Director, Deborah Warner; Set Designer, Hyemi Shin; Costume Designer, Nicky Gillibrand; Lighting Designer, Adam Silverman; Choreographer, Kim Brandstrup. Cast: Wozzeck, Christian Gerhaher; Marie, Anja Kampe; Captain, Peter Hoare; Doctor, Brindley Sherratt; Margret, Rosie Aldridge; Drum Major, Clay Hilley; Andres, Sam Furness;  First Apprentice, Barnaby Rea; Second Apprentice, Alex Otterburn; The Fool, John Findon. Conductor, Sir Antonio Pappano.

I think I’m right in saying I’ve heard this work only once before live. This was the previous ROHCG production in 2013, with Simon Keenlyside as Wozzeck, and Karita Mattila as Marie, conducted in the previous Keith Warner production by Mark Elder.  This, a new production by Deborah Warner (who I once spent a week with in the 80’s haring around  Egypt in a bus touring a Shakespeare production she was directing), was a very absorbing and intense performance. Having just listened to 11 Mahler-only concerts it was very interesting to hear the similarities and differences in this work to Mahler – the use of a wide variety of styles, including a dance band, military music and a honky-tonk piano, plus using a huge orchestra are points of similarity; the basic atonal idiom is obviously different but at times of high drama like the last two transition passages we could be listening to Mahler’s 11th – or maybe 12th – symphony had he lived to write them.

It’s a very bleak work – like Peter Grimes (the links between the two works are obvious when you think about it, including both central figures drowning, and powerful orchestral interludes) it’s the story of someone who is inherently a poet but unable to express himself and who is living a miserable and squalid life. That needs to be reflected in the stage design. The visionary part was very convincing – the blood red moon looming at the back of the stage, and the row of dead leafless trees. The bleakness was well conveyed by the movable stage blocks conveying the essentials of Wozzeck’s house, the doctor’s surgery, street scenes and so forth as well as the use of the entire stage at key moments such as Marie’s killing. However the mechanism used to effect the frequent scene changes seemed rather overcomplicated – while the revolving disk centre stage worked well the various screens moving up and down seemed fussy. One of the screens was in some way slanted so that shadows of blocks and people could be seen moving across quite a wide section of the stage, which was interesting, but overall this use of screens seemed at times fussy and distracting. Costumes were grey and black except for Wozzeck and Marie.

The personen-regie was very good indeed and made the 100 minutes or so fly by – I totally believed in these characters and the horror and injustice of their lives. The injustices though are individual – people not caring for each other – rather than the communal focus of Peter Grimes. This makes the need for credible acting all the more important, and all those involved achieved this.  Christian Gerhaher was outstanding as Wozzeck, his shuffling walk the epitome of a down-trodden overburdened man. His career as primarily a lieder singer meant he offered us exceptionally clear diction, and beautifully nuanced singing – for example his singing of the fragments of the Lord’s prayer. Anja Kampe was equally convincing as Marie. I was interested to hear Clay Hilley as the Drum Major – he has been Berlin’s Siegfried recently and stood in for the first cycle Gotterdammerung Siegfried at Bayreuth last year – it sounds as though he would be impressive in that role. In the lesser roles Peter Hoares and Brindley Sherrard were particularly as the Captain and Doctor.

The orchestra sounded wonderful under Pappano  – the last 10 minutes or so of the performance were remarkable in their intensity

Halle Orchestra – conductor Sir Mark Elder; Alice Coote mezzo-soprano; Michael Spyres tenor; Neal Davies bass; Hallé Choir choral director Matthew Hamilton; Hallé Youth Choir and Alumni director Stuart Overington

Surprisingly the number of ‘Gerontius’ performances I have been to over the years has been very small. I don’t think I’ve heard the Halle and Elder perform it before – though I had a ticket for a performance of theirs in 2017 I couldn’t go – some work related crisis……I heard Boult conduct it at the Proms in 1970 and Colin Davis with Anne-Sofie von Otter in 2005. I am pretty sure I heard Janet Baker sing it – possibly with Davis again – at some point in the 70’s.

