United Kingdom PROM 9 – Brahms, Schoenberg, Mahler: Alice Coote (mezzo-soprano), BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra / Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor). Royal Albert Hall, London, 25.7.2024. (CK)
Brahms – Symphony No.3
Schoenberg – Verklärte Nacht
Mahler – Kindertotenlieder
On paper, this BBC Prom programme looked a little odd: the most substantial piece – Brahms’s Third Symphony – opened the concert and took up the first half; Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, which would normally be the main (perhaps only) piece in the first half, came last, following Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht in the version for string orchestra. In addition, it almost seemed that the concert was performed by three different orchestras: all of them the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra of course, but very differently constituted for each of their three musical offerings. Such were the contrasts between them that it was a surprise to note, as Andrew MacGregor reminded BBC Radio 3 listeners, that all three fall within a 20-year period.
Did it work? Well, yes, it did. The marvellous opening of Brahms’s Third Symphony seemed to indicate some thinness of string tone – each section was a desk short of the usual full complement, presumably for economic reasons – but after the mellow burbling of the woodwind the playing grew in firmness and bite. This is music of heroic temper but uncertain import: there is a sense of ambiguities, of tensions held in balance but unresolved: this symphony does not offer up its secrets as easily as the other three.
The middle movements, less sternly On Duty, gave us the opportunity to enjoy the warm Brahmsian sound, rooted in cellos, horns, oboes and clarinets. In the Andante there was a lovely blend of wind and string harmonies and a wonderful fullness of tone, with glorious sunset chords on trombones at the end. In the Poco allegretto the string tune, graceful but with an ache in it, was passed around the sections of the orchestra, taken by the solo horn and gently embroidered by the woodwind before the strings took it back.
The finale began with mysterious, quiet urgency until the trombones snapped the orchestra into life. There were reminders that when Brahms imitates his master Beethoven he is apt to seem rather stiff in the joints; but then came the gorgeous loping theme that rides so smoothly across the barlines. Ryan Wigglesworth ensured that there was plenty of light and shade in the playing: in particular, the passage as the music begins to settle into its final calm was magical, the romantic horns sounding almost as if they had got lost in the forest Scherzo of Mahler’s Fifth and turned up here instead. The performance was warmly received.
Wigglesworth and the BBC SSO strings were sensitive and responsive to all the echoes and half-lights, alert to every nerve-ending in the first part of Verklärte Nacht – though the first stirrings in the depths had to make their way up through a barrage of audience coughing. Wigglesworth’s control of the ebb and flow of the music, its essential intimacy, was very impressive: when affirmation finally came, it was tender rather than sumptuous. They may not be the Vienna Philharmonic, but the playing of the BBC SSO strings was beautiful enough: it had an honesty and intentness that commanded our attention and respect. You could have heard a pin drop at the end as their sounds began to spiral upwards and evanesce. There was a rapturous reception, fully deserved.
A confession. Not having shared the general enthusiasm when Alice Coote sang Zarathustra’s ‘Midnight Song’ in the London Philharmonia Orchestra’s performance of Mahler 3 last November (conducted by Sir Mark Elder), I was preparing to concentrate on Mahler’s orchestration in this performance of Kindertotenlieder. How wrong I was. Coote seemed able to find the appropriate colour in her voice for every vowel sound, especially in its rich lower register: no plushness for its own sake, but a sensitivity to the text as fine as anything in the string writing in Verklärte Nacht. The singer has to inhabit these heartbreaking songs totally, otherwise there is no point in singing them: but overdo the expression and you risk tilting the cycle in the direction of a dramatic scena for grieving mother or father (perhaps the final song is tilted this way in Mahler’s dramatic setting). Coote was able to inflect each song with emotion – a kind of helpless agony in the second, a desperate attempt at affirmation in the fourth – by voice alone. She also seemed to understand where Mahler was going: preparing the ground for Das Lied von der Erde, where the solo voice is one among several – primus inter pares, perhaps, but Mahler is able to endow individual instruments with an eloquence that is close to speech, and to devise a spare texture in which the instrument is one voice, the soloist another. In the lonely solos for oboe, cor anglais and horn in Kindertotenlieder he is already there.
It was a shame that we could not emulate Coote’s stillness and concentration between each song – each break produced a bout of coughing – but this was a very moving performance. She stood still at the end, locked into the atmosphere of the songs, until well after the applause had started. She particularly loved the Prommers, and they loved her. The fact that I haven’t mentioned the playing of the BBC SSO and the sympathetic direction of Ryan Wigglesworth throughout the cycle should not suggest that they had no impact: they were locked into this transformative experience too, and all the solos were beautifully taken.
Placing the song cycle as the culmination of the concert worked after all, in a special performance which allowed us to appreciate its greatness and to leave the hall with its music in our minds and hearts. I shall long remember Alice Coote’s inflection of the last word of the last song.
A brief footnote: I was at last Saturday’s Prom 11, one of the two CBeebies Proms – Wildlife Jamboree – with one of my granddaughters, rising 5, and her mother: it was rather wonderful to see the Royal Albert Hall packed with young children and their families.
Chris Kettle