Grosses Festspielhaus
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| Images: Monika Rittershaus |
Jacquelyn Wagner, Sarah Wegener, Liv Redpath (sopranos)
If it initially felt more than a little
strange, even heretical, to hear Mahler’s Eighth Symphony on Good Friday, this outstanding
Salzburg Easter Festival performance from assembled soloists, choirs, the
Berlin Philharmonic, and Kirill Petrenko swept all before it, doubts included—or
perhaps better, incorporating such theological doubts into the experience of
those listening 115 years on from the work’s premiere. A little under four
years from the outbreak of the First World War, that age may seem, simultaneously,
both strangely close to and increasingly distant from the insanity of the world’s
current predicaments. Mahler was no aestheticist; this rightly offered no
refuge. But nor did it hold up anything so predictable as a mere mirror. No
audience member will have experienced it in quite the same way, but all will surely
have been edified, exhilarated, and far more besides. The indifference, at
best, in which so many contemporary Mahler performances proceed was never an
option here. Petrenko’s way with the work was often surprising, yet never
arbitrarily so. It was, as is typical of this artist, a deeply thought-out
reading that challenged, confounded, and ultimately, dare I say, came close to
that thing we may still, hope against hope, consider to be transcendence.
Beth Taylor (standing), Jacquelyn Wagner and Fleur Barron on either side
I shall admit to having had my doubts earlyish
on in the First Part. The organ sound was far from ideal. More fundamentally, I
wondered quite where the performance was heading, with highly contrasting
blocks of material: a brisk and lithe choral section seeming almost
underwhelming, followed by spacious, operatic solo singing that seemed perhaps
closer to Berlioz or Verdi than Mahler. Unity of soloists and chorus
intriguingly suggested something akin to the world of nineteenth-century
oratorio – Dvořák’s Stabat Mater came to mind – but I began to ask myself: where
is the symphonism in this? I should have known better, since Petrenko had taken
a highly original view that yet proved compelling both in the moment and in
retrospect. Chamber-music playing – yes, in this movement – suggested an
affinity with the Berlin Philharmonic Wagner of Herbert von Karajan, reminding
us of the roots of this festival, revisited this year in a new Ring, but
more importantly offering a fascinating new perspective (for me, at least) on music
I had thought I knew well.
Liv Redpath (Mater gloriosa)
It goes without saying, yet doubtless should not, that the Berlin Philharmonic’s chamber playing, just as much as any titanic, surround-sound barnstorming, proved superlative and indeed enlightening. When Petrenko whipped up a storm, he truly did so; when the choirs sang, seating arrangements only enhanced a musical understanding that reached back to the antiphonies of ancient polyphony. (I thought, perhaps idiosyncratically, of Wagner’s Palm Sunday Palestrina.) Where, though, was the Mahler, I might perhaps have asked earlier on. It was increasingly clear, again both in the moment and in retrospect. Ghosts from his earlier symphonies increasingly haunted the music: liminal passages from the Rückert symphonies, ecstasy from the Second and Third, and more than a little Wunderhorn later on. And when the moment of return arrived, any idea that this conception was not, among other things, symphonic through and through was dispelled once and for all. If there was something disturbing about hearing those cries of ‘Gloria!’ on this of all days, there was something utterly thrilling to it too: a tribute to Mahler’s syncretic vision, itself reimagined in further syncretism, rather than any banal blasphemy. All came together, as it must, yet in at least the last two performances I have heard of this symphony, it utterly failed to do so; moreover, it came together in a display of long-range thinking that made complete sense of the progression we had heard so far, also anticipating that to come.
The introduction to the Second Part is, of course,
one of the most extraordinary musical landscapes in the entire canon. In that,
it follows Goethe and, for some of us, even goes beyond him. Bar prolonged electronic
interference from what I assume was a malfunctioning hearing aid, this wanted
nothing. Here, Petrenko and the Berliners offered their very own – rather,
Mahler’s – rite of spring, initially cold yet melting, suggestive of the snow
one can still view here on the Alpine landscape visible from all quarters in
the city, yet in its translucency also partaking in a further liminality
already hinting at the very different heights to come. At that moment when they
must, strings dug in, in a way one fancies they must have for Mahler in 1910
Munich, yet probably did not. It was, at any rate, both expertly and movingly
shaped. When choir and echo entered, it was likewise as if we heard chamber
choirs writ large, that translucency extended not only to song but to words and
verse themselves.
As other persons had their say, we recognised
them both as of old and quite anew, classical yet contemporary: the ideal for
any performance, as Daniel Barenboim (who surely would have had the measure of
this work he never conducted) might have told us—and Pierre Boulez, who
certainly did on both counts, very much did tell us, both in words and music. The
early stages of the rest of this part truly imparted a sense of ascent both physical
and metaphysical, as if partaking in a musical-cosmological demonstration of
the mediaeval Great Chain of Being. Gihoon Kim’s excellent Pater ecstaticus was,
yes, ecstatic, but also clearly heartfelt, presaging the deep (in every sense)
love extolled and embodied by the Pater profundus of Le Bu. The word ‘Kettenschmerz’,
towards the close of his first solo, he almost spat out, without slightest
sacrifice to beauty of tone or deeper meaning. This is clearly a rare talent: an
artist new to me but whom I hope to hear much more from. Beth Taylor’s Mulier
Samaritana revealed a fine, Erda-like contralto-like mezzo, equally at home
with the alchemy that turns words into something approaching music drama.
Jacquelyn Wagner offered a thrillingly, operatic turn for Magna peccatrix. First
among an extraordinary team of equals in the First Part, Sarah Wagener sounded
here, quite rightly, more oratorio-like in the part of Una poenitentium, without
in any sense refusing the inheritance from her composer namesake. Speaking of
whom, the Siegfried-like Doctor Marianus of Benjamin Bruns, rang out in uncommon
harmony with the orchestra. All soloists, as well as all choirs, contributed to
the greater whole in outstanding fashion, whether the Third Symphony’s Bimm-Bamm
sublimation in our corps of younger angels, Fleur Barron’s imploring, inwardly
strong Maria Aegyptiaca, or the pre- and post-Parsifalian voice from above, Mater
gloriosa, of Liv Redpath, both necessary response and necessarily sweet.
All the while, Petrenko proved, after
Mahler, our (pen-)ultimate guide. There was no more a weak link in the
symphonic logic of this vast structure than there was in the playing of the Berlin
Philharmonic or the singing of our onstage cosmogony. All took its place with a
Wagnerian inevitability that belied the elements of crowd control, however
unseen and unheard, which must always inform a performance of this symphony. When,
heralded by a clarion-like yet tender return for Doctor Marianus, the Chorus mysticus
entered, it was with a magic that seemed to lie somewhere between Mozart and Nono.
Disbelief in the celebrated and/or notorious last line of Goethe could be
suspended, because one felt one actually believed; perhaps even in the old
canard, credo quia absurdum. There was, though, nothing absurd to a coronation
of queens and princes of heaven alike, even on Good Friday. Whether or no this
were the beyond we glimpsed, none could doubt that we felt we had.
