thu 28/03/2024

London Philharmonic Orchestra, Jurowski, Royal Festival Hall | reviews, news & interviews

London Philharmonic Orchestra, Jurowski, Royal Festival Hall

London Philharmonic Orchestra, Jurowski, Royal Festival Hall

New Southbank season launched by a fresh look at Mahler's cosmic Third Symphony

From primeval baying to a very human song in excelsis, Mahler's Third Symphony cries out for Olympian interpretation. That I've found in recent years with Abbado in Lucerne and the Albert Hall, Bělohlávek at the Barbican and Salonen on the South Bank. Since Vladimir Jurowski always demonstrates fresh thinking, and sometimes a burning intensity to match, the first performance of his London Philharmonic's new season was bound to be at least as challenging.

That it certainly was from the opening bars. After two months of hearing conductors and orchestras handling mass and void in the Proms' cavernous Albertopolitan home, it could only be a shock to be slapped by the sharp angles of the Royal Festival Hall. Perhaps that was why Jurowski made relatively little of Mahler's potential dynamic extremes, spaces and silences in a usually riven half-hour first movement. Here, raw nature and the raggle-taggle marchers who totter along its craggy ridges seemed two sides of the same coin, reminding us that Mahler uses much of the same material for both musics.

Yet the heart of the movement did go duly berserk within the taut rhythmic confines Jurowski insisted upon, sandwiched as it was between a novel jamming-together of pinging, stratospheric harps and grumbling double basses at one end and a Max Walli-ish side-drum rattling away behind us at the other. The coda, too, accelerated masterfully from colossal universal brake-slamming into an unexpected orgy of celebration. Collective gasps from the audience followed hot on its final crash, but no immediate applause, though that soon began to ripple as chorus and mezzo filed on for their later contributions.

Then we were treated to true Jurowskian method-in-madness with a flower-picture minuet that seemed to be more about the innocence of childhood, ushered in by Ian Hardwick's coy oboe solo, as full of sudden vocalisings as the animal magic which followed (no wonder we heard flutes practising their runs in the warm-up; Jurowski took the wind that shakes the meadow at a heck of a lick). The scherzo's offstage post-horn, beautifully distanced and naturally phrased by the consummate Paul Beniston, started as a nursery-rhyme lullaby and only wove its dreamy spell on its final return, a sudden growing-up.

Pic_Petra_Lang_Elbstr__11-Ann-Weitz_bearbNext came the still centre, the deeply serious declamation of Nietzsche's "Midnight Song" with the magnificent Petra Lang (pictured right) sibylline among the choir against controversial oboe nature-shrieks and violins singing the human response in this very different cosmos. We couldn't have wished for a brighter, more dewily phrased matutinal bell song by way of innocent answer from the ladies of the London Philharmonic Choir and the Trinity Boys Choir.

Why, then, the pause for seating between the last fading tintinnabulation and the deeply serious string hymn which forms the apex of the symphony? "Without a break" says Mahler, and to indulge one runs the risk of losing the listener's sympathy right at the start of what can be a long haul. And Jurowski made that final Adagio a very long haul indeed. Though impeccably phrased and unerringly unfolded, it wasn't my idea of an inwardly mobile prize song. So I tried the transcendental meditation approach, and admired it from an emotional distance with eyes closed. It may just be that my depths respond to a faster heartbeat; I left this performance full of admiration but quite unmoved. Clearly not the experience of the many who gave Jurowski a no doubt deserved standing ovation. As indeed I'd gladly done in his revelatory Mahler Resurrection Symphony last season

I'd had my vision earlier, when something of the old LPO/Jurowski programming spark asserted itself at the start of what is, by and large, a safer season with Zemlinsky's Six Maeterlinck Songs. What astonishing pieces these are, individual streets ahead of the relatively over-touted Korngold in the way they cast their late-Romantic spell: half densely textured rhapsodies, half simple ballads (Robin Holloway's silk wrap around Schumann's Mary Queen of Scots settings is fresh in my mind as a recent parallel).

In 1910, the year of the songs, Mahler was being discombobulated by his wife Alma's affair with Walter Gropius, and beginning to pour his heartbreak in the Tenth Symphony; Zemlinsky, some time after his renunciation of love for the then-unmarried Alma, allowed Maeterlinck's twilight of loss and parting to inform his musical feelings.

If we didn't know all this, though, we'd probably hear these as layered reflections of the Belgian poet-playwright's preoccupations with darkness and light, liberation and repression, youth and old age (isn't it time for a Maeterlinck revival in the theatre?). They're November songs, surrounded last night by a halo of coughing more suitable for that sickly month.

Moods shift in a single tone colour. A celesta can provide a healing touch in a note, a tam-tam signal sudden catastrophe, and in between the voice and its solo-string companions are left to surge and grope in the half-light. The resplendent  Wagnerian contours of Lang's singular and impassioned mezzo, matched to an upper register fuller and richer than many a dramatic soprano's, drew us into the strange world of longing ultimately fulfilled; while Jurowski's LPO players, as in the Mahler, essayed an opera for orchestra of their own which perfectly complemented the siren song.

 

Add comment

newsletter

Get a weekly digest of our critical highlights in your inbox each Thursday!

Simply enter your email address in the box below

View previous newsletters