Mahler
stephen.walsh
What a fascinating work Mahler's Ninth Symphony is! Marvellous and astonishing as well, of course. But these qualities are, so to speak, written into the score (did Mahler ever compose anything not designed to astonish?).Yet the fascination comes from outside, from the music’s time and place. And for various reasons Markus Stenz's performance, in front of a surprising number of unoccupied seats in Cardiff’s St.David’s Hall, hinted strongly at this aspect while by no means downplaying the others.Powerful and profoundly engaged though it was, this was not a performance that bled visibly, as so Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Colourise London Choral Sinfonia/Michael Waldron, with Roderick Williams (baritone), Andrew Staples (tenor), Elena Urioste (violin) (Orchid)Colourise, the latest album from by the London Choral Sinfonia, proved revelatory: I came for the Vaughan Williams, but got unexpectedly drawn in by the Lennox Berkeley. His Variations on a Hymn by Orlando Gibbons gets its premiere recording and is a piece I am very pleased to know: it grows engagingly from a humble beginning, solo strings quietly mimicking viols, before growing to fill its 19-minute duration without feeling a moment too long. Read more ...
David Nice
Match the most multi-timbred, flexible orchestra in the world with the iridescent peak of symphonic mastery, and you have an assured winner of a Prom. Yet not even Kirill Petrenko’s previous London performance of Mahler’s Seventh with the Bavarian State Orchestra, nor the brilliance of his two previous Proms with the Berlin Philharmonic, had prepared me for the miracle he achieved last night with players who will clearly do anything for him.Unlike his predecessor in Berlin, Simon Rattle, Petrenko makes Mahler fly, much more air and fire though not without earthiness when it’s needed (update: Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Long goodbyes don’t get grander, warmer or more passionate than this. Sir Simon Rattle began his farewell season with the London Symphony Orchestra with a Proms performance of Mahler’s Second, “Resurrection” Symphony – the mighty work that has waymarked the major moves of his career. Finely pointed and detailed as ever, yet lacking nothing in the overwhelming uplift of its close, this Resurrection almost felt designed to remind London of the giant gifts it will soon lose. However, if the motives for Rattle’s departure for Munich included disappointment over the city’s failure to fund and Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Karel Ančerl: Live Recordings (Supraphon)Karel Ančerl’s nascent conducting career was interrupted by World War II, Ančerl and his family being sent to the Theresienstadt camp in 1942. Two years later, he and his family were sent to Auschwitz. Ančerl’s wife and son were murdered; he survived, returning home and gaining a conducting post with Radio Prague. There’s an inspiring quote in this set’s booklet, Ančerl recalling that, “despite having witnessed the abysmal depths of that which a human is capable of doing to a fellow human, I did not lose faith in people – I returned with full Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Jugendstil: Music by Mahler and Schoenberg Beatrice Berrut (piano) (La Dolce Volta)“Is transcription betrayal?” asks pianist Beatrice Berrut in her booklet essay. Emphatically not, Berrut seeing transcription as “an act of homage to the genius of a music whose essence does not change.” Berrut’s arrangement of the “Adagietto” from Mahler 5 is a brilliant reinvention, not a pale imitation. You wonder how she’ll handle Mahler’s sustained lines, so easily playable on orchestral strings, and then grin when you hear the unobtrusive, syncopated Brahmsian accompanying figure that she adds to Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Conductor and pianist came at Liszt from opposite directions last night. Michael Tilson Thomas is a venerable presence at the podium and has been Laureate Conductor of the London Symphony for decades. Their relationship speaks of deep empathy and close communication. In the Liszt First Piano Concerto, MTT dug deep into the rich string tone of the LSO for round, warm sonorities, and always with plenty of bass. Lukáš Vondráček (pictured below) is a generation or two younger than MTT, and is the leading Czech pianist of his generation. He’s not a complete stranger to the LSO; they played Read more ...
Robert Beale
Saturday’s concert by the BBC Philharmonic was in large measure about the Mahlers – Gustav and Alma. The former’s First Symphony formed the substantial second part of the programme: Frau Mahler was the inspiration of the piece that opened the evening. New Zealand-born Gemma New returned to Manchester to conduct: we saw her last October on the Hallé rostrum, and the energy and fierce attention she brought then were even more evident this time.That first piece was Die Windsbraut, by Alissa Firsova (daughter of Elena and of Dmitri Smirnov), a short essay in putting pictorial ideas into music, Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Mahler: Symphony No. 4 Czech Philharmonic Orchestra/Semyon Bychkov,with Chen Reiss (soprano) (Pentatone)Semyon Bychkov’s Mahler 4 is the first volume of a projected cycle from an orchestra with a surprisingly small Mahler discography. Mahler was born in what is now the Czech Republic, and the fanfares and funeral marches which fill his symphonies echo those he heard while growing up in Jihlava. The Czech Philharmonic does have recorded form in Mahler: Vaclav Neumann’s late 1970s symphony cycle on Supraphon is as idiomatic as they come, and there’s a thrilling vintage version of No. 9 Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Mahler on modern instruments is ubiquitous these days, so historically informed performance is bound to be revealing. Here, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment brought transparency and focus to Mahler’s often complex textures in his Fourth Symphony. The concert was programmed as a showcase for young South African soprano Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha, whose voice is ideal for this repertoire. But just as interesting was conductor Ádám Fischer, an engaged and energetic Mahlerian, and always gently resistant to convention.The concert opened with the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth. The gut Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Sometimes you know the quality of music by the depth of the silence when it ends. Last night at Middle Temple Hall – and thank Mahler’s mystical heavens for it – the final ghostly “Ewig” of Der Abschied faded away into a soundless void that lasted just as long as it had to. No braying dunces shrieking “Brava!” spoiled the stillness that Alice Coote and pianist Julius Drake left in the wake of the supreme rhapsodies of leave-taking that close Das Lied von der Erde. On Remembrance Day, at the finale of this recital devoted to Mahler’s “songs of life and death”, that silence felt more than Read more ...
David Nice
You don’t expect a great orchestral string section to be born overnight, yet under the circumstances of the Proms Festival Orchestra’s rapid creation and only three rehearsals of three hours each, this was more than good, with detailed articulation demanded and delivered. You also wouldn’t have expected, until it was announced a few weeks back, a big Mahler symphony in a slimmed-down Proms season.What a cause for celebration beyond the sheer feat of freelance musicians coming together, many after a long performing silence (which also meant, mostly, Mahler’s too). What we should perhaps call “ Read more ...