SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Gergiev's Mahler 4. A second opinion: Leonidas Kavakos violin, Laura Claycomb, soprano, London Symphony Orchestra/Valery Gergiev, Barbican Hall, London, 12.1.2008 (JPr)

Sibelius : Violin Concerto
Mahler : Symphony No 4


Mahler’s Fourth Symphony is the watershed between those that drew their inspiration from Des Knaben Wunderhorn and the often brooding and tempestuous works with which his life and career ended. According to many commentators, including Henri-Louis De La Grange, the fourth symphony's  simplicity is deliberate.  Mahler uses a standard symphonic technique yet transforms and enriches it through his febrile imagination. We can discover in this music seventeen-century polyphony, the musical structure and delicate scoring of the eighteenth-century, the development of the use for Leitmotifs from the nineteenth century and even a prescient glance forward to the intensification of music by the composers of the twentieth-century’s ‘new Viennese school’.

Mahler’s original intentions for his Fourth were as a six movement ‘humoresque’ where instrumental sections and vocal ones would alternate. What he left us eventually, he considered to take us from earth to heaven and he said that the atmosphere of the symphony is like the sky, where the blue that is always but which can cloud over or darken and yet will  always reappear seemingly renewed and fresh. His first movement with the wonderful slow jog-trotting sleigh bells has a traditionally formal structure (a sonata) grounded in Mozart and Bach and Mahler felt its components were rearranged in patterns of increasing complexity. His second movement, a sinister scherzo that is relieved by two trios, is a dance of death, harking back to the baroque scordatura, where a solo violin is played tuned a whole tone higher than normal (A-E-B-F#) and thus produces a thin, spectral sound. Further than this, Mahler’s instruction wants it to sound ‘like a medieval fiddle’ (and so,  certainly without vibrato or anything similar.) The third slow movement, contains an set of variations built upon two contrasting but related themes, and here Mahler considered this either to reflect his mother's sad face -  always loving in spite of almost constant suffering -  or as ‘ a vision of a tombstone on which was carved an image of the departed, with folded arms, in eternal sleep’.

The work's only radical change from the ‘standard’ symphonic form is left to the finale although everything has been signalling the way the music would go through the development of earlier themes. Here we have a song written in 1892 which was originally conceived to be the seventh movement of the Third Symphony:  wiser thoughts prevailed on Mahler however and he cut it out. Sleigh bells return and the soprano sings ‘Das himmlische Leben’ (The heavenly life) ‘To be sung in a happy childlike manner absolutely without parody’. Here we have a traditional rondo but no rousing conclusion as we have instead, this naïve reflection on the ‘joys’ of heaven including  the activities of the ‘butcher Herod.’ As the child falls silent the music fades and all we hear is the tolling of the harp. It seems as though Mahler is saying to us, 'If  you need to ask what all this means, only a child (or perhaps those who have a child’s sense of wonder) can tell you the answer."

Even more curious as to what the Fourth means is to ask how  Mahler heard it himself and therefore wanted it performed.  We have no recordings to resolve the question but we do have the piano rolls from 1905 whcih include the final movement of this symphony. Despite his instruction above and a further one saying ‘It is of the greatest importance that the singer be extremely discreetly accompanied’ his playing, even allowing for the fact that he may not have been a great pianist, is a trifle eccentric. He ignores many of his own markings in the score so that it all seems like a free interpretation, it is full of strange rubato and the vocal line is exposed and unsupported. He therefore seems to violate all the instructions for interpretation he imposes for others … curious.

It was time for the Fourth in Gergiev’s on-going Mahler cycle at the Barbican and more of that later. The symphony was preceded by Sibelius’s Violin Concerto which was composed apparently during one of his biggest ‘benders’ in his unsuccessful fight against alcoholism. ‘When I am standing in front of a grand orchestra and have drunk a half-bottle of champagne, then I conduct like a young god. Otherwise I am nervous and tremble, feel unsure of myself and then everything is lost.’ Sibelius was a violinist himself and although he discarded much material after the concerto's 1903 première,  it is still a great technical challenge for any soloist. Beautiful, lyrical and intensely Nordic,  there is some sublime music here, regardless of the composer’s condition when it was composed - which may or may not be reflected in the music. Certainly the major-key ending suggests at a battle with inner demons that had been overcome - something Sibelius  himself never seemed to have managed.

Leonidas Kavakos gave an impassioned account of his taxing solo in the second movement with the ascending broken octaves,  and his fingering was magisterial throughout. However - and it may have been just me - didn’t the more demanding passages seem to slow the music down just a little? Together with Sibelius’s dreamy lyricism, at certain times the soundworld of Richard Strauss seemed never too far away and it all was just a little to soporific despite some vehemence in the changes to the score’s dynamics that Gergiev brought to his accompaniment.

My earlier reflection on the background to Mahler’s Fourth Symphony was offered mainly to reveal how Mahler - by its simplicity -  may have been trying to appease  critics of his time who accused him of being too grandiose and also to point up perhaps that even then its performance cpuld be a matter of individual interpretation. Nothing in the music press seems to have divided opinion so much as this Mahler cycle conducted by Valery Gergiev with the London Symphony Orchestra. The difference in how the same concert has been received has even been seen in the pages here of ‘Seen and Heard’. You either love Gergiev or loathe him.

For me this performance of the Fourth Symphony had a unity and logically coherence I have never experienced before. If I was willing to go along on his rollercoaster ride through Symphonies 3 and 6 then the wealth of detail from the reduced numbers Mahler employs in his Fourth was revelatory. Here there was an almost quintessentially English (Elgarian?) spaciousness to the first movement. It was pastoral and quixotic in turns and built up a fine head of steam. There was fine work by the leader  Andrew Haveron, with both of his violins in the second movement which was,  overall,  full of both the required elements, bucolic charm and sinister under currents. Gergiev, batonless again, his fluttering hands with arms outstretched.  seemed to reach over the orchestra like a vulture opening its wings. The third movement was impassioned, beautiful and serene and there seemed to be a passage here that I had earlier heard in the violin concerto.

Of all things to comment on,  there have been some very silly remarks about the entrance on stage of the soprano soloist, Laura Claycomb, after the start of fourth movement. I would much rather have that than hear her voice drying up because she was there from the start or breaking the atmosphere by needless applause when entering during the break in music. She was the disappointment of the evening, with clouded diction, rather too conversational an approach and she was not loud enough. Undoubtedly she will sound better in the forthcoming BBC Radio 3 broadcast. Gergiev brought an almost trance-like, meditative state to the final section and the quiet at the end was stunning, witness alone to the power of the performance. Only after this reflection was there deservedly warm applause for all concerned and particularly the LSO's players who never disappoint or make an ugly sound.

Jim Pritchard

BBC Radio 3 will broadcast this series on consecutive nights from 28^th January in the order : 1^st, 3^rd, 4^th and 6^th.  The broadcasts will be part of the Performance on Three programmes, which usually remain available for listening online for a week. Full details of the BBC broadcasts can be found here.