Salzburg Festival (6) - GMYO/Hrůša: Mahler, 21 August 2023

Felsenreitschule

Mahler: Symphony no.9

Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra

Jakub Hrůša (conductor)

Image: © SF/Marco Borrelli

Time was when I, like many concertgoers, was hearing a great deal of Mahler’s symphonies, probably more so than those of anyone else. That was partly choice, of course: no one compelled me to, and I was very much under Mahler’s spell. (Not that I am necessarily free now.) But it was also a reflection of concert programming and indeed the recording industry. As a student, I was avidly collecting Pierre Boulez’s revelatory Deutsche Grammophon series as it came out. In 2007, I travelled to Berlin for Holy Week and Easter, to hear Boulez and Daniel Barenboim conduct them all (minus the ‘Tenth’), plus the orchestral song-cycles, though sadly no Das klagende Lied. It was a defining moment in my musical life and even in my musical writing, for it had me begin my blog to record my experiences. (At the time, I did not even really know what a blog was.) As the years rolled on, though, increasingly and again like many, I felt that the Mahler craze was getting out of hand. I should always be interested in an outstanding performance of a Mahler symphony, just as I would with a Beethoven symphony, yet most to my ears were anything but, too many conductors and their egos reducing them to the level of ‘orchestral showpieces’. It seemed the best thing for Mahler, for other composers, and for audiences would be a period of silence. Some time before the pandemic, my attendance had tailed off considerably. Since concert life began once more, I realise I have not been to a single performance of a Mahler symphony, unless we include Das Lied von der Erde. Now, for whatever reason, I shall have several over the next month. Will absence have made the heart grow still fonder? We shall see.

The first in my mini-series was a Salzburg Festival performance of the Ninth Symphony from the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra and Jakub Hrůša: an excellent team on paper and in practice. Doubtless not stinting on rehearsal time, and certainly not on numbers – I counted ten double basses and there must have been closer to forty than thirty violins – this was a performance to fill the Felsenreitschule, quite rightly at least as much in magical moments of quiet stillness, somehow both endless and over in the blinking of an eye, as in climaxes. We can perhaps be too ready to speak of national characteristics in music, especially in so complex a geographical and cultural area as Central Europe, yet momentarily forgetting whom I saw at the podium and listening only, as it were, with my ears, I was in the first movement and beyond put in mind both of the sort of sound I associated both with the Czech Philharmonic and with Rafael Kubelík’s wonderful recordings (studio and live) with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. There are all manner of ways to approach Mahler, but this particular brand of unforced musicality and golden, glowing, never saturated string tone seemed to forge a connection not only with Mahler’s Bohemian origins, but also with a tradition dating back to Mozart, Mysliveček, and indeed beyond.

Programmatic explanations help some listeners and do no great harm, though the claim that Mahler’s faltering heartbeat may be heard in the first movement may be an exception. At any rate, there was neither need nor invitation to think in such terms, Mahler and Hrůša reminding us of Mendelssohn’s oft-quoted observation that music expresses thoughts that are not too indefinite for words, but rather too definite. In many ways, the lack of anguish (and apparent who) was welcome, though occasionally I could not help wishing for a little more edge—doubtless ironically, given what I said earlier. With melody, harmony, and counterpoint in such productive balance, though, and with Hrůša’s unobtrusive shaping of the whole so finely judged, there were no grounds for complaint. This was not an especially modernist Mahler, though not was it backward-looking; other standpoints will have their day. 

Oscillation between string-led material and multiple woodwind voices continued into the second and third movements. The second certainly had its moments of rusticity, perhaps closer to Haydn than often one hears, but there was alienation too: in the very idea of rusticity, of course, but also in the music’s twin embrace of and escape from it. The Rondo-Burleske dug deep, not only on account of the depth of string tone, embracing counterpoint and its vigour in a related and complementary, yet also contrasting, fashion. Perhaps there might have been greater violence, even horror, yet, again not unlike Kubelík, Hrůša reminded us there were other tendencies in the music. I was also reminded at times, and not only here, of Bruno Maderna’s startlingly ‘different’, yes-saying way with the work. Hrůša’s marriage of precision and patience paid off handsomely in the way all would surely have felt the pull of progressive tonality, whether they knew the term or not. Mahler’s path to the finale, here resolute and unsentimental, unhurried yet rarely if ever lingering, made sense both emotionally and intellectually. One cannot say fairer than that. 