Why on earth is it that, 120 years on, The Dream of Gerontius remains compellingly popular? It has Newman’s dreadful fusty late Victorian verse, and a Prelude almost embarrassingly over-indebted to Parsifal. The kind of theology embedded within it is alien enough to me, a liberal Anglican,  let alone a much much wider secular audience. The character Gerontius often sounds priggish, pompous and over assured of his salvation (though maybe that is the point – however I don’t know how much dramatic subtlety I would credit Newman with……) A large part of what makes the work gripping, I think, is the drama of Part 2 – whatever the theology or assumptions behind it, Newman is undoubtedly daring in envisaging what being a soul might feel like and what it might talk about after death, and Gerontius’ priggishness is undoubtedly deflated by the judgement he receives. And the glorious music, of course – to me, although Part 1 has some lovely musical moments, the work really starts to take flight at the ‘Profiscere’ and continues at an exalted level after that both dramatically and musically. I think also – though some would disagree – that the Wagnerian echoes (again Amfortas stands rather obviously behind Gerontius’ agonies in Part 1) recede in Part 2, and Elgar’s authentic voice breaks through more strongly.

A word in parenthesis about unswitched off or unsilenced mobile phones……occasionally I’ve heard a notification call at a distance, which has been momentarily distracting but not really an annoyance. This time though, just as Michael Spyres was finishing his (very moving) ‘Take me away’, a 5 note notification call opened up right next to me – 5 rows from the front of the stalls. I thought it must be mine, so loud and close was it, even though I knew in my head I had switched the thing off (but had I leaned on it so that it had come on by mistake….?) and I spent a minute panicking, into the Angel’s Farewell….in the end I knew it couldn’t have been mine (and I confirmed this was the case when I got out of the hall) but it was very upsetting and disturbing, caused sadly not by somebody careless and unheeding but by someone elderly who clearly  had forgotten to check.

This was a very fine performance indeed. Part of Elder’s way with this music, and the weight of tradition the orchestra carries with it, is to be unrushed, to let the music unfold naturally, to flow like a broad river, but without ever seeming to be sluggish ; the Prelude sounded grand but not grandiloquent; the ‘Profiscere’ was deftly handled with just the right amount of kick as the choir takes over from the bass; ‘Praise to the Holiest’ sounded expansive, but not in a loose way – just very much alive, with all the details able to tell. The orchestra at the end was just radiant, as the Angel’s Farewell surged. Perhaps my only quibble was that the orchestra didn’t quite produce enough of a blindingly vehement audio-flash when Gerontius faces God, finally

Michael Spyres is a ‘baritenor’ (not a phrase I’ve come across before) but who is clearly up for all the demands of this role.  I thought he was very good indeed – he had the power for ‘Sanctus Fortis, Sanctus Deus’, and ‘Take me away’, and the last two lines from the latter were very moving.  I look forward to hearing him at the Proms in the Trojans in early September. Neal Davies was a good, though not outstanding bass. However Alice Coote was quite exceptional – every phrase was beautifully pointed, every word crystal clear. Her soft singing at ‘My work is done’ and ‘Softly and gently’ was absolutely beautiful – the latter I thought eclipsed even Janet Baker’s recorded account with Simon Rattle (which is the highest praise I can offer).  The choirs sounded marvellous – ‘Praise to the Holiest’ was really thrilling – the soprano wave at the climax was spine-tingling and the final note of that section was seemingly endless, and glorious

A great performance then of a work that does need inspirational leadership of the sort that Elder provided to engage a modern audience. The audience seemed to regard it all as a bit of an event and unfortunately  the applause started before the measured pause at the end was over. A pity….like the mobile call………….

Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, conductor Semyon Bychkov: Mahler Symphony No 6

And so to the final concert, after 12 previous live musical events (plus two one-hour sessions of Bach), 11 talks, and one film over 11 days…….

This was (here I go with those superlatives again) a magnificent performance. I doubt if I have ever heard a better one live (I have heard Haitink, Chailly, Boulez and Harding conduct this). The reasons for this were, I think:

1. That the orchestra played magnificently – soaring strings, wonderful first horn, very striking  – in several sense of the word – timpanist, a beautiful warm sound, but at the same time playing as though they were putting a special effort into this performance; their playing had a few minor fluffs, but that somehow emphasised the emotional commitment of the playing – they weren’t a super-orchestra on auto-pilot
2. That Bychkov conducted the work superbly – all the tempi made absolute sense. He also – marked as being necessary in the score but not always observed – took the repeat in the first movement. He played the Andante 3^rd, which to me makes more emotional sense, and is the way I got to know the piece in the recording I had as a teenager (Bernstein NYPO). There were many memorable moments:
   1. The slowing down (but not suddenly and not crassly) for the Alma theme in the first movement
   1. Within quite a fast basic pulse in the first movement, the sense of quiet and ethereality of the passage with the cowbells
   1. The sweep of the end of the first movement
   1. The slow winding down of the slow movement towards its end
   1. The glorious string sound and broadening of tempo for the climax of the slow movement
   1. The careful gradation of tempi in the finale – this can very easily seem episodic, and the conductor has to get the sense of crisis upon crisis building up in the music, with the first two hammer blows as only temporary relief. Bychkov did this superbly
   1. The broadening of tempo before the third hammer blow (which Bychkov like most did not seek to reinstate)

              These are only some of the memorable moments from this performance.

