SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

In Marshall Marcus’s interesting pre-concert talk, the Southbank Centre’s Head of Music revealed that the original thought was for a performance of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony - ‘A Symphony of a Thousand’ - before the ‘Resurrection’ Symphony was decided upon. This was deemed to be particularly close to Leonard Bernstein’s heart and appropriate as Marin Alsop’s ten-month Bernstein Project as it nears it conclusion. There is a direct line of succession from Gustav Mahler, through Bruno Walter, to Leonard Bernstein and then to Marin Alsop because Bernstein was her mentor. Most notably, Bernstein performed Mahler 2 in November 1963 in memory of his friend President Kennedy, explaining why he chose this Symphony ‘with its visionary concept of hope and triumph over worldly pain’. He said, ‘We played the Mahler symphony not only in terms of resurrection for the soul of one we love, but also for the resurrection of hope in all of us who mourn him’. This weight of such music history must have pressed heavily on Marin Alsop’s shoulders and in the end this was an evening where the maxim ‘it’s not where you start … it’s where you finish’ applied very strongly.

For this Symphony’s climatic fifth movement when the voices intone the ‘Resurrection’ text, the chorus surrounded the orchestra filling the first rows on either sides of the stalls, the overhanging boxes, side stalls, as well as, the normal choir seating. From the whispered word ‘Aufersteh’n’ to the final apocalyptic tsunami of sound that Mahler composed, this performance gave me a palpable frisson as the lights went up and the seven choirs turned to the audience. Sadly, this was only the final minutes of a concert that apparently involved 563 musicians, soloists, and amateur singers. The finale definitely sounded at the end like the ‘Symphony of a half-Thousand’ but for the rest of its ninety minute span, it had a restraint, bordering on tentativeness, and a rawness symptomatic of the probable difficulty of finding time to rehearse two different orchestras and the several choral groups.

The forces involved, including Marin Alsop’s own Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra of which she is Conductor Emeritus, were probably too large to allow for perfection since Mahler provides plenty of pitfall traps for the orchestra with his funeral music, military marches, waltz-like Ländler and Klezmer interludes, brass fanfares conjuring heaven's gates, and all manner of other portentous outbursts. This life-affirming symphony is indeed Mahler’s vision of the triumph of life over death and the soul’s return to God, and everyone involved made up in exuberance for what otherwise was lacking in the quality of the performance. I enjoyed the opening bars with its tremulous violins and violas, followed by the rough-edged declamations from the cellos which are so redolent of the first minutes of Wagner’s Die Walküre. From this point on there was a stately build-up toward the first of a number of gleaming climaxes, each dissolving before Mahler attempts to crank up the tension once more.

Among many issues to be faced in a performance of this Symphony is what to do about Mahler's request for a five-minute pause between the first and second movements. Marin Alsop paused just long enough to allow latecomers to be seated, barely two minutes, before forging on. The delicate pizzicato of the Andante moderato, with its consoling melody brought forth a genteel, rather than bucolic, Austrian dance movement. The Symphony seemed to be deliberately biding its time until there was a long and powerful build-up to the finale. Throughout the evening I enjoyed the contribution of the orchestra’s timpanists (Geoff Prentice and Rosemary Toll) furiously ushering in their percussive storms until, at last, there was the entry of the soloists.

Karen Cargill, the mezzo soloist, did not bring great dramatic imagination to ‘Urlicht’ and her vocal security might have been compromised by having to sit near the organ from the symphony’s beginning. The voice of her soprano colleague, Katherine Broderick, carried over the orchestra far better and was suitably radiant. This last of the ‘Resurrection’ Symphony's five movements includes the vivid depiction of Judgment Day in which the offstage brass summoning the dead came off especially well and set up the massed choirs’ heart-stopping entrance beautifully. There are few moments in late-Romantic symphonic music that equal this work's final pages in emotional impact, and under Alsop’s assured baton all-concerned (joined by an unnamed organist) pulled out all the stops almost literally in a gloriously theatrical ending of which both Bernstein and Mahler would surely have approved.

Jim Pritchard