United Kingdom Howell, Weill, and Mahler: Anu Komsi (soprano), BBC Symphony Orchestra / Sakari Oramo (conductor, violin). Barbican Hall, London, 16.4.2025. (MB)
Dorothy Howell – Lamia
Kurt Weill – Der neue Orpheus, Op.15
Mahler – Symphony No.4 in G main
Placing little-known music with a Mahler symphony may be thought each a wise and high-risk technique. It will nearly definitely outcome within the music gaining a wider viewers. In the case of Dorothy Howell, although, it’s troublesome to think about many wishing to increase that acquaintance. To be honest, she was younger when she wrote Lamia, premiered (1919) and championed by at least Henry Wood. Maybe there are higher items from afterward in her profession. The muted reception accorded to a dedicated efficiency from the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Sakari Oramo mentioned all of it, alas. I can’t think about anybody would have divined inspiration in Keats with out being instructed so. An opening two-flute determine intrigued; like all the things else, it led nowhere specifically. This was a tone poem that may nearly have appealed as to these for whom Delius’s music is just too goal-oriented and too radical in musical language. If introductions to introductions to introductions had been your factor, you would possibly nonetheless discover it featureless, although there normally appears to be an English ‘enthusiast’ marketplace for rhapsodic expanses of lateish-Romantic sound.
Weill got here, then, as a aid, in a uncommon alternative to listen to his 1925 cantata Der neue Orpheus. It continued a vaguely Grecian theme, but is something aside from nostalgic, setting Yvan Goll’s ironic, surrealist – maybe mockingly surrealist – poem in a witty set of musical parodies taking us from Clementi to Wagner through Stravinsky, Mahler, and different milieux. And that is just one central part of its twenty-minute span. (Howell, apparently, was considerably shorter, but felt longer.) Can one hear absence? Almost definitely, if solely contextually. The absence of violins within the chamber orchestra was absolutely felt in that sense at the least, in usually wind-led sound, adopted with speedy safety and conviction of idiom by the BBC SO. The orchestral introduction, imbued with a eager sense of drama, might need been the opening to an opera. Vividly communicative, Ana Komsi’s account of the textual content relished its surrealism but in addition the humanity seemingly gained (shades already of the uneasy collaboration between Brecht and Weill?) by its alchemic conversion into vocal music. ‘Everyone is Orpheus. Who does not know Orpheus?’ Such apparently lofty universalism was instantly deflated, even alienated, by banal element of his important statistics and character. Increasing presence of Busoni within the orchestra was splendidly introduced out by Oramo, reminding us not solely of the id of Weill’s trainer, however of the conductor’s latest excellent account of his Piano Concerto, Pierrot- in addition to Orpheus-like, Oramo took up his violin, as sounds of the circus took us nearer to the world of Mahagonny and, particularly notable, that of The Soldier’s Tale.
If Goll and Weill’s Orpheus moved its viewers, the efficiency of Mahler’s symphony was not fairly what I used to be anticipating. This Mahler Fourth was arguably extra dramatic in a stage sense and fewer Classical than most. It was not a lot that actions in themselves – and in relation to 1 one other – appeared to have been conceived individually as that conception apparently having been born extra of distinction than line, even continuity. The first motion’s opening was extra deliberate than regular, actually holding again earlier than launching right into a spirited first topic. It had allure, fashion, precision, coronary heart, and closely inverted commas. Flexibility is written in addition to referred to as for interpretatively, however each varieties appeared emphasised right here and all through in a notably nightmarish studying, during which sardonic presentiments of the Fifth Symphony took priority over these of neoclassicism. It was likely extra context than the rest, however Weill at occasions appeared solely to be simply across the nook. And the music definitely breathed: not all the time usually, however it breathed.
Weird, infantile, all issues in good measure, the second motion obtained a transfer on with out being hurried. If Oramo liked it a bit of an excessive amount of every so often, it was a fault in the best path. And right here a sure type of neoclassicism did come to the fore; there have been passages during which Schoenberg’s Serenade, Op.23, was unquestionably a kindred spirit. It appeared to predict each actions to return, the third unfolding ‘naturally’, nearly in response, with out attempting to show it into Bruckner. There remained in such distinction a extremely trendy subjectivity. Mahler’s inheritance from Beethoven was neither missed nor overplayed in a passionate but removed from overblown efficiency whose climax proved correctly transferring. So too did the arrival of the finale, palpable because it should be in sincerity that’s childlike but by no means infantile. The singing of Komsi (Oramo’s spouse) contributed an additional stage of intercession as middleman between us and the saints. This was rightly extra Styrian than Sienese, in voice and orchestra alike. I’m not certain I’ve ever felt extra instantly concerned, mediation however, as if a definitive, magical hyperlink had been cast within the Great Chain of Being.
Mark Berry