whole symphony. The performance’s spirit compelled too: marionettes from the earlier ‘Rückert’ symphonies danced, yet abstracted, even automated, harbingers of a future that might not be desired, but could not be averted. The ‘world’ of a Mahler symphony – think of his celebrated exchange with Sibelius – has many mansions, historical, geographical, and otherwise. Unusually prominent at times, to my ears anyway, were premonitions not of the over-invoked Shostakovich, but of his more interesting compatriot, Prokofiev, lying in a future somewhere between The Fiery Angel and Cinderella. Wind tattoos functioned likewise, provoking if anything still greater unease. In more ‘traditional’ vein, vistas I might foolishly have imagined might no longer astonish me still did, the aural lens stretched a little or more than a little at times, testing yet never abandoning overall coherence, whether in rapt, near-suspended animation at the close of the development or something more furious in a recapitulation of depth and breadth. 

The first Nachtmusik’s opening horn calls have been delivered more flawlessly, but so what? The sense was there. (I mention this only because Beckmessers may otherwise assume I did not notice.) More to the point, they initiated a sardonic, Nietzschean serenade on the cusp of the nihilist and the diabolical, subjectively ambiguous and the more powerful for it. Lyrical cellos suggested a world all the more alienated as a result. Cowbells on- and offstage sounded a desiccated memory of their presence in the Sixth Symphony. Dances were swung, yet with knowledge of what was to come: a Weill future already, disturbingly present. The Second Symphony’s faithful were despatched to purgatory, or worse. Aufersteh’n? If you say so, but not only Klopstock was dead. The Scherzo seemed firmly rooted in that other place. It snarled in defiantly post-Nietzsche fashion, even as it (aptly) danced. Zarathustra’s realm, hell, purgatory, or somewhere else? Why choose? Except it did, the Devil’s lair increasingly apparent: no monolith, but all the more frightening for its variegation. Perhaps – shudder – this hell was our earth. There was to be heard a distinctly Schoenbergian rage, disciplined by remnants of Prokofiev’s motor-rhythms, particularly when one peered between the cracks. 

More strange bedfellows were encountered in the second Nachtmusik, Adagietto strings taking a walk on the wild side, joined by guitar, mandolin, and the rest, to pass the Eighth Symphony, even Pierrot, to the unmistakeable world of Schoenberg’s Serenade and contemporary Webern. An orchestra (in large part, or so it sounded) of soloists tended to parody, in a world that had nothing left to parody, that strong initial grounding of the symphony’s opening as crucial as ever. Music appeared to pose a theological conundrum Mahler’s St Anthony might have blanched at: one for the fish, perhaps. And so, to the finale, to ask further unanswered, unanswerable questions. It blared and blazed, sang and danced, tracing a path between old and new that transformed before our ears. It was not the last word, nor did it try to be; indeed, its modernity lay in its provisionality, exhausted and exhausting, yet exhilarating in a restored radicalism whose nods to Mozart and Wagner did anything but clarify. It ate itself as it laughed (or mocked). Nietzsche or nihilist? Again, why choose? Angels on acid or devils on ambrosia? Perhaps they were instead on horseback. The Wunderhorn St Martha may not be the cook after all.