Mahler
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 ...
David Nice
Why travel to Glyndebourne for a concert? Well, for a start, none of us has heard a Mahler symphony live in full orchestral garb for at least 15 months, and though the Fourth is smaller-scale than some, its innocent beginnings belie the cosmic adventures ahead. Only a handful of us got to see the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the Royal Festival Hall during the semi-lockdown period; its departing music director Vladimir Jurowski had to make do with overwrought film presentation only when he bowed out with Tchaikovsky’s complete Swan Lake ballet score. And any programme which segues from Read more ...
graham.rickson
André Previn: The Warner Edition – Complete HMV & Teldec Recordings (Warner Classics)Flicking through this box set will provoke a Proustian rush if you’re of a certain age. These recordings were mostly made for EMI, though Warner Classics have wisely kept the LPs’ original sleeve art, reminding us of just how ubiquitous a presence André Previn once was in the UK. Many of these recordings were bestsellers, familiar to anyone who frequented record shops or public libraries in the 1970s or 1980s. A multilingual child prodigy, Previn began his musical career as a conductor and arranger Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
The drunkard in spring; the lonely man in autumn; the long goodbye. Mahler’s last song-cycle often seems to embody solitude; a resigned, earthly counterpart to the transcendent rapture of his previous work, the Eighth Symphony, as a superstitious talisman to ward off the finality of a Ninth. Last night at the Barbican, however, in their first performance back at their much-maligned home, the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle showed a different side to the piece – or rather sides, because this was a performance lit from within by a remarkably full realisation of its place in Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: The English Suites Paolo Zanzu (harpsichord) (Musica Ficta)I’m a recent convert to Bach keyboard music played on harpsichord, having recently immersed myself in the Erato box set containing Zuzana Růžičková’s Bach recordings made in the 1970s. Her preferred instrument was an iron-framed modern harpsichord, whereas Paolo Zanzu uses a 1995 copy of a German original built in 1735. It makes a soft, warm sound, his readings of Bach’s six English Suites correspondingly friendly and intimate. With a piano it’s easier to concentrate on Bach’s harmonic arguments, but the harpsichord allows Read more ...
David Nice
In verses from the folk anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth's Magic Horn) set by Mahler as a song, later adapted for the scherzo of his Second Symphony, St Anthony of Padua sermonizes on repentance to the fish, who all listen politely and then carry on behaving as they did before. It’s a parable destined to apply to the human world after lockdown, but not to the wonderful Iván Fischer, who turned 70 in January, telling an aquarium what to make of four movements of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony before and between conducting his Budapest Festival Orchestra. The results will surely charge up Read more ...
David Nice
How strange to experience Saffron Walden’s amazingly high-standard new(ish) concert hall without the usual auditorium – in other words no tiered rows other than in the balcony, but seats around tables, on a level with the musicians (pictured below, the scene before the performance). And what a world-class concert this was, not the sort of thing you’d usually expect at the end of a misty afternoon’s ramble in the Essex countryside.It was a topsy-turvy programme, to be sure, with meditations bright (Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll) and dark (Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder) followed by an anything but tea- Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mahler: Symphony No. 7 Orchestre National de Lille/Alexandre Bloch (Alpha Classics)Mahler 5’s five movements trace a lucid journey from darkness to light, and No. 6’s tautly-structured outer movements don’t contain a wasted note. Whereas cynics suggest that No. 7 is an unsuccessful rehash of elements drawn from its two predecessors. They’re wrong. This is the Mahler symphony I got to know first, if only because it was the only one available at my local record library (remember those?). I’ve loved it ever since. That the work is now almost standard repertoire is remarkable, given the Read more ...