SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Beethoven, Mahler: Emanuel Ax (piano), London Philharmonic Orchestra, Jaap van Zweden (conductor). Royal Festival Hall, London 16. 1. 2008 (JPr)


Almost unacknowledged against the furore caused by the continuing Gergiev Mahler cycle is the fact that the London Philharmonic Orchestra  in its 75^th anniversary season, has been performing a half-cycle of it own before beginning a further full one under principal conductor  Vladimir Jurowski, and rumoured to be starting soon. One can accept that a Mahler cycle by such a controversial figure as Gergiev was itself likely to be ‘controversial’ in itself, so we have got what we wanted. More surprisingly though there have been equally good – debatably better – recent Mahler performances from the LPO under Simone Young, Gennadi Rozhdestvensky and now Jaap van Zweden.

In this instance what was played in the first half of the concert becomes almost an irrelevance. It is unlikely in the tumult of applause for conductor and orchestra at the end of the evening, that  anybody was thinking about the piano concerto heard earlier. If the Mahler is routine you will have wanted to have heard something else to make your, often expensive, trip to the concert hall worthwhile, yet if it is as stunning as this was, anything else becomes irrelevant. This is always a dilemma for  concert programme planners.

With the concerto as a warm-up piece of no small distinction,  we had Emanuel Ax playing Beethoven’s relatively rarely performed  Concerto No 2 in B Flat, Op 19. Beethoven’s early appearances in Vienna as a pianist were some while before he chose to publish any of his music and were all private affairs held in the houses of the aristocracy. Fascinatingly, he delayed his public debut until 29 March 1795 as the soloist in this concerto at a concert at the Burgtheater. The Wiener Zeitung tells us that ‘the celebrated Herr Ludwig van Beethoven reaped the unanimous applause of the audience for his performance.’ This successful première not only gave Beethoven an opportunity to  show-off his considerable skills as a performer publicly but also to demonstrate his developing talent as a composer. Beethoven had come to Vienna ‘to receive the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn’ and this piano concerto is undoubtedly Mozartian in its melodic invention,  albeit with  heavier orchestration. After the effected showiness of Lang Lang recently,  it was a delight to witness a piano soloist of the old school, Emanuel Ax. Like an elderly uncle put upon by young ones to ‘tinkle the ivories’,  he seemed to have an impish pleasure in his own playing;  there was evident enjoyment of Beethoven’s music, as well as the contribution of the orchestral colleagues around him. His technique displayed a breathtaking ease and his fingers seemed to caress the keys and  his pianism was at its zenith in the first movement’s cadenza and the beautiful lyricism of the Adagio. Jaap van Zweden and his orchestra were equally light in touch and these delicate textures were elegantly supportive of the soloist.

Perhaps the Beethoven drew the audience because the London public has overdosed on Mahler lately. As recently as the previous weekend Mahler’s First and Fourth Symphonies were performed at the Barbican to sell-out audiences and lengthy queues for returns. Here at the Royal Festival Hall so soon afterwards,  there were few empty seats. As we approach the Mahler anniversary years of 2010/11 I have begun to wonder how much more Mahler  one audience can take and I am beginning to consider that we may be seeing a clear shift in conductors’ approaches to this music since  it has been widely perceived that performances of the symphonies have been getting slower and slower. When I first asked Bernard Haitink if he would want to be president of the Mahler Society, he picked up on a sentence I had included in my letter to him, something about taking interpretations of Mahler’s music into the twenty-first century. He declined hinting that change was not for him and he remains a most honoured patron for the Society. Jaap van Zweden and Haitink have the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in common but their Mahler is poles apart. At nineteen,  Jaap van Zweden was the youngest concertmaster ever for the Concertgebouw but since his mid-thirties he has also been building a glowing reputation as a conductor. Among the number of important posts he holds,  he has been recently been announced as the new music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra as of the 2008/9 season.

Mahler’s Fifth Symphony was completed during perhaps the happiest time of Mahler's life. After the Fourth (see review)  he, employed ‘a completely new style’  - as he put it - involving abandoning any implied ‘programmes’ to his compositions, the use of virtuosic technique and a greater emphasis on contrapuntal orchestration, such occurs in the Fifth's finale. So here we have first of that central trilogy of symphonies which abandons the use of voices and/or Wunderhorn texts, both important ingredients in Mahler’s first four symphonies. The Fifth, with its progression of moods, its apparent use of a funeral march, and the complete association of the Adagietto with his love for Alma Schindler, clearly has some sort of inner programme, even if Mahler refused openly to acknowledge this fact. This is mainly in the arrangement of the five movements into three parts and during which the music moves from seemingly negative emotions toward more positive ones. The two movements of Part I are often believed to be tragic and angry, the third, a transitional central Scherzo contains moments of jubilation and moments of anxiety. Part III conveys the feelings of love and jubilation, completing the progression from one emotional extreme to the other. There are direct musical connections between the Parts I and III and one remarkable fact about the Fifth is that despite the large structure of each individual movements none of them changes in time signature or meter along its duration and this is very unusual for Mahler.

Apart from perhaps not over-emphasising some Slavic influences as much as Gergiev undoubtedly will do when he gets round to the Fifth in March, this performance was possibly as we will hear it then and if it turns out  better then it will be some performance to be at. If there really was a funeral march at the beginning I did not hear it and van Zweden appears to have taken Mahler’s quote about his Scherzo  - ‘A man in the full light of day who has reached the climax of his life’  - as the basis of his interpretation.

For Mahler the ‘climax’ at this time in his life was Alma. I seem to have missed reading what went on behind their bedroom doors,  but this performance of the Fifth that they worked on together,  depicted it for me clearly in the music from Jaap van Zweden’s account of the score. Those of a delicate disposition had better stop reading now,  but what we had was nothing more or less than love-making depicted in music from the enthusiastic couplings of early rough, over eager, hectic passion to the tenderness and joy of marital bliss. This performance brought us rampant climax after rampant climax  over the span of the music and eventually brought forth the expected loud orgasmic conclusion at the end of the Finale. Any moments of gentle lyricism, particularly in Parts I and III, seemed like the post-coital cigarette beloved of Hollywood movies. I don’t think these ideas can have been far from Mahler’s mind when he wrote the Fifth and the constant winding up and winding down of musical passages throughout the symphony seem to have a clear parallel to this interpretation of the music -  not something I feel the need to elaborate on further.

The success of the concert would not have been possible without the willing and hard-working members of the LPO who were almost faultless throughout. At the very end,  the brass was bit raggedy and ensemble tended to drift a little under the pressure van Zweden exerted on the players, but this did not matter much at all and the recording that was made will be worth hearing when it is available.

The crucial feature for me in any Fifth is the Adagietto and the time that movement takes; here it was an ideal 9mins 50 secs or so and was undoubtedly ‘love music of the perfect kind’ as described in Lindsay Kemp’s programme note. This was Mahler’s declaration of love for Alma to celebrate the union of two souls he hoped would live happily ever after. There was to be one thing beyond his  control however… fate.


Jim Pritchard

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