___________________________________________________________________________

So, all in all, summing up the Festival in an obviously subjective and fairly general way, I’d say that the only performance I felt was sub-standard as a performance, from a conducting perspective, (though well played) was the 1^st Symphony. I was out of sorts for DLVDE and so can’t comment on that. The evening with Das Klagende Lied was interesting and absorbing. Symphonies Nos 2, 4, 7, and 10 received very good performances. The stand-outs for me were Symphonies Nos 3, 5, 6, 8 and 9., particularly Nos 5, 6 and 9 The orchestras were all strikingly good in their different ways. A marvellous 11 days!

MDR Symphony Orchestra, MDR Radio Choir, Dennis Russell Davies conductor, Chen Reiss soprano, Sophie Harmsen alto, Attilio Glaser tenor: Gustav Mahler — Totenfeier; Gustav Mahler — Wunderhorn and Rückert-Lieder in arrangements for voice and orchestra (selection); Gustav Mahler — Das klagende Lied ((revised version in two movements from 1898))

Leipzig this afternoon was particularly bonkers, with huge numbers of football fans singing loudly in the main town market place, a huge number of police cars about, and continuing large numbers of Goths promenading, with many in black 19^th century gear. But there was a place of stillness in the Thomaskirche, and about 45 minutes of music by Bach, Mendelssohn, Byrd and a modern Norwegian composer, Ola Gjeilo, performed by the Boys Choir and members of the Gewandhaus orchestra. The most substantial work they performed was the Bach Cantata BWV59 – ‘We mich liebet, der wird mein Wort halten’. I sang along with a hymn – shared between congregation and choir – with words by Luther and an older melody arranged by Bach, which felt great!

The evening concert was not as high octane an evening as others in this Festival, but certainly a worthwhile one to go to. I hadn’t known that Totenfeier, the first version of the first movement of Mahler 2, had emerged from a discussion with Richard Strauss about death, and an agreement that both should write symphonic poems on the subject! Strauss’ contribution was Tod und Verklarung – which, it has to be said, is  a much less original piece than Mahler’. Totenfeier is essentially the same as the final version but without the enlarged orchestra that entails – this version has 4 horns and I think double woodwind, with maybe 3 trumpets and trombones. Where there are differences musically, they tend to be cuts to the earlier version rather than additions to the later one, and some inner voices particularly woodwind sometimes get lost because of the reduced number of instruments. A fascinating piece to hear…

The Mahler songs chosen from Des Knaben Wunderhorn  and the Ruckert lieder tended to be rather sweet-toothed and as a group a bit bland. It is a pity some of the more macabre Wunderhorn ones weren’t chosen as a contrast. Sophie Harmsen sang them very well.

Das Klagende Lied was revised by 1898 and that was the version we heard in the concert – there are recordings of the original version and it would be interesting to hear that. So views that this sounds, as a piece written by Mahler as a Conservatoire student, like ‘pure Mahler’ are a bit suspect. Nonetheless it is remarkable how much foreshadowing melodically there is of the 2^nd Symphony as well as occasionally of the 1^st. It was very well done by the Leipzig Radio forces

Gewandhaus Orchestra, MDR Radio Choir, Leipzig Opera Chorus, St. Thomas Choir Leipzig, Gewandhaus Choir, Gewandhaus Children’s Choir, Andris Nelsons conductor, Emily Magee soprano (Magna Peccatrix), Jacquelyn Wagner soprano (Una poenitentium), Ying Fang soprano (Mater gloriosa), Lioba Braun mezzo-soprano (Mulier Samaritana), Gerhild Romberger mezzo-soprano (Maria Aegyptiaca), Benjamin Bruns tenor (Doctor Marianus), Adrian Eröd baritone (Pater ecstaticus), Georg Zeppenfeld bass (Pater profundus): Symphony No 8.

