United Kingdom Mahler: Marianne Crebassa (mezzo-soprano), Tiffin Choirs children’s choir, London Symphony Chorus, Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela / Gustavo Dudamel (conductor). Barbican Hall, London, 15.1.2025. (CK)
Mahler – Symphony No.3 in D minor
I cannot remember a sense of excitement and occasion before a concert – excepting. perhaps, Klaus Tennstedt’s Mahler performances across the river – to rival the buzz in the Barbican Hall. Nine years ago, Dudamel gave a very fine performance of Mahler’s Third in this hall with the Los Angeles Philharmonic: but here he was reunited with the orchestra which exploded into our musical lives in 2007 with what some described as ‘the best Prom ever’. I don’t know how much the personnel has changed since then – those players will now be in their thirties – but we were expecting something special, and we got it. Conducting from memory and backed to the hilt by his players, Dudamel gave us an intense and all-encompassing account of this extraordinary score, embracing its tiny details and its immense vistas, fired by a single impulse and alive in every bar.
The first things you notice about these players are the startling vividness of their individual work and the volume which they can collectively produce. After their opening unison roar the eight horns divide into four pairs: for the first time, I could hear the cavernous rasp of the lowest pair. Volcanic upward rushes on the double basses (ten of them) and cellos; guttural bassoons; fortissimo tremolos in the violas – it was magnificent, unsettling, as if boiling lava was trying to burst up through Mahler’s wild rockscape. As the march of summer got under way – a wonderfully raucous fanfare on five horizontal clarinets – the sense of mounting excitement was sustained right through to the headlong climax: and even in that tremendous noise the woodwind and strings were clearly audible.
The second march – Mahler labels it Das Gesindel! (The Mob!) – was even more extraordinary. Beginning quietly and with pinpoint precision, it multiplied inexorably into the tramp of hundreds: for Richard Strauss it suggested ‘uncountable battalions of workers marching to the May Day celebration in the Prater’. Alma Mahler gives an amusing account of how Mahler and the nervous reactionary Hans Pfitzner encountered such a march. Pfitzner felt so threatened by this proletarian rabble that he ran off down a side street; Mahler, elated, joined the march. As the music accelerates into an unruly, Ives-like hubbub it is easy to share Mahler’s excitement: but the edge of Dionysiac frenzy in this performance gave me some sympathy with Pfitzner’s reaction too.
The three trombone solos – so evocative and so structurally important – were magnificently played. The imposing, centrally placed cymbals player also caught the ear and eye: at the point where Mahler asks for several players we had to be content with him alone, but his mighty clash was probably as effective as anything a cohort of lesser mortals could produce.
The charming second movement, the ‘flower-piece’, was brightly lit and sharply focused: no cloying sweetness here. A tangy, almost rustic oboe; pizzicatos like a cork out of a bottle; stopped horns I hadn’t noticed before; rushing sextuplets clearly articulated. I found myself thinking not of a postcard-pretty alpine meadow but of Dylan Thomas’s The force that through the green fuse drives the flower: the same force, in microcosm, that drives the anarchic energies of the first movement.
In the third movement the posthorn that interrupts the rumbustious animals (so vivid one imagined them leaping off the stage into the stalls) was so beautifully and movingly played by Pacho Flores that it seemed freighted with more than mere sentimental nostalgia. It is worth remembering that in the 1896 autograph score Mahler wrote Der Postillon! in bold letters: the title of a Lenau poem in which a coach ride on a fine spring night pauses by a churchyard so that the postilion can play a salute to an old friend and former postilion who is buried there. In the fourth movement’s Nietzsche setting, mezzo-soprano Marianne Crebassa – placed in the orchestra with the violas – was even more moving: her voice has a quality, hard to define, that communicates instantly and urgently, yet naturally, with the listener’s emotions (mine, anyway). The Ladies of the London Symphony Chorus made a joyful noise in the carolling fifth movement, abetted by the children of the Tiffin Choirs: I loved their gleefully emphatic Liebe nur Gott!
The last movement crowned Dudamel’s vision of the work with complete conviction, achieving a rare and ultimately overwhelming pitch of intensity. It confirmed the fact that of this orchestra’s many glories, the greatest is their strings. A word for the first trumpet nailing the hushed chorale, ppp sehr langsam, that leads to the final chain of climaxes; and I shall not forget the sight and sound of the closing bars, the majestic chords of the winds and the giant heartbeats of the timpani borne aloft on a threshing sea of strings.
Mahler’s Third needs unobtrusive stage-managing if Mahler’s governing concept of the Chain of Being is to be respected. A pause after the first movement, yes, not least so that the players can retune: then onward. The chain can be broken if the mezzo soloist walks on between movements to a smattering of applause. Thought has to be given to when the choirs stand up, and when, as the hushed finale begins, they sit down. This performance got everything right.
Chris Kettle