United Kingdom Mahler: Hongni Wu (mezzo-soprano), Philharmonia Voices (Ladies), Tiffin Boys’ Choir, Philharmonia Orchestra / Paavo Järvi (conductor). Royal Festival Hall, London, 16.3.2023. (CK)
Mahler – Symphony No. 3
Mahler’s Third is so broadly 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 important incomprehension and hostility from the beginning. After the primary Vienna efficiency Felix Salten (writer of Bambi) mentioned 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 in which all the elements that have ever been put into a symphony before are conglomerated with all the musical equivalents of a picaresque novel and a Christmas pantomime … On internal evidence it was written during a holiday at Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.’
We take such issues in our stride now. Perhaps an excessive amount of so, particularly within the first motion. Desmond Shawe-Taylor labelled it an inventive 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 nicely to recollect the outline of Mahler’s expertise – a decade or so after writing the Third – by his spouse Alma: ‘One day in the summer he came running down from his hut in a perspiration, scarcely able to breathe … it was the heat, the stillness, the Pan-ic terror. He was overcome by this feeling 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 should have been for Mahler’s first audiences. As the music put out tendrils, expanded and multiplied itself in the direction of Mahler’s riotous ‘Rite of Summer’ 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 following 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 chill out, to tug again for some time; I used to be caught up, ‘in the moment’ all through: and it was over so quickly!
A quick pause, and on we went. The flower minuet was fleet-footed; sufficient to make one keep in mind with a smile Natalie Bauer-Lechner’s account of Mahler straining his hand attempting to put in writing the innumerable sextuplets on the pace he wished them performed. The limpid great thing about sound was enhanced (as additionally within the finale) by Järvi’s inserting 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.
Both 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 just a little 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 might 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 Garden’s Jette Parker Young 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 folks music; the place subsequent? In some fingers the finale will be virtually a spiritual expertise. Not right here. ‘The Ixion’s Wheel of appearances is ultimately dropped at a standstill’, Mahler advised Natalie; however for Järvi and the Philharmonia the aim was in sight, they usually harnessed the momentum of the entire efficiency to press ahead in the direction of it. Anguished interruptions have been gathered into the music’s progress however not allowed to hinder 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 instructor of philosophy. For me, the efficiency was thrilling, stunning, in the end falling wanting the transcendence I hoped for. For her, it was a transferring, brave and all-embracing response to Nietzsche’s query: How a lot reality are you able to bear? All of it, says Mahler. True to the intimations of the Nietzsche ‘Midnight Song’, the efficiency sought and located the enjoyment that lies (tempo Wordsworth) too deep for tears.
One very last thing: I’ve by no means heard a efficiency of this dizzyingly multifarious symphony that was so clearly and persistently 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