The other thing that’s happening in Leipzig at present is the largest annual Goth festival in the world- https://wave-gotik-treffen.de/english/info/info.php . There are huge numbers of people in black, many with chains, women with spiked hair in unusual colours and heavy make up/white faces, and blokes with pony tails, various sort of hats, particularly top hats, and tatoos. There’s even a Pagan Village somewhere – most are middle-aged, some staying in the same hotel as me.

So…..on now to the big one. The last Mahler 8 I heard was in early 2020 in Birmingham conducted by Mirga. It was quite driven, but very good. The other Mahler 8’s I’ve heard over the years have been conducted bu Colin Davis and Pierre Boulez – I remember also Charlie Groves in the Ally Pally, oddly, in about 1971 (which felt very much like the huge exhibition space in Munich, holding 3000 people that was the site of the first performance in 1910, and Mahler’s greatest public triumph), and a performance that might have been at the old Free Trade Hall in Manchester by Kent Nagano in the mid 1990’s. Mirga’s was probably the best I’ve heard. I found myself remembering before the concert started about my father – who had left school at 14, who had little knowledge of classical music and had only ever been to one or two concerts but who was nevertheless so bowled over by watching a Proms Mahler 8 performance on TV that he instantly demanded a recording of it for his next birthday present – we should make no assumptions about who can be responsive to and affected by Mahler’s music…..

I used to find this work difficult to take in – what was in particular Goethe’s Faust doing alongside a medieval hymn. Various talks and books – particularly Stephen Johnson’s book ‘The Eighth’ – have led me to more fully understand that both parts of the work’s text are glorifying Eros, the creative Spirit, the anima – whatever we might call it, that which leads us on to be more human, more creative, more fully aliive

Certainly everything seemed fully alive in this performance, where things came spectacularly together, and I thought it had to be the best I’ve ever heard live. The combined forces of the various choruses weren’t huge (see picture) but, given the acoustics of the hall, they sounded wonderful anyway –from where I was sitting the men sounded slightly stronger than the women, because all the men were in the middle of the choir seats in front of the organ, while the women extended to the wings on either side. The children – including the Thomaskirche boys’ choir – sounded very clear. The orchestra played extraordinarily well, sounding particularly sumptuous. The soloists for the most part sounded great, though the tenor seemed to be straining occasionally – the ones well-known to me, Emily Magee and Georg Zeppennfeld, were also those who stood out as soloists. .

Most importantly from my perspective Nelsons got all the tempi right – there was nothing which sounded too slow or too fast. To give some examples, the slow down for the huge orchestral build up to, and the choral shout off ‘Accende’ in the first half was at first enormously expansive and then with the choral entry  shot forward. The venom of ‘Hostias’ was just right. The slow down at the end of the first movement just before the entry of the additional brass was wonderfully managed, so that it sounded majestic rather than like Mirga’s bolting horses. In the second part the strings were encouraged to be gloriously sumptuous at the beginning, and the various changes of mood – eg to and from the celestial boys’ music – were handled without bumpiness. Stephen Johnson had mentioned in his pre-concert talk that there’s a particular moment after Dr Marianus’ concluding passage, where glockenspiel and celesta glitter, and high flutes and clarinets ponder, which sounds both like the conclusion of Das Lied von der Erde and seems to reflect on Mahler’s view of himself as a stranger everywhere, almost as if he’s wondering whether the concluding glorious noise is really what he wants. That passage was particularly poignant in this performance. The chorus and the orchestra at the end were overwhelming, and  – praise be – there were particularly effective gong crashes, which sometimes get overlaid with other orchestral sounds in some of the live and recorded performances I’ve heard

Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden, Ladies of the Saxon State Opera Choir Dresden, Children’s Choir of the Semperoper Dresden, Christian Thielemann conductor, Christa Mayer alto: Gustav Mahler — Symphony No. 3

I went to an interesting talk in the afternoon, in the auditorium of the Mendelssohn house, near the Gewandhaus, about Mahler 3, and a Leipzig philosopher Gustav Fechner, who was at the University while Mahler was in Leipzig, and who was an Idealist philosopher who propounded a theory not so different from Teilhard de Chardin’s ideas in the 20th century, of all creation on a progressive journey of consciousness towards God – Fechner wrote a book which seriously propounded that flowers had souls…..Mahler had clearly read some of his books, the relevance to 3rd Symphony is clear, and maybe also, as someone suggested in the lecture, there’s possibly an impact on the 7^th as well –  Fechner wrote another book about Night and Day.

After the pre-concert talk by Stephen Johnson (whose talks are free and very interesting), and a surprise appearance with Johnson of Thomas Hampson, the singer, on to a concert I was looking forward to with great interest.

