SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

SEEN AND HEARD CONCERT REVIEW
 

Prom 62 - Hindemith, Mahler and Bruckner: Christian Gerhaher (baritone) Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, Herbert Blomstedt (conductor). Royal Albert Hall, London 1.9.2010 (JPr)


Youth orchestras such as the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester are far removed from the aural horrors of school bands that do so much damage to classical music in all our formative years. In fact with a group of talented musicians ‘youth’ is a misnomer as the cut-off age of 26 is not very young and most are on the verge of a professional career. There were 125 or so musicians on the stage for the Bruckner symphony, it is clear that not many will end up playing in Mahler’s beloved Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra as virtually all the string section were female so will need to seek employment elsewhere because that basically male group remains notoriously chauvinistic. The GMJO – founded in 1986 by Claudio Abbado - has never recently appeared to have many British players in it and now it does not seem to have many from Germany either. It is taking its pan-European aims very seriously and is dominated by musicians from distant corners of our over-extended ‘Europe’, from France and Spain to Latvia and Lithuania.

Of course it matters little where they come from – how do they sound? Well it is to the credit of their individual talent, collective determination and preparation that they play with such assurance and unanimity. The sound they produced in the Hindemith and Bruckner was unbalanced in favour of the string section that was larger in numbers than some entire orchestras and complicit here was the positioning of the twelve bass players across the back of the orchestra and above everyone else in the orchestra. There was an unnecessary theatricality to their bowing and swaying at times but if you have twelve basses why not show them off? For me it gave the Hindemith and Bruckner more ethereal aching dignity at the expense of the grandiose monumentality I was expecting – possibly not a bad thing.

In his opera that followed the ‘Mathis der Maler’ Symphony from 1934, Hindemith created a character who ‘is the embodiment of problems, wishes and doubts which have occupied the minds of serious artists from remotest times’. It is clear that the composer was influenced in this by the social turmoil in Germany in the 1930s. It is based on the life of the German painter Matthias Grünewald, whose masterpiece was a sixteenth-century triptych whose structure is reflected in this three-movement symphony. It is believed the spiritual affinity between Grünewald and his subject of St Anthony is the same as between Hindemith and his protagonist, Mathis but there is nothing ‘spiritual’ about this work despite its quiet, meditative, opening. After that - and through to the brass chorale at the end - Hindemith gives us music redolent of the political unrest he witnessed and we hear a dramatic work that reminded me a Prokofiev soundtrack to an Eisenstein film.

For me Hindemith’s neo-Romantic soundworld was a revelation. The nimble strings of the GMJO made light work of the contrapuntal complexity and those cellos underpinned the ‘Entombment of Christ’ (Grablegung) with their elegiac resonance. The conductor, Herbert Blomstedt, is a Hindemith and Bruckner expert; he is now in his 84th year and looks quite frail but he conducted the two largest works from memory and clearly his young musicians were devoted to him. I wonder if the music might just not have benefitted from a little more edginess to it but Blomstedt seemed to settle here – and later in the Bruckner - for the greatest orchestral sonority possible.

Mahler’s songs Liedereines fahrenden Gesellen are about a young lad’s lost love, jealously, despair, anguish and melancholy. After the Hindemith half or more of the players left the stage; those that remained gave a chamber-like translucent and supportive accompaniment to the Lieder that were sung with great emotional honesty and dramatic urgency by Christian Gerhaher. Nevertheless, I was surprised how many words I missed and how his eloquent voice lacked the range these songs ideally need and can get from a mezzo. One example of this was in the third verse of Ging heut’ morgen über’s Feld, the first two lines went up too high to be comfortable for him and when ‘Gewann in Sonnenschein!’ was too low he resorted to Sprechgesang. Nevertheless his is a type of vocal performance British audiences seem to adore for Lieder and he was given a rapturous ovation.

Blomstedt unfolded Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony slowly and resolutely, convincingly building up to its many climaxes and eventually to the pivotal dissonant chord in the Adagio heralded by the four Wagner tubas and timpani. After a pause the symphony ends in quiet reflection and a mood of resignation. If anything it all had seemed like an ‘Ode to Life and Death’ rather than the ‘Ode to Joy’ of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that was Bruckner’s inspiration for this composition. It is quite an emotionally engaging work without any real sense that it is unfinished.

On his death Bruckner’s symphony remained unfinished after nine years and apparently souvenir-hunters helped themselves to the sketches for the final movement he was working on. Since the composer’s symphonies often had a structure that was virtually unique to him then it is difficult to accept there is any real incompleteness noticeable to this symphony in its three-movement form. However there is little progression in the music and a slight sense that Bruckner - realising his life was coming to a close - put into the three existing movements almost every theme and melody he had left in him, leaving us with three - to my ears - unrelated tone poems.

Overall, in beauty of sound and accuracy of ensemble, the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester have done nothing better than this at the Proms since their unforgettable concert in 2002 with Claudio Abbado.

Jim Pritchard

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