Conductor: Vladimir Jurowski
Conductor Emeritus Vladimir Jurowski of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, in a speedy return to the Royal Festival Hall after Wednesday’s programme of challenging music featuring the industrial sounds of Alexander Mosolov, now tackles the infamously unfinished last symphony by Mahler. Using the performing score by Rudolf Barshai from 2000, Mahler’s Symphony doesn’t feel as desolate as one would expect.
Gustav Mahler died in 1911 at the age of 50, leaving only the first movement completely scored. Two other movements had some orchestral score, while the last two movements were only short-scored. The last few years of the Austrian composer’s life were full of tragedy. He’d been forced to resign from the prestigious Court Opera in Vienna in the face of rising antisemitism, even though to take the directorship, he’d converted to Catholicism.
In 1907, three years after he’d composed Kindertotenlieder against the wishes of his wife Alma, his daughter died from scarlet fever. Soon after, he discovered that Alma, whom he had forced to give up her own composing ambitions on the eve of their wedding, was having an affair with architect Walter Gropius. Mahler also found out that he had a congenital heart condition, and doctors advised that he give up his long walks in the mountains.
Against such weighty misfortunes, including some chats with Freud, Mahler’s final symphony was written, and it’s all too easy to see them echoed in the muffled drum that beats like a funeral march in the Finale. But there is hope, too, in the repeated theme of the first movement that almost returns at the end of the whole piece.
However, it starts with melancholic strings that, despite their sadness, signal enough courage for the darkness that approaches. But the theme is lost, and amidst a crash of brass, a long note of a trumpet comes like a warning for the future or an elegy for all that Mahler has lost.
The Scherzo that comes next is lively and life-affirming. With swathes of Vienna dance music and plenty of percussion, the brass triumphant, it may seem that tragedy has been averted. But the short Purgatorio, which follows with its insistent string motifs, is more troubled, sometimes cheerful, at other times menacing, a contradiction that always upset Mahler’s many critics.
Jurowski conducts economically throughout, with only a few little leaps in the air as the music in the fourth movement, another scherzo, waivers between dissonance and harmony. The Finale arrives without a pause, and here in Barshai’s version, the flute saves the day with Juliette Bausor’s playing soaring wistfully before the intrusion of dark and heavy percussion and another long trumpet call. Nonetheless, the optimism in her solo hangs in the air like a wreath of spring mist, perhaps dispelling the funereal drumbeat that opened the Finale.
At the end, and after a long, dramatic pause, Jurowski holds the score in the air for it to receive its own applause. And it deserves it, along with every member of the LPO.
Reviewed on 24 January 2025
1 Comment
I thought it was a pretty weird performance. Maybe that’s as it should be. The opening Adagio was very intense, but glacially slow – probably as slow as Wyn Morris’s recording. And then, having got through that, Jurowski took a break and sat on a piano stool just beyond the podium. Several additional musicians came in. It was as though we were observing that five minute break that Mahler asks for after the first movement of the Second Symphony. I didn’t get much from the second movement, it seemed a little tiresome, and I was disappointed by Jurowski going attacca from Purgatorio to the fourth movement. That nasty little movement – and it wasn’t nasty enough in this performance – needs to stand separate at the centre of the five movement arch, I think, whereas Jurowski’s (Barshai’s?) idea seemed to be that the first movement be somehow separated and the last three movements should all run together, again rather like the second symphony. Although Jurowski made some dramatic gestures, I didn’t hear all the snarling and ironic bite I feel the fourth movement aspires to. That maybe partly be due to Barshai’s orchestration. It did improve as it went along. The loud off-stage drum beats weren’t that loud up where I was in row E in the balcony and the strings and trumpet (I think that’s what happens) didn’t manage to maintain the intensity as they took up the melody from the extraordinary flute solo. Up in the balcony, that final gesture from the strings, the massive crescendo leap of a thirteenth, “Almschi” written the score, didn’t quite cut the mustard. Come the finish, I certainly felt I’d been with the musicians through something very intense, exhausting, but it felt weird, as though somehow misdirected. I didn’t really get what Jurowski was after.