I got to know this work through the first Haitink recording. It is sprawling and wonderful, and every performance is always an occasion. What I love about it is its inclusivity of musical language – the landler, the schmaltzy posthorn, the folk-song, bound up with Nietzsche and a variant on the slow movement of the Op 135 Beethoven string quarter (in Mahler’s adagio). I’ve spoken before about break-out moments and certainly there’s a major one in this symphony, towards the end of the third movement, where the brass calls out from the depths for the world to move on towards God. The Nietzsche poem gives greater depth to that – again the reference to ‘ewigkeit’, but, as Johnson I think correctly pointed out, the 5^th movement emphasises compassion, and it is this that prepares the way for the final Adagio, not Nietzsche.

Mahler is not natural Thielemann territory, and I wondered what he would make of the Third Symphony.  Thielemann himself is quoted in the programme as saying “I have a plan for the future with Gustav Mahler, which consists of slowly approaching his work”

I found Thielemann’s reading of the Third Symphony very fine indeed, though not effacing the Proms performance of Bernard Haitink in 2017.  The principal strengths of it were:

– a very clear handling of the huge first movement’s structure, taken at quite a fast pace (in terms of the overall work Thielemann’s timing was more like 90 minutes than the 100 sometimes quoted for this work) but weighty enough to deal with all the drama inherent in this movement

– Thielmann is very good – I guess it comes from his long experience of Wagner – at building climaxes and generating energy in an orchestra – I remember describing his performance of Tristan at Bayreuth in 2017 as ‘boiling’ at times. It’s interesting to hear how he somehow rather prioritises orchestral impetus and inner glow, rather than total accuracy or clarity of sound – he’s also by far the most energetic of the conductors we’ve had in this Festival, and was obviously conveying that energetic passionate approach to the orchestra

– He is also very good at maintaining flexible tempi – he can bend them to slow down for a big climax or to emphasise a point of beauty without making you feel he is pulling the music about – there were excellent examples of that in the first movement, in the run-up to the big climaxes and also in a wonderfully melancholy passage for lower strings after one of the big outburst

After the first 5 movements, I thought this was absolutely the best I had ever heard live. The finale (where Haitink was as his strongest) was however taken at marginally too fast a pace – surprising given all Thielemann’s involvement with Bruckner, sounding at times more Andante than Adagio. That sometimes detracted from the overall spirituality of the movement, but the crashing waves of the oncoming climaxes were superbly done, and the final blaze was taken quite slowly, which was all to the good

The orchestra played magnificently, particularly trumpets, horns, trombones and the posthorn

A very satisfying evening, rounded off with an English Language film about Das Lied von der Erde, introduced by Thomas Hampson

Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra,  Daniele Gatti, Conductor.  Gustav Mahler: Adagio from Symphony No 10; Symphony No 1

I spent the earlier part of the day at Wittenberg – or rather Lutherstadt Wittenberg. I went to the Lutherhaus, and the Schloss church, where Luther is buried. The museum at the Lutherhaus is very fine and thoroughly informative – Luther’s house is in fact his old monastery which he, his household and his students/academic and domestic staff took over after the early 1520s with the agreement of the local ruler.

The evening’s concert encompassed both the beginning and the end of Mahler’s symphonic oeuvre – an interesting piece of programming.  This was, however, as I suspected it would be, not a great evening – though let’s be clear I’m judging this by the very highest standards (as is of course appropriate for a Festival). I’ve mentioned Gatti’s Mahler before (see review of Mahler 5 four days ago …..seems a life time…!). Both the Mahler 1 this evening, and the Mahler 4 some years ago had the same characteristics I associate with Gatti’s conducting – exaggerated tempi, arbitrarily slowing down or speeding up, and emphasis on beauty of sound for its own sake. The Mahler 1 started ridiculously slowly in the beginning of the first movement and the latter ended ridiculously fast; there was an extraordinary slow down the second time the second main theme occurred in the finale; the ending was raucous; and so forth. This performance annoyed me a great deal. The adagio of Mahler 10 was better but was not as intense as the CBSO one on Sunday.

In addition, while the orchestra plays very very well, and clearly has some very talented young players, there were sometimes problems at moments of transition, when there was a less than total unanimity of ensemble – which I guess is due to their not playing together as a permanent ensemble and some hesitancy as to how one section joins in with another  (or it might have been Gatti’s beat – though he seemed to be giving very clear directions to the young players………..)

