United Kingdom PROM 62 – Mahler: Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra / Sir Simon Rattle (conductor). Royal Albert Hall, London, 6.9.2024. (CK)
Mahler – Symphony No.6
‘Too beautiful’. That was the verdict of a seasoned Mahlerian friend on Simon Rattle’s recent recording of Mahler’s Sixth with his orchestra in Munich – where he has picked up the torch, as it were, from his late, great friend Mariss Jansons. This BBC Prom performance was certainly beautiful (from the orchestra that had delivered a luminous performance of Bruckner’s Fourth the previous evening, how could it be anything else?). And inexorable. And shattering.
Rattle’s tempo for the first movement was on the brisk side, menacing, purposeful: the Allegro energico that Mahler asks for. The first indication that we were in for an exceptional performance came with the woodwind chorale that follows the first incursion of the ‘Fate motif ‘– a transitional passage, we are used to thinking, to the passionate, springing melody on the violins, traditionally known as the ‘Alma Theme’. Played ppp as marked, Rattle and his players invested it with a soft, veiled, mysterious quality – music from another dimension: a distant glimpse, perhaps, of a Brucknerian world of faith and certainty that is to remain, in this symphony, forever out of reach, and from which Alma’s theme abruptly returns us to the here and now.
Rattle has in the past been criticised for being too interventionist, toying with detail and losing the big picture; and more recently – though it would be hard to name a less Karajan-like conductor – for cultivating beauty of sound for its own sake. Not here: he paced this movement magnificently, every sharp detail clear and perfectly weighted within the music’s grimly propulsive progress, and the orchestra responded with superb playing in every department. At times the strings sounded almost superhuman, from the steely brightness of the violins in that ‘Alma Theme’ to the guttural throb of the double basses before the crashing ‘Fate motif’. Invidious to single out individuals from such a crowded stage, but the first horn had a wonderful night – heartbreaking in the Alpine interlude – and the bloom on the sound of the eight horns together was unforgettable.
Rattle placed the Andante moderato second, as I believe he always does and it flowed naturally from the thrillingly affirmative climax of the first movement: it too was most beautifully played. There is a passage in it, marked misterioso and introduced by clarinets in thirds, which seems to me to contain the heart of Mahler: if, that is, you believe that his symphonies are not primarily about life and death, but about love. A minute and a half’s music – tender, fragile, almost Webern-like in its spare clarity – embedded in his darkest symphony; quickly gone.
Early in this movement, something small and white caught the platform lights as it slowly fluttered down like a butterfly from somewhere high above, coming to rest a foot from one of the first violins. I am not sure why I mention this: it seemed one of those accidental Mahlerian juxtapositions, inexplicably moving.
The sinister Scherzo – a march of amputees, someone called it – returned us to nightmare: the playing sharply detailed, alive to every hairpin in this extraordinary score. When its exhausted fragments folded in on themselves and were extinguished, Rattle allowed no respite: we were pitched straight into the finale’s harsh landscape, with its weird duet between tuba and harps (played with a plectrum as Mahler asked, sounding skeletal rather than angelic), its rearing horns and trumpets and its heart-attack surges in tempo. Yet alongside the horror, this half-hour musical firestorm also bore out Colin Matthews’s surprising remark that ‘there is more exultancy in the Sixth Symphony’s finale than in any other of Mahler’s works’: it is this, of course, that makes it ultimately so shattering and so cathartic – something that Klaus Tennstedt’s performances taught me.
In Rattle’s hands no punches were pulled: the music’s harrowing imagery was conjured in sharp relief. The two points where the orchestral juggernaut seems to grind to a halt hanging over an abyss (‘Cataclysm’ and ‘Catastrophe’, Norman del Mar labelled them) were truly terrifying. Nor was Mahler’s instinct for theatre neglected: pre-eminently, of course, when a percussionist deliberately ascends to the back row of the orchestra and prepares to wield the hammer; but also, in this performance, at the climactic moment when victory seems to be achieved, four percussionists fanned out along the back so that their (briefly) triumphant cymbal clash made a visual as well as a sonic impact. So intense was the build-up here that I felt, for the first time, that the music was crying out for the third hammer-blow: but it never came. In the first and last movements the dry whiplash of the rute – the bundle of birch sticks – was made frighteningly vivid by being quadrupled, two percussionists belabouring the bass drum case with a rute in each hand.
Rattle and his players seemed to live every bar, every moment of this devastating score: and so, accordingly, did we. Beauty and horror, and humanity caught between them. Rattle held the silence at the end: none of us broke it.
For years, Rattle’s 1987 performance with the Berlin Philharmonic – their first mutual encounter, which I taped off the radio – was my benchmark Mahler 6. Almost a septuagenarian now, none of Rattle’s energy, his passion, his ability to inspire, his sheer love of the music has diminished: but there was something extra in this performance – wisdom, experience, call it what you will – that made it a richer, more all-encompassing human statement: grim, certainly, but also rainbow-like in its reach and colour. Nor need the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra feel in the shadow of the great ensembles that have preceded it this Prom season: they were magnificent. An extraordinary performance, an extraordinary experience.
Chris Kettle
A fine review. I agree with everything you write. I was near the front of the arena. The small white thing was a feather.
Thanks for clearing that up, Graham!
I agree with every word. As Chris hints at the end, the BRSO was a match for the Berlin Phil in every department.