Seen
and Heard Promenade Concert Review
Prom 65 Mahler, Symphony No 7:
San
Francisco Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas (conductor)
Royal Albert Hall, 2.9.2007 (JPr)
When I
‘review’ my reviews of the BBC Proms I always seem to have
something to whinge about, often it is the modest size of the
audience in what is supposed to be a ‘sell-out’ season. No
complaints about this in 2007, as empty seats have been few
and far between and like ‘A’ level results (where there will
soon be a 101% pass rate), so it must be for tickets sales
based on figures released previously.
However
my carping over previous years about the content of the
printed Proms programmes remains just a valid today as ever.
It is just not good enough to leave an audience, many hearing
the rarely performed Mahler 7 for the first time, so
ill-informed about it. Andrew Huth in his notes again uses the
adjective often ascribed to this symphony when he writes ‘Many
people have found the Seventh to be the most problematic of
Mahler’s symphonies’. What is unforgivable from anyone with
ears to hear is when he writes earlier ‘Passing references,
perhaps not intentional (my italics), can be heard to
music by Schubert, Schumann and Wagner, to Bizet’s Carmen
and even Léhar’s The Merry Widow.’ One thing most
musicologists I would have thought would agree on was that
Mahler rarely did anything unintentionally!
The
composer’s duties as conductor at the Vienna Court Opera meant
that while he wrote the two middle Nachtmusik
(‘Night-music’ or Serenade) movements first in the summer of
1904 he then left it for a year uncertain as to what to put
around them. There followed the oft-quoted revelatory moment
when he stepped into a boat to be rowed over an Alpine lake
and got ‘the rhythm and the style of the introduction to the
first movement’. So he bookended the two Serenades with an
Adagio and a Rondo-Finale putting an eerie Scherzo in between
them.
It is
more the subject of lecture (or a book) but I repeat how in
thrall Mahler was to Wagner, something the musical world is
eager to suppress I believe. Mahler would know that in Mein
Leben Wagner claims a precompositional ‘vision’ for the
introduction to Das Rheingold while staying in La
Spezia, Italy, where there were also boats and water. In the
last years of his life there is also evidence that Mahler was
very anxious about seeming to be the elderly Hans Sachs (from
Wagner’s Die Meistersinger) to Alma’s youthful Eva
(there is much that frivolously alludes to Alma in the
Seventh). The use of the guitar and mandolin in the Serenades
ironically mimics the unsuccessful wooing of Eva by Beckmesser
with his lute playing. The Mahler expert, Professor Steven
Bruns has written: ‘The interval of the perfect fourth has
special significance throughout Wagner's opera, and the fourth
is motivic in Mahler's Seventh as well. Finally, Mahler was
surely referring to the sunny C Major of Wagner's Die
Meistersinger in his strategic use of that tonality in the
Seventh, especially during the closing measures.’ And with a
few conceptual leaps, QED, we have Mahler’s unacknowledged
‘Wagner Symphony’ and then it is not ‘problematic’ at all!
Don’t of course forget the music in the first movement that
was appropriated for Star Trek … that is another story
entirely but it all goes towards making this a fascinating
symphony and the one that is possibly becoming my favourite!
So how
was it at the Proms in the experienced hands of Michael Tilson
Thomas and his San Francisco Symphony? Well his approach was
the antithesis of Claudio Abbado’s recent Mahler 3 at the
Proms. I wonder whether that performance would have come over
much better in the live radio broadcast or audio streamed than
it would have in the upper reaches of the Albert Hall where
surely it would have faded to nothing, so introspective was
Abbado’s approach at times, of course the playing was peerless
and the final movement was majestic but it was Abbado’s Mahler
for Abbado and not the audience if truth be told.
Michael
Tilson Thomas went in the other direction and played
unashamedly to the gallery. For a symphony with supposedly so
many rough edges he showed that it can be approached with
shining lyricism and if it is supposed to veer from darkness
to light then the darkness that MTT allowed was never more
than a dusky hue because wit and optimism shone through the
whole work, but that may have been a slight misjudgement.
The
first movement was both robust and rhapsodic. If the principal
trombonist, Mark H Lawrence, and principal horn, Robert Ward,
tried to establish a melancholy tone the jauntiness of the
rowing rhythms worked against this somewhat and emotion seemed
lost in a positive forward momentum MTT established. The
lilting tempo was an undercurrent of the second movement, the
first ‘Night-music’ marked ‘Allegro moderato’. Basically it is
another march (because this should be apparent too in the
first movement), but this one sways dreamily and there is
nothing foreboding here. MTT is rather too knowingly pastoral
here and perhaps there was too little nocturnal mystery.
To get to the second Serenade we have to go through the
graveyard of the Scherzo that the composer marks ‘Shadowy’. It
is a brilliant waltz macabre, and even though its ‘bump
in the night’ ghostliness is lightened somewhat by a trio it
all probably was not eerie enough on this occasion.
The
gentle ‘Andante amoroso’ ‘Night-music’ that follows was a joy
even here though there was a problem. I found the balance MTT
achieved in the quieter moments throughout the symphony almost
ideal but here he was seriously at fault with the guitar and
the mandolin that from my stalls seat was almost inaudible and
struggled to make an impact in the second movement. Both
players were up at the back with the percussion, perhaps
others heard them better than I did? Here we are in the world
of the Wunderhorn symphonies once more complete with
fleeting birdcalls, the entrances of the guitar and mandolin
all mixed enchantingly with some sublime solo violin from
Alexander Barantschik. In fact all the musicians play
particularly beautifully here, notably the woodwind due to
MTT’s expressive control.
The
second Serenade was every bit a quiet interlude before an
exuberant Rondo-Finale where under MTT joy is unconfined.
Shostakovian, before Shostakovich, it argues back and forth in
its Rondo-form between serious declamatory moments (triumphant
brass) and inconsequential trills and slides in woodwind and
strings. Almost posing the question - whither the symphony? –
as music is on the cusp between nineteenth-century Romanticism
and Schoenberg at the start of the twentieth? It is the brass,
aided and abetted by the rampant timpani of David Herbert that
wins out in the end and the conclusion is most definitely –
‘always look on the bright side of life’.
There
was a sense of rightness about Tilson Thomas’s tempo choices
on this occasion but the arc of Mahler’s Seventh
Symphony may just have a bit more ‘darkness to light’ than the
conductor allows it. Credit him with taking what is supposedly
‘problematic’ and having a clear-sighted, almost brash,
riposte. His orchestra were with him every step of the way and
were generally excellent with only a few moments of jet-lag in
these early days of their European tour. A great time was had
by all and my final carp? Well we have the benefit of a world
class ensemble and an outstanding conductor, most of the
audience have struggled through the vagaries of the London
Underground’s upgrading work that seems to shut down all the
lines on a Sunday that you might want to take you anywhere
important – and what we get is an early start and only 80
minutes of music. Not great value for money in these
straitened times!
Jim Pritchard