This was the sort of evening where you think that maybe there’s too much Mahler being played, and that conductors get to feel they can only make an impact on their audience if they exaggerate their approach to the work or do something unusual. I hadn’t appreciated until reading the programme notes for the concert that in 2024 Gatti takes over from Thielemann in Dresden. That, sadly is somewhere I’ll probably be avoiding for the next few years then, though I could imagine he’s an excellent opera conductor

Budapest Festival Orchestra, Iván Fischer conductor: Gustav Mahler — Symphony No. 9

I spent an agreeable 3 hours going to some Leipzig museums – first of all the contemporary history forum, which is about the history of the DDR (and very informative, with all signs in condensed form in English) and then, at the Town Museum, the exhibition ‘The Music City Leipzig under National Socialism – Clef and Swastika), where printed English guides were available; this too had a range of fascinating exhibits outlining those who left Germany in 1933, those who lost their jobs but had no option but to stay in Leipzig, those who carried on but lay low to the extent they could, and those who actively collaborated (including Richard Strauss at first). The other name I’d come across before was Hermann Abendroth, who’d initially been dismissed from a post in 1933 ‘because he employed too many Jewish artists’, but subsequently got a job with the Opera House. He had to join NSADP in 1937, but was quick to be de-Nazified after the war

So…..Mahler 9 with the Budapest orchestra, whose performance had received some rave reviews in London when they were visiting there last week. Expectations were high and were more than met by this performance, which must be just about the best of the 9th I’ve ever heard live (here we go again into my list of superlatives, but I can only tell it as it is).

Mahler 9 is both impassioned and resigned, about whatever we think it is about – one’s own mortality, the serious business of trying to live life honourably, whatever. There are some clues as to how Mahler felt about it himself – the reference to Kindertotenlieder right at the end of the last movement, and to Beethoven’s Les Adieux sonata, and there is even, Stephen Johnson told us before the concert, some evidence from recent research that ‘Abide with me’ was the hymn that Mahler heard being sung at the fireman’s funeral in New York that produced the muffled drum stroke for the 10^th, and which so sounds like the first few notes of the Adagio’s main melody. However, as again Johnson pointed out, this symphony more than most is surrounded by myths, and it’s important to remember that it is not a ‘farewell to life’, given that it was written long before Mahler’s last illness, and he had many months of energetic programmes in New York to conduct in, and the passion for life is just as important as the fear of or resignation to death in the work. However though the break-through moments which some of the other symphonies possess appear, they fail in this symphony. The most obvious one is the slow part towards the end of the third movement – the melody is too saccharine, and fails to take off, becoming merely sad, and mocked by the orchestra – the extraordinary clarinet passage which mocks the tune, for instance. I also detected somewhere – can’t remember where, maybe the first movement – that there is a flute solo which sounds extraordinarily like the flute solo. in the finale of the 2nd symphony but which here fades into nothingness, rather than a choral hymn to resurrection. One interesting thing I didn’t know – again from Johnson – is that ‘ewig’ and the same two note sequence represented by that word features in the ending of the 8^th, obviously the end of Das Lied vin der Erde and also – the two notes – at the beginning of the 9^th Symphony.

In performing this work well, I guess you need to have a first class orchestra, and a conductor who gets the right balance between passion and resignation, so that the work neither becomes overly-manic and fidgety or too slack and slow (Wagner’s conducting theories again about melos and tempi). The orchestra sounded magnificent – somehow a darker sound to the massed strings than some I’ve heard this week, and with very fine section leads – in particular horn, trumpet, flute, oboe and clarinet. However they didn’t have  – or weren’t encouraged to have – that slightly show-off sense of beauty for its own sake that one can sometimes get from other front-rank orchestras – everything fitted into a vision of the work. The orchestra was placed with double basses along the back of the stage, violins split, cellos to the left, which all seemed to make the string sound richer in texture. The first movement was quite phenomenal – taken at a relatively quite fast past, it gripped me in a way I’ve never heard live before – the opening theme achingly beautiful, the climaxes enormous and frightening, the sadness at the end of it almost overwhelming. The sheer volume of the climaxes was quite extraordinary. The second movement was also quite fast, but still clod-hopping and rough enough in feel, and still allowing for sufficient room to be able to speed up in the manic bits. The third movement on the other hand was slower and the steady tempo allowed all notes to be heard and a clear rhythmic pulse established, the contrapuntal detail to be audible, and a manic speed-up at the end to be achieved without a scrabble – all while being played with accuracy and venom. As a result the movement sounded grimmer than it sometimes does  more bitter and it never degenerated into just being an orchestral showpiece. The last movement was extraordinarily fine, with again not that slow a basic tempo. This emphasised the passion for life in this movement as well as the tragedy of the great climaxes. The strings digging in to their unaccompanied 4 note passage in the last of the climaxes was a sound so intense it was almost unbearable to listen to. Equally the strings slowly dying away at the end were very memorable.