Prom 60 - Gerhaher/GMYO/Jordan - Bach and Bruckner, 30 August 2016

Royal Albert Hall

Bach – Cantata: ‘Ich habe genug’, BWV 82

Bruckner – Symphony no.9 in D minor

Christian Gerhaher (baritone)

Bernhard Heinrichs (oboe)
Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra
Philippe Jordan (conductor)

Bruckner, Bruckner, wherever one goes; From Salzburg to London, he is with us, he is with us indeed, and will be next week too. (I shall even be given the Third Symphony another try, on my birthday: the things I do for Daniel Barenboim…) Still, at least it seems to mean that fewer unnecessary Mahler-as-showpiece performances are being foisted upon us. Moreover, in this case, it was good, indeed great Bruckner, rather than one of the interminable number of ‘versions’ of interminable earlier works.

 

Keen though I was to hear the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra in Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony, for he principal attraction for me, and for a good part of the audience, was in any case the extremely rare opportunity to hear a Bach cantata played by mainstream performers – especially, so it seemed, when the soloist was Christian Gerhaher. According to the programme, there had only been two previous such opportunities to hear Ich habe genug at the Proms: in 1956 and in 1962, with Heinz Rehfuss and Hermann Prey as soloists, both enticing prospects indeed. Ian Bostridge performed the version for high voice (with flute obbligato, rather than oboe, and period instruments) in 2000.

 

As it was, Philippe Jordan, heedless of the size of the hall, opted for a very small orchestra (oboe, strings 6.4.3.2.1, chamber organ) and, perhaps more to the point, insisted throughout that the strings play in very subdued fashion. An advantage of smaller forces can often be a greater willingness to play out, but not here. It is a reflective work, of course, and does not need to sound like Mahler (or Bruckner), but the approach nevertheless seemed perverse; I can imagine it might have worked better on the radio. The opening aria was taken at a ‘flowing’ tempo, which is to say considerably faster than would ‘traditionally’ have been the case. On its own terms, it worked well enough, but memories of, say, John Shirley-Quirk with Neville Marriner, or Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (with various conductors) were anything but effaced. Gerhaher’s use of head-voice, moreover, left this listener at least longing for something deeper, darker. There was certainly greater resolution, though, upon the da capo. His diction, whether in arias or recitatives, was impeccable. Bernhard Heinrichs’s oboe playing was unfailingly musical, very much a second ‘voice’. ‘Schlummert ein’ was again relatively swift, although I felt Gerhaher might have done more with the words without coming anywhere near over-emphasis. And Jordan’s pauses seemed excessive: disruptive more than anything else. The following recitative offered much more in the way of verbal emphasis, as did, to a lesser extent, the final aria, ‘Ich freue mich auf meinen Tod’. Here I was rather taken with the swift tempo, which engendered something of a spirit of defiance.

 

Jordan seemed very much to have rethought ‘traditional’ approaches to Bruckner, but to rather more successful effect. Once past a rocky opening – devoid of mystery, and of much else too, not helped by an onslaught of coughing – we heard some fine playing indeed from the young players of the GMYO: first strings, then the oboe soloist, and so on. The first movement was taken pretty fast, but not unrelievedly so. Intriguingly pointillistic woodwind matched well string pizzicato playing, and added to a sense of provisionality; this was no ‘cathedral in sound’ of cliché. There was, moreover, a strong sense of development: necessary here to avoid a sense of mere repetition. And there was a sense of intimacy too: not the constraint of the Bach performance, but something penetrating deeper, to the very essence of the musical lines. The moment of return was duly awe-inspiring: what a wonderful orchestra this is! Was the approach too fragmentary, though? Perhaps, perhaps not. It was certainly interesting. There was no wanting of power in the coda.

 

The scherzo opened with a lightness that was far from non-committal, more Mendelssohnian perhaps. Response thereto was anything but light, although one could certainly hear Bruckner as an heir to Schubert (his Ninth Symphony in particular). Perhaps it was a little too driven, but it was certainly not dull. There was occasional insecurity concerning pulse, though. The trio was full of incident, proving both urgent and, occasionally, a little languorous. I liked its range. The finale developed the sense of late Romantic hypertension. There was nothing comfortable to this view of Bruckner, which was all to the good. Both the virtues and the drawbacks of the previous movements endured. Jordan proved, however, especially able in highlighting the contrasting nature in the musical material. Moments of crisis registered; much, it seemed, was at stake. The close was blissful, Schubertian.

