United Kingdom Mahler: Hongni Wu (mezzo-soprano), Philharmonia Voices (Girls), Tiffin Boys’ Choir, Philharmonia Orchestra / Paavo Järvi (conductor). Royal Pageant Corridor, London, 16.3.2023. (CK)
Mahler – Symphony No. 3
Mahler’s Third is so extensively recognized and cherished that it’s odd to be reminded that it was the final of his symphonies to chalk up a UK public efficiency, fifty years after the composer’s loss of life, and that it aroused essential incomprehension and hostility from the beginning. After the primary Vienna efficiency Felix Salten (creator of Bambi) stated that the composer deserved to be locked up for a number of years. Sir Donald Tovey poked good-natured enjoyable at its comprehensiveness, describing it as ‘a musical phantasmagoria wherein all the weather which have ever been put right into a symphony earlier than are conglomerated with all of the musical equivalents of a picaresque novel and a Christmas pantomime … On inner proof it was written throughout a vacation at Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.’
We take such issues in our stride now. Maybe an excessive amount of so, particularly within the first motion. Desmond Shawe-Taylor labelled it a creative monstrosity, and certainly there are monsters right here: it’s the job of conductor and gamers to not tame them, however to conjure them. We do properly to recollect the outline of Mahler’s expertise – a decade or so after writing the Third – by his spouse Alma: ‘Someday in the summertime he got here working down from his hut in a perspiration, scarcely capable of breathe … it was the warmth, the stillness, the Pan-ic terror. He was overcome by this sense of the goat-god’s frightful and ebullient eye upon him in his solitude.’
So, did Paavo Järvi and the Philharmonia let the monsters free? They did. The introduction was thrillingly eruptive, with braying brass, seismically uprushing basses and ear-splitting drums. It was as stupendous and astonishing because it will need to have been for Mahler’s first audiences. Because the music put out tendrils, expanded and multiplied itself in direction of Mahler’s riotous ‘Ceremony of Summer time’ there was a fierce readability to the enjoying, with Järvi’s stabbing stick or finger going right here, there and all over the place, ensuring that each element was spotlit, each rhythm articulated with precision and elasticity. He was clearly revelling within the Dionysian ecstasy of all of it, one second marching on the spot on the rostrum, the subsequent fluttering his left hand aloft to encourage these raucous horn trills, his physique uninhibitedly jaunty as we approached the loopy passage Mahler labelled ‘The Mob’. There was no slack bar; even the central interlude (beautiful enjoying from first violin, horn and flute) went previous with none lack of stress or momentum. There was no alternative to loosen up, to drag again for some time; I used to be caught up, ‘within the second’ all through: and it was over so quickly!
A short pause, and on we went. The flower minuet was fleet-footed; sufficient to make one bear in mind with a smile Natalie Bauer-Lechner’s account of Mahler straining his hand making an attempt to jot down the innumerable sextuplets on the velocity he wished them performed. The limpid great thing about sound was enhanced (as additionally within the finale) by Järvi’s putting the primary and second violins left and proper, throughout the total width of the stage. The ending was so beautiful that he appeared unwilling to let it go.
Each this motion and the animal Scherzo have been distinguished by some brilliantly characterful woodwind enjoying, Katherine Bryan’s feisty flute the standout. James Fountain’s posthorn might maybe have been a little bit extra distant, however he performed it so fantastically (so, too, the hushed orchestral accompaniment) that not one of the magic was misplaced.
The mezzo soloist Hongni Wu entered instantly earlier than her motion, to a smattering of applause; I’d have most well-liked her entrance to have been unobtrusive (and earlier), nevertheless it wasn’t as unhealthy as Leonard Bernstein’s video Vienna efficiency, the place Lenny goes off to fetch Christa Ludwig and turns her arrival virtually into an additional motion of the symphony. Hongni Wu – a graduate of Covent Backyard’s Jette Parker Younger Artists Programme – sang fantastically, seeming to develop in heat and eloquence; her ‘Ach komm’ und erbarme dich’ within the fifth motion was genuinely touching.
Nocturnal Nietzsche, and a Christian people music; the place subsequent? In some arms the finale will be virtually a non secular expertise. Not right here. ‘The Ixion’s Wheel of appearances is finally dropped at a standstill’, Mahler instructed Natalie; however for Järvi and the Philharmonia the objective was in sight, and so they harnessed the momentum of the entire efficiency to press ahead in direction of it. Anguished interruptions have been gathered into the music’s progress however not allowed to impede it; and so we arrived, by way of a hushed brass chorale that uncovered some drained lips, on the place of fulfilment and pleasure.
I used to be on the live performance with my daughter, who has been a trainer of philosophy. For me, the efficiency was thrilling, stunning, in the end falling in need of the transcendence I hoped for. For her, it was a shifting, brave and all-embracing response to Nietzsche’s query: How a lot fact are you able to bear? All of it, says Mahler. True to the intimations of the Nietzsche ‘Midnight Track’, the efficiency sought and located the enjoyment that lies (tempo Wordsworth) too deep for tears.
One final thing: I’ve by no means heard a efficiency of this dizzyingly multifarious symphony that was so clearly and constantly the outworking of a single imaginative and prescient, generated and sustained by a single impulse. And it was over very quickly in any respect.
Chris Kettle
