SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Haydn’s Symphony No.96 was completed in 1791 as one of the symphonies he composed on his first trip to London. He conducted the first performance at the Hanover Square Concert Rooms, probably on 11 March. It is in standard four movement form and scored for two flutes, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings. Because of the number of them it is useful that Haydn’s symphonies often have nicknames and this one is ‘Miracle’ because rumour had it that during that première, a chandelier fell from the ceiling of the concert hall. The audience managed apparently to get out of the way successfully, and so the symphony got its nickname. Nice story, shame it isn’t true – at least for this work – as research shows that this event did indeed take place but during the concert when his Symphony No.102 was first played. This pleasant but lightweight symphony allowed spirited dialogues between some of the orchestra's principal players. Gareth Bimson's trumpet had a brawny tone that spoke brightly over the horns and oboes while Michael Cox's fine flute sparkled throughout. However the leader Stephen Bryant and sub-leader Anna Colman, along with the entire string section, were outstanding in this (as throughout the programme) with their virtuosic and animated bowing.

The music of Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler echoes strongly in Alexander Zemlinsky’s orchestral song Waldgespräch (Forest Dialogue). While his music re-emerged mainly in the 1990s Zemlinsky remains a little-known link in the lineage of Austro-Germanic Lied composers tracing their ancestry back to Schubert, and in a relatively short time at the close of the nineteenth century, this musical world begat in succession Gustav Mahler, Hugo Wolf, Richard Strauss, Alexander Zemlinsky, and Arnold Schoenberg. That Zemlinsky’s works, few as they are, do not feature prominently in the modern repertoire does not suggest they are either poor or inconsequential, as Zemlinsky was in fact a great composer, but his output was only eight operas, three symphonies, and a relatively small number of chamber ensembles and songs.

Like Mahler, Zemlinsky was a conductor for most of his professional life and this limited his time for composing. But when Zemlinsky is at his best, as in this Waldgespräch, he demands attention. Zemlinsky conducted the première of this short concert work in Vienna on 2 March 1896 with his own amateur orchestra and the soprano Melanie Guttmann. At the Barbican we heard the young Swedish soprano Camilla Tilling make the very best of this short song. Her diction was clean, and she brought a sense of drama and complete identification to the song. There was terror in her face when the youth recognised he had been lured to his doom by the witch, Lorelei and then the triumphant glee from the witch herself as she reveals he can never leave the forest he has wandered into. Through this we became totally immersed in the harmonic subtlety and expressionistic chromaticism of Zemlinsky’s idiom.

After the interval it was Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. I don’t know why but at times I have found performances of this sometimes bland and even uninteresting. Nevertheless, I cannot remember a better performance than I heard from the inspired BBC Symphony Orchestra under their chief conductor, Jiří Bělohlávek; it was totally convincing and very impressive. Here for once there seemed an immense skill and often a celestial beauty imbued into every bar of the music. I am not sure why this was but perhaps backed up as he was by his responsive musicians, Bělohlávek concentrates less on happiness and childlike innocence and more on ‘Hades full of terrors’ that Mahler said was there also. We are very much in the world of ‘Freund Hein spielt auf’ in the second movement – the pied-piper whose beguiling fiddle playing leads the unwary to the land of ‘Beyond’. Death comes smiling indeed!

The first movement overall remains rather joyful and refreshing, though Mahler’s mysteries and horrors are never far away. It involves a rather complex orchestration, featuring as it does various percussion instruments including those wondrous opening sleighbells and a lot of parts for the wind instruments. That second movement is rather tense to start with but the horns introduce a short motif answered by the violins, which begin a very lyrical passage. At times it does indeed sound like a slow movement (it is marked ‘At a leisurely pace’) but with sudden changes in tempo and dynamics, together with an abrupt ending, we are undoubtedly reminded that it is indeed a scherzo. The third movement, which is the actual slow movement of the symphony (marked ‘Restful’) is beautiful and the most elegiac. The theme starts in the basses and then is gradually amplified by the whole orchestra, creating a wonderfully serene and magical atmosphere. The contrasting middle part creates tension that disappears when the initial theme comes back. At the end of this movement there is a sudden outburst of E major (this movement is in G major), which anticipates the brilliance of how the symphony will end.

The last movement features a soprano part, inspired by Mahler’s ongoing obsession with the Des Knaben Wunderhorn collection of poems, here he uses one he composed before Das himmlische Leben about the ‘joys’ of heaven which if we again look behind the mirror apparently includes much slaughter, as well as the attractive (to some) prospect of ‘eleven thousand virgins’. The music here is rather uncomplicated and follows closely the lyrics of the original tune, culminating with music, which is the ultimate joy, this being essentially the conclusion of the last movement and the whole symphony. The BBC Symphony Orchestra’s musicians responded magnificently to this heavenly rapture and produced (as mentioned previously) wonderful string sounds that floated and shimmered gloriously.  Ms Tilling was again pure-toned and unforced. She perfectly captured the innocence of the child unmoved by the slaughter around her. (Indeed with its paean to ‘Good (fruits and) vegetables of every kind’ it all seems an anthem for vegetarianism.) That the child is unmoved by what it sees is at the heart of the movement and, perhaps, the whole symphony. Camilla Tilling’s performance was excellent and hers is perhaps the finest soprano voice of its type I have heard for many years.

Throughout the whole evening the BBC Symphony Orchestra played with wonderful commitment and almost as one glorious instrument responding to every nuance of Jiří Bělohlávek’s inspired conducting. Once again it was almost possible to count the sparse audience at the Barbican so thank goodness this concert was recorded for posterity by the orchestra’s masters, the BBC.