Munich Philharmonic, Tugan Sokhiev conductor, Christiane Karg soprano, Ekaterina Gubanova alto, Andreas Schager tenor: Gustav Mahler — Symphony No. 4 in G major; Gustav Mahler — Das Lied von der Erde
Before the evening concert, I did a couple of things:
- I went on a 2hr 45min guided tour entitled ‘Mahler and Leipzig’ – this was not so much about Mahler as, after all, he was only in Leipzig for two years, but our guide (English-speaking tour, about 15 people) was hugely knowledgeable about other aspects of Leipzig’s musical history. We didn’t dwell much on Bach but there was a lot about Artur Nikisch, Mendelssohn etc. A large number of composers have passed through Leipzig, including Janacek and Grieg. She highly recommended the Mendelssohn house, which I must get to. She also was very interesting about the role Kurt Masur, with his various government contacts, had in ensuring that peace protests in 1989/1990 were met with no violence by the DDR authorities
- I went to a 6pm musical service at the Thomaskirche, essentially a form of Choral Evensong, with Bach Motets BWV 226,228 and 229, as well as a 16th century setting of the Nunc Dimittis (but no Magnificat) all sung alas not by the Boys Choir but by the very good Saxon Youth Choir
When I bought my tickets, in October 2021, the evening concert was due to be conducted by Valery Gergiev. He however was dismissed as conductor of the Munich Phil after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as a known Putin supporter, and Sokhiev was the replacement. The latter – I’ve not seen him conduct before – is an Ossetian Russian, one of the last students of Ilya Musin at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, who from 2014 to 2022 was Music Director and Chief Conductor of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow , and Music Director in Toulouse. In 2022 he resigned from both posts, feeling he had to leave both due to ‘current events’, and wishing to be even-handed.
This was a substantial concert – by far the heftiest of those I’m going to, and I have to say I was flagging emotionally by the time we got to Das Lied von der Erde, as maybe you’ll see below.
I thought the Munich Philharmonic sounded every bit as good as the Gewandhaus orchestra and of course both works give players more chance to shine as woodwind and brass individuals than Mahler 2 does. I also marvelled at the clarity, warmth and simply the volume generated within the hall, seated 4 rows from the very back. Given that the hall was a GDR product, and access to Western technology available at the time limited, it is even more a tribute to the quality of DDR architects, and sound engineers of the time that they got it so right.
I thought the Mahler 4 performance was quite outstanding. My view was perhaps coloured by reading somewhere recently a remark by Mahler I hadn’t come across before, that the so-called sleigh bells at the beginning of the work (which we automatically associate with Christmas via Lieutenant Kije) are in fact representing the bells on a jester’s hat; also, Mahler’s remark to Alma along the lines of ‘I can’t be happy if there is one person in the world suffering’. This symphony seems to me to be a lot about how suffering and darkness enters our lives at every stage, and that any resolution of life’s seeming futility into something making sense and being meaningful is complex, and we are left with an ambiguous ending. Perhaps in this work, these thoughts are refracted through the mind of a child, but the work lets us know that even there we find darkness as well as light.
Sokhiev and the orchestra were I thought extremely effective in bringing out the work’s ambiguities. This was done partly through extraordinary clarity in the orchestral sound, so that the glints, the undercurrents of disturbance and disagreement from brass, woodwind or strings are heard very clearly. It was also done through judgements on tempi – thus the first theme of the slow movement was perhaps faster than usual, less contemplative, expressing therefore more a simple joy in life, while the contrasting sad, slower than usual, sections of that movement seemed darker and gloomier than normally played, subverting that joy. As in the Mahler 2 dynamic contrasts were well handled too – but also ambiguous. Mahler 4, unlike the 2nd, 3rd and 5th symphonies has two ‘break-through’ moments – the point at which we sense something ‘other’, something more than the life we lead. In this performance though, the quiet string musings before the 2nd of those moments, the uproar of the ‘opening of heaven’ in the third movement, were not as quiet as they sometimes are and that seemed to make the uproar more knowing and the aftermath more saccharine. Likewise the sudden welling up in the 2nd trio of the scherzo seemed too loud, too self-conscious, for this to be a true realisation of sudden joy, and the following muted sniping trumpets were more telling.. Somehow, right at the end of the 4th movement, the harp sounded louder than usual, making it more like a tolling funeral bell than a quiet sinking into paradise. In all these sorts of ways, and many more, I found this a very telling subtle performance, emphasising the ambiguities in this work more strongly than I’ve ever heard before. I can’t honestly remember hearing a better one.
After this, I didn’t the emotional or mental energy to appreciate the performance of Das Lied von der Erde quite as I should have done. I think also, my sitting right at the back of the hall did make the voices, as opposed to the instruments, sound a bit distant. Again, I though Sokhiev and the orchestra were working wonders with the music – the funeral march in the last movement was magnificently bleak, the 2nd autumnal song was slower than usual and all the better for it, with wonderfully wispy strings; also – a small point, but one that I often wince at – the mandolin was kept under control when the singer in the last movement begins to sing ’Ewig’.
But obviously a performance of this work has to stand or fall by the singers. Ekaterina Gubanova and Andreas Schager are both opera stars whose work I have much enjoyed at performances over the last year. Schager obviously, as the current go-to Siegfried, has the vocal heft for his first and third songs – he was, though, unable to give pointing and delicacy to the 2nd of his songs, about the artists on the lake, Gubanova had somehow too generalised a voice – her diction wasn’t clear, the sound of her voice was lovely but she didn’t point words and phrases enough. I may be wrong about two people who I have great respect for as singers but somehow they didn’t really seem to me to be suited for these songs – you somehow need singers who can project the words and situation more clearly. In the case of the alto role, my gold standard is Janet Baker, who I heard live several times. This simply wasn’t in that league. So measured by any normal standards, this was a very good performance, but by Festival standards maybe slightly disappointing.
As a final thought, I wonder if they might have done this differently in terms of programming. The Festival organisers could for example have cut out Das Klagende Lied, for instance, later on in order to give DLVDE its own top billing………………..
John's musical journey 