Prom 57: Zimmermann/GMYO/Gatti - Wagner, Berg, Strauss, and Ravel, 26 August 2012

Royal Albert Hall

Wagner – Parsifal: Prelude to Act III and ‘Good Friday Music’

Berg – Violin Concerto
Strauss – Suite: Der Rosenkavalier (attrib. Artur Rodziński)
Ravel – La Valse

Frank-Peter Zimmermann (violin)

Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra

Daniele Gatti (conductor)

 

There is probably no finer Parsifal conductor alive than Daniele Gatti. It was once again a privilege to hear his shaping of music from Wagner’s final drama, even if I find it difficult to reconcile myself with the practice of performing ‘bleeding chunks’ as the ‘Good Friday Music’, and remain a little surprised at conductors with a deep understanding of Wagner’s works performing such snippets out of context in this way. (That is not, I hasten to add, a matter of ‘purism’, simply a feeling that the experience remains insufficient. There is nothing wrong, for instance, with performing the Prelude to Act I of Die Meistersinger as a curtain-raiser. If it works, it works; but if it does not...) At any rate, there seemed something a little odd about starting with the opening to the third act. Nevertheless, the performance was of such dramatic intensity that one expected to hear Kundry groaning, and felt a little disoriented by a transition of sorts into the ‘Good Froday Music’. The Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra’s woodwind solos were especially fine, reminiscent of the Siegfried-Idyll. Gatti’s varied pacing proved unerring, some though by no means all of it unerringly slow; the crucial thing was the unbroken communication of Wagner’s melos.

 

It was perhaps noteworthy that, as with all the music on this programme, Gatti conducted the Berg Violin Concerto from memory. Gatti has a distinguished track-record in the music of the Second Viennese School; there could certainly be no doubting either his or Frank-Peter Zimmermann’s knowledge of the score. The GMYO woodwind again played with great intensity throughout, though Zimmermann’s account began in somewhat subdued fashion. (Perhaps it was partly a matter of the Royal Albert Hall’s dreadful acoustic.) I wondered whether it were too subdued, despite the apt impression of the ‘angelic’ thereby imparted, but it came to life during the Allegretto section of the first part. Gatti’s understanding of Berg’s twelve-note writing was abundantly clear in his shaping of woodwind lines in particular, pointing the way to the Bach chorale that would be fully sounded in the second part. There was, moreover, a winning Viennese lilt, rubato and all, to be heard to the rhythms. The second part opened with a vehemence previously lacking; there could be no doubting Zimmermann’s virtuosity here either. Moments of Mahlerian stillness were just as striking, the vistas (Carinthian?) that opened up as striking as anything in the music of another composer with whom Gatti has long exhibited a particular affinity. Zimmermann’s working out of serial processes, and more generally Berg’s motivic development, was as impressive as Gatti’s. The Andante from Bach’s A minor Sonata, BWV 1003, made for an apt, wonderfully intimate, encore.

 

If I continue to harbour doubt about performing extracts from Parsifal, feelings about the Rodziński (allegedly his work) suite from Der Rosenkavalier go beyond any conceivable understanding of reasonable doubt. Yes, of course it is always a pleasure with a fine orchestra and conductor to hear this music, but it could surely have been better put together; indeed, one sometimes wonders whether it could have been worse put together. It was all wonderfully performed, making one long to hear Gatti and indeed the orchestra in the work as a whole. The opening horns resounded with such magnificence that I had to check first that we remained in the Royal Albert Hall, and second that there were only four of them. (We had remained there, and there were only four.) Masses strings could barely have sounded more Straussian in the Act I Prelude, but the melying away after Strauss’s initial flourishes was every bit as impressive. Gatti pointed up echoes of Elektra without overdoing them; this was less a determinedly modernistic Rosenkavalier selection than a Romantic performance with a sense of alternatives. Throughout tone and textures were subtly variegated, even when the allocation of vocal lines to instrumentalists, however splendidly played, proved a little difficult to take. I was left wondering how much, if any, sense the selection would have made to someone unacquainted with the opera as a whole, but that was not the fault of the performance.

 

For that reason alone, La Valse proved more satisfying. I was struck from the outset at the ‘French’ quality of the sound Gatti drew from the orchestra, not unlike that which one would expect from his own Orchestre National de France. Ravel’s score sounded as if a painterly, Cézanne-like, phantasmagoria. It seemed to be taken faster than usual, though not excessively so, and the tempo was certainly not unvaried. The vortex into which the Viennese waltz whirled itself had a mechanistic, Stravinskian quality: Ravel viewed through the prism of The Rite of Spring. There was something finer to come, however, and despite my reservations concerning ‘bleeding chunks’, a rapt account of the Prelude to Act III of Die Meistersinger, the orchestra’s strings offering a challenge to any permanent opera or symphony orchestra. Again, one longed to hear Gatti in the complete work.