SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Mahler: Symphony No 6 in A minor

Tonight' s concert opened with a quite traditional performance of Mozart’s last Violin Concerto, Saraste deploying a largish string compliment. Miss Jansen played the solo part with a minimum of ornamentation and overt vibrato although the cadenza she chose to play in the last movement was a curiously elaborate unidiomatic Nineteenth century sounding affair. Saraste accompanied in a quite crisp and dutiful manner although his overall contribution lacked the rhythmic/dynamic élan which Peter Maag used to bring to this work. Also,  Saraste did not arrange his violins antiphonally thus robbing us of the mellifluous counterpoint and interplay heard particularly in the ‘Adagio’. In this,  Miss Jansen started to sound a little contrived and bland and a little too keen to underline certain virtuoso points. Both soloist and conductor failed to invest the last movements ‘Turkish’ music with the rhythmic thrust required.

Mahlerians today tend to count the Sixth symphony as one of the composer’s ‘greatest’ works; if not his ‘greatest’ single achievement. But seen from another perspective,  the Sixth has been the subject of all manner of controversy from the time of its first performance under Mahler in 1906.  Did Mahler intend the third, final catastrophic hammer blow in the the very long finale, restored tonight by Saraste?  Should the ‘Andante moderato’ constitute the second or third movement In juxtapostion to the ‘Scherzo’ ? Saraste adhered to the more recent convention of placing the andante as third movement, despite evidence that Mahler preferred the more logically dynamic deployment of it as the second, with the scherzo as third movement. Two of Mahler’s most pioneering protégé’s Walter and Klemperer,  chose never to perform the work; Walter finding it too sentimental and over the top in general; and Klemperer simply claiming (ironically?) never to have ‘understood’ it.

Overall,  Saraste gave an  unmannered and straightforward rendition of the work tonight, eschewing the more ‘romantic’ and rhetorical interpretive excesses that  this symphony is open to. But overall, his  reading lacked a certain inner dramatic conviction making the symphony sound at times more like a series of elaborated orchestral effects than anything approaching a coherent  narrative structure which - Mahler saw as ‘all important’ if Bruno Walter is to be believed. The opening rhythmic figure in the string bass was quite well judged in terms of tempo,  but this was not sustained throughout the movement; the coda’s mock triumphant fanfares lacking Boulez' rhythmic finesse and having no sense of release, of dynamic energy in reserve. Saraste paid meticulous attention to detail (often in the orchestra’s upper register) - though harps, xylophone, and cow-bells were often too loud and intrusive - at the expense of the lower registers. I listened in vain for the ‘Heavy, pronounced’ march tread the composer asks for in the strings, especially double-basses, and the important timpani part -which links rhythmically to the finale - was curiously reticent. These problems of orchestral balance and clarity were not helped by Saraste’s decision not to deploy the orchestral lay-out that Mahler had in mind when composing the symphony with antiphonal violins and double-basses either in a row at the back of the orchestra, or on the the left-hand side. Too often Saraste lacked that sense of tonal/dynamic/rhythmic contrast which subtends the contours of both this movement and the long last movement; tonight, especially in the brass chorale figurations of these two outer movements, the brass just trundled out the music all at the same strident level, often obliterating important accompanying woodwind detail.

The two middle movements, although played in questionable order, were delivered more successfully than the outer movements. The ‘Andante moderato’ in particular was sustained at the andante pace asked for by the composer and was free from interpretative impositions - thus emphasising the the music's noble and slightly fractured elegaic quality. But again I missed that balancing of the dialectic between formal structure and emotional content,  so important in Mahler and which conductors like Rosbaud and Gielen brought and still bring off so well.

The Hoffmannesque ‘Scherzo’was quite rhythmically adroit, Saraste paying especial attention to the poignant parody of the graceful minuet rococo style of the trio section, reminding us that the preceding work in the concert was by Mozart. Here, the strings and woodwinds played with great delicacy and finesse.

But again I was at a loss to detect Mahler’s ‘Wuchtig’,’ weighty, rhythms. The Philharmonia’s string section now play far more politely than they did in the late Sixties as the ‘New Philharmonia’ under Barbirolli, who certainly understood the meaning of ‘Wuchtig’ in this work. He  would not have tolerated the patches of messy ensemble heard tonight in the brass and strings. At times Saraste merely directed the outward contour of the scherzo failing to punctuate Mahler's many zig-zagging rhythms and sudden ‘uncanny’ off-beat dynamic figurations, rhythmic clusters and tattoos.

Although Saraste chose a good initial tempo (‘Allegro moderato’) for the Fourth movement finale, he failed to adhere to Mahler’s ‘Sostenuto’ marking. At times,  the movement dragged, at others it seem to lose all direction and  sagged, seriously, especially at the crucial climaxes which unleash the massive constellations of  minor key brass chorales, the wild swirling wind figurations and fatal hammer blows. In conducting terms,  it is a question of carefully gauging these cardinal climaxes, on which the whole huge edifice is structured and  hangs together, in a way that adheres to the baroque and contrapuntally complex intermediary music and ultimately to the whole work: it's  a question again of balancing the dialectic of the huge formal structure with its dramatic/rhetorical content. The disputed third hammer blow which occurs just before the last desolate statement of the symphony’s rhyhthmic/chorale motto theme/coda, sounded but simply failed to make its full impact, not simply as a forceful sound, but as a unified dramatic effect helping to compound the coda’s grim mood of exhaustion and desolation. Here,  when the latter came too prominently in the movement, the  impact  had been lost for it to make the  proper and crucially important effect. Not really a coda in the classic symphonic sense, this is a dramatic statement of trauma which should leave the audience and performers devastated. Tonight,  quite some time before this passage concluded,  I was thinking about the best exit from the hall from which to catch the bus home.


Geoff Diggines

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