Justifiably this performance got the loudest cheers and most people on their feet of any performance so far this Festival. Half way through the Festival it’s this performance and the Concertgebouw’s No 5 that have been the stand-outs.

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Daniel Harding: Gustav Mahler – Symphony No 7

I spent the earlier part of the day in Eisenach, about an hour’s train ride from Leipzig, the birthplace of Bach with a fine Bach Museum, rather better than its cramped Leipzig equivalent, and including an hourly concert for 20 minutes of extracts from Bach’s keyboard music played on a domestic organ, a clavichord, a spinet and a harpsichord . By 5pm I was back in Leipzig at an English language talk by Anna Stoll-Knecht (Locarno) on Mahler and Wagner (it being Wagner’s birthday), with particular reference to conducting Wagner in Leipzig. One thing I hadn’t appreciated is that Cosima and Mahler collaborated closely on finding and training singers for Wagner roles and were in regular touch with each other from the early 1890’s to mid 1900’s, until she abandoned Mahler because of her indignation at the innovative Roller sets in Vienna. We were also played a brief extract from Karl Muck’s 1928 recording of Parsifal as the next best thing to hearing Mahler conduct – I used to have that recording in vinyl, and was reminded how good it was I took immediate steps to get a digital version this morning. The speaker focused on Wagner’s theories on conducting – that the key things are getting the melodic line clear, getting then the tempo right, and ensuring that transitions from one tempo to another are gradual and not lurching.  Mahler’s early reviews suggested he hadn’t taken that advice yet when he was conducting in Leipzig – there are references to ‘jerkiness’, over-excitability etc

And so to Mahler 7…… Stephen Johnson made the  – I thought quite helpful – comment in his talk before the concert started that (quoting Abbado) we shouldn’t be trying to make sense of this work; we should just enjoy its very different moments, its wonderful instrumentation, the thematic material. It’s in a way Mahler’s most mindful symphony. I think you can be a little bit bolder than that, personally, and that the comments in programmes notes that you find talking about the work as an evocation of ‘night’, is fair enough. There is a certain sort of darkness about the first 4 movements that I can relate to this (and, according to Johnson, Mahler is said to have announced loudly to an orchestra when he was rehearsing the work, when he got to the finale, “And now…….this is DAY!’ I followed that mindful advice, though, and found it helpful. If you take that view about mindfulness, however, almost automatically you’re going to prefer the clinical precision, the remarkable focus on detail that the Berlin Phil and Petrenko offered at the Proms last September, as I reviewed here at the time. Harding’s reading, with another great orchestra (now of course Rattle’s) did not have that degree of forensic detail and exquisite moments. What it did have was bundles of energy. With my mindful hat on, and not bothering overmuch about what the symphony is ‘about’, I loved particularly the finale, which gripped me more than any other live performance has done, and which was brilliantly played by the orchestra. But sometimes I felt that Harding was trying too much to emphasise certain points, to make things in a sense ‘meaningful’ . But there were superb solos by almost every section principal, and the orchestra was wonderful. The performance got a big ovation from the audience (though not on the scale of the Concertgebouw’s 5^th on Saturday. Interestingly, having a drink afterwards with someone I’d met on Friday’s guided tour, afterwards, we overheard two blokes at the next table talking about Mahler and Wagner. They stopped to have a chat when they left and one of them turned out to the (excellent) conductor Mark Wigglesworth, who agreed that the 5 movement don’t fit together very well – they seem to come from different symphonies, he said

City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, conductor Robert Trevino : Gustav Mahler — Symphony No. 10 (arrangement by Deryck Cooke)

Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla was meant to be the conductor for this concert but she pulled out a week before the event – as she had been conducting in Rome a few days earlier on May 13 and was due to be conducting this in Birmingham around the same time, I’m not quite sure what was happening with her programming…..I’d not heard of the replacement but he is apparently a frequent visitor to Leipzig. It’s a pity not have heard Mirga conduct this work – I usually find her concerts inspirational.

