SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Beethoven (orch. Mahler) and Alma Mahler (arr. Colin and David Matthews): Sarah Connolly (mezzo-soprano); London Symphony Orchestra; Marin Alsop (conductor). Barbican Hall, London 5.12.10 (JPr)

Beethoven (orch. Mahler) Overture: Leonora No.3

Alma Mahler (arr. Colin and David Matthews) Seven Lieder

Beethoven (orch. Mahler) Symphony No.7

The Mahler anniversary years of 2010 and 2011 have faced one, almost insurmountable, problem, and that is that Gustav Mahler never lived long enough to produce enough music to fill two years of such ‘celebrations’. How many times can a regular concertgoer be expected to go and listen to all the Mahler’s songs or symphonies without eventually crying out – ‘Enough already!’?

This has set a challenge to those planning season-long series of orchestral concerts, namely to come up with interesting approaches to this problem. This made the concert devised by Marin Alsop for the London Symphony Orchestra both welcome and intriguing - on paper - as it featured some of Alma Mahler’s songs between two of her husband Gustav’s rarely performed retuschens (retouchings) of major Beethoven works.

When Alma and Gustav became engaged he insisted that she would have to give up her own ambitions as a composer. He wrote to her: ‘A husband and wife who are both composers: how do you envisage that? … If we are to be happy together, you will have to be “as I need you” – not my colleague, but my wife!’ Alma seems to have been compliant with this pre-nuptial ‘contract’.

Only 17 songs by Alma Mahler seem to have survived World War II but more may still be out there somewhere. As a student - and possible lover - of the composer Alexander von Zemlinsky, it is not surprising that her songs (originally composed for piano to texts by contemporary poets) have the late-Romantic sound world of her early twentieth-century Vienna, and their passion and obscurity mirrors the artistic world Alma was a part of in her youth.

One of the joys of the Barbican LSO concert series is the free pre-concert events that can often involve senior musicians from the local Guildhall School of Music and Drama giving performances of complementary repertoire. In this case a few of Alma’s songs were sung, together with some by Gustav, in an entertaining recital given by Sky Ingram (soprano), Victor Sicard (baritone) and Jean-Yves Cornet (piano). Fortunately we were subsequently to hear two of the Alma songs again in the David Matthews’ orchestration and this later provided an interesting contrast. A feature of the Gustav Mahler songs was that selections like this now include many rarely-performed ones that are being ‘exhumed’ to provide a greater variety for those (like me) over-familiar with those more regularly sung. The young singers were not ‘the finished article’ and had that mannered recital technique beloved of music colleges: the Gustav Mahler songs (particularly) require some greater dramatic, quasi-operatic, fervour.

In 1995, Colin and David Matthews orchestrated seven of Alma’s songs and these were performed with the LSO by mezzo Sarah Connolly. She sang with even, rounded tones but I would have preferred a more expressive and less mature sound. The orchestration gave the songs a lingering, evocative, comforting beauty with hints of Wagner, Richard Strauss, Zemlinsky, Schoenberg and Berg; almost every relevant composer of Gustav’s generation except himself. But they are instantly forgotten once the music stops.

Overture: Leonore No.3 and Symphony No.7 were the two Beethoven works that Marin Alsop conducted without a score in Mahler’s retouched versions. In an intriguing essay in the programme book Ms Alsop explains that Mahler ‘revered Beethoven, but Mahler was the consummate creator and recreator, a conductor who transformed symphonic and operatic performance, setting the bar for artistic excellence miles above where it had been before. His personal experience with the 20th-century orchestra sent him down a messianic path to improve upon Beethoven’s work. But where then does Beethoven end and Mahler begin? Where does one draw the line and say “this is too much”?’ (This is exactly my exclamation when faced with orchestral concerts advertising gimmicky ‘authenticity’.) Mahler was someone ‘of the theatre’ and, I believe, he was true to these values in presenting his own works - and those of others - in the best way for his contemporary audience; as many conductors tinker with dynamics to reinvent performance practice in the early twenty-first century.

Apparently Mahler didn’t do much to the Leonore Overture but he made more extensive revisions to the Seventh Symphony; in both cases what he did was designed to provide more clarity to the music or project important passages better. The LSO missed a trick to inform the uninitiated – me included! – about the significance of these changes. Why are orchestral managements so reluctant to really educate their audiences? Marin Alsop was a student of that great communicator, Leonard Bernstein, and surely could have said something and used the orchestra to illustrate a few moments, we should listen out for, where Mahler’s Beethoven differs from the original. Am I expecting too much?

So without Marin Alsop’s intimate knowledge of Beethoven – and without a degree in music – I cannot really comment how truly different it all was. It had all the energy and drive you would expect from Ms Alsop’s thrusting baton and the always exemplary – virtuosic - LSO. The Leonora No.3 Overture was as intensely dramatic and ‘operatic’ as to be expected, however, there was a certain bombast and leaden-footedness to the Seventh Symphony that recalled Gustav Mahler’s mentor, Bruckner. Nevertheless its conclusion built up quite a head of steam but I still did not get ‘a feeling of Dionysian intoxication’ that Ms Alsop wanted her audience to feel.

Jim Pritchard