Bernard Haitink and Gustav Mahler have become synonymous
over the past two decades; he must have conducted Mahler’s Sixth Symphony
more than any other living conductor, as well as having had a long and
distinguished history of conducting that composer’s other symphonies.
Haitink was also Music Director of the European Union Youth Orchestra
from 1994 to 1999, its founding ethos being to celebrate the European
Ideal of ‘a united community of nations working together for peace,
harmony, social justice and human dignity’. Its illustrious conductors
have included, amongst others, Giulini, Mehta, Solti, Bernstein and
Karajan so this promised to be a red-letter event.
The first movement of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony in
A Minor, ‘Tragic’ (1903-4) started in a well-mannered and slightly
manicured way rather than with the essentially brusque march the composer
intended. Its very slowness gave it little sense of urgency and forward
momentum (as heard in George Solti’s account with the Chicago Symphony
Orchestra: Decca Ovation: 425 040-2 DM). However, the EUYO’s playing
was stylish with the strings having an appropriately strident quality
and the percussion great flare and precision. Strikingly intense was
Vivian Urlings’s snappy trumpet solo (one minute in) which had a jazzy
feel to it.
In the second theme (allegedly a portrait of Alma),
Haitink often lost the tension, the music sounding fragmented. He was
at his best in the serene interlude of very distant clattering cowbells
where he and the EUYO conjured a sense of spaciousness and wonderment
of the Austrian landscape. Very often the cowbells are played too loudly
in concert, that sense of distant evocation Mahler was striving for
too often ignored. The closing passages, however, were resounding, giving
a sensation of celebratory joy.
The Scherzo had just the right mélange
of the sweet and the sinister, meeting in an acidic sound world of snarling
horns, biting percussion and harsh strings; contrasted with a naïve,
childlike simplicity from the woodwind it seemed ideal. Haitink’s tight
tempi brought out perfectly the implied threat to the ‘innocence of
childhood’, the superb EUYO woodwinds inhabiting a Mahlerian sound-world’’
of stark and rugged gruffness. The Andante was surprisingly static
with orchestral textures levelled out and homogenised. Haitink’s spaciousness
caused the music to lose its sense of flow with the smooth strings barely
audible. It was only in the closing passages that the music seemed to
ignite with passion and a sense of melancholic anxiety.
Haitink’s rather laid-back approach was better suited
to the colossal final movement. Here his broad tempi helped recall the
relentless, drawn-out trauma implicit in the score. The opening passages
were measured and sustained, as if waking from a bad dream, but the
lyrical sections for the strings and woodwinds sometimes came across
as too distant. Timpanist Marcus Fischer, however, played with great
rhythmic buoyancy, giving this music its essential nailing, forward
thrust. As we approached the dying end we experienced a sensation of
numbness and exhaustion after the wear and tear of the percussion and
brass. The closing bars were full of dread and resignation, with the
trombones, and especially the tuba of Kristian Karlstedt, making brooding,
dying sounds, slowly ebbing away only to be abruptly shattered by the
final death blows from the percussion with death announced in the final
pluck on the strings. This had an immediate starkness that brought this
work to an abrupt and perfectly judged end. There was a few seconds
of reflective silence before the overwhelming applause from a cough-free
packed house.
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