I came to this concert with some trepidation. I can see why the CBSO were invited to the Festival – Nelsons used to be their chief conductor, Mirga was his successor, they have had a succession of winners as conductors that has given them a lot of kudos (Rattle, Oramo, Nelsons himself, Mirga) – but it’s still a bit of a leap from the three orchestras we’ve had so far to the CBSO. How would they fare?

The answer is….very well indeed. The CBSO is not the Concertgebouw, and no British orchestra in my experience (and I am happy to be told otherwise) apart from arguably the LSO has the kind of weight and thickness of string sound that the best central European orchestras have (and the Concertgebouw) – though the Halle are pretty stylish string-wise. But there were virtuoso performances from (particularly) the first trumpet (and his back-up in those searing long trumpet notes), and the first flute, and in general excellent tight ensemble. What the CBSO strings did have is a sort of acerbic lightness that goes very well with the sound world of this symphony. I was touched to hear someone next to me (I think – my German is minimal) say to his neighbour ‘They play like a German orchestra’. High praise indeed!!

I got to know this work through the first recording of the Cooke performing version  – the Philadelphia/Ormandy recording. That was of Cooke 1, but in fact Deryck Cooke revised it another two times. It was interesting to hear some of the (minor but audible) changes he made, adding more texture and depth to the orchestral sound

It is very easy to read Mahler’s life a little too smoothly into his works. As Stephen Johnson (who’s giving an English language lecture before each symphony in the Gewandhaus) mentioned, the enormous dissonant crash with the high trumpet in the first movement was added at a fairly late stage in Mahler’s development of the score, so it’s reasonable to assume that it is a response to the news of Alma’s infidelity in the Spring. But this work was being developed alongside the enormous triumph of the first performance of the 8^th Symphony in the summer of 1910 in Munich, which established Mahler publicly as an eminent composer who was also a conductor, rather than vice-versa. Though he obviously knew of his heart problems, he had no idea at that point that he was going to be dead within a year. So while there is clearly an emotional journey in this work, it is not necessarily about a dying man, and may have (pure conjecture of course) more to do with his continuing grief for the death of his eldest daughter, and Alma’s adultery.

The symphony’s structure is much harder to ascertain than the first 7 symphonies, and it comes as no surprise that, according to Donald Mitchell, there is evidence that Mahler had some uncertainty about the order of the 5 movements as he developed the work. Essentially, we have a first movement that moves between consolation and bleakness, a second that is quite jolly, the deadly serious Purgatorio, the violent 4^th movement and a final movement that brings back consolation to the fore. It is more difficult for a conductor and orchestra, therefore, to take us on a journey through this work which makes emotional sense than, say, the 5^th Symphony. The best thing about this performance was that the journey was clear and made sense. Key elements were:

• The shattering climax of the first movement, which was brilliantly done, and overpowering in volume (the trumpet and high strings were extraordinary)
• The clarity and rhythmic impulse of the second movement
• The depth of the sudden upswelling of emotion half-way through the Purgatorio movement, which is, if not a break out moment to something ‘other’, then certainly the turning point of the work, where it’s recognised that the status quo, the continual grind, self-conscious jollity can’t continue, and that grim reality has to be faced and hopefully overcome
• The jagged edges of the 4^th movement – though there were moments when the conductor I thought went too fast and, though the CBSO kept up with him, some clarity was lost in terms of note-value
• The beautiful way in which the consoling song of the last movement unfolded, and the passionate climax and upswelling at the end

So, all in all, a performance I appreciated very much of a work I haven’t heard very often live in the concert hall in the full performing version. One thing I noticed which I hadn’t before is the occasional influence of Parsifal on the score – Mahler didn’t, I think, conduct Parsifal in New York, taking the ban on complete performances outside Bayreuth seriously, but he did conduct extracts in New York and Germany. The opening of the first movement is very similar to the Act 3 Prelude, and at the end of the first movement there is a passage very similar to the closing bars of the Prelude to Act 1, as the curtain rises

What would have happened if Mahler had lived another 20 years – how might his work have developed? Stephen Johnson’s view was that the 10th symphony performing version suggests some very tentative answers – that he wouldn’t have tipped over into total atonality but, rather as Britten and Shostakovich did, used atonality within a fundamentally tonal perspective. But beyond that – who can say; how would WW1 have affected him? Would he have gone back to an impoverished and much reduced Vienna? Would he have been interned in the US? Sadly, we shall never know……..

Mahler being carried off the train on his last journey, arriving in Vienna and reported by newspapers