United Kingdom Mahler: Oxford Millennium Orchestra / Joe Davies (conductor). Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, 7.3.2025. (CK)
Mahler – Symphony No.7
Mahler’s Seventh Symphony is one of the most complex works in the repertoire (Bernard Haitink’s words, not mine). It has also caused a lot of critical fuss – formal failure, Mahler’s problem symphony, etc. I sometimes think that if Mahler had anticipated his disciple Schoenberg and called it Five Pieces for Orchestra it would have saved a lot of trouble.
It is probably not controversial to assert that, like the Third, this is very much an outdoor symphony; and that for the first four movements it is concerned with aspects of night. This, I think, is key to appreciating the music. We have probably all experienced the sharpening of our senses while walking at night in the countryside; so potent and so precise is Mahler’s sonic imagery, down to the tiniest detail, and so transparent is his scoring, that by some alchemy the music vouchsafes us – if we let it – an out-of-concert-hall experience.
Brave, then, of the 90-strong Oxford Millennium Orchestra – composed of undergraduates, postgraduates and members of the wider Oxford community – to tackle the symphony. Some might say foolhardy: but tackle it they did, with mixed results. The middle movements came off best: the first Nachtmusik opened splendidly with confident and atmospheric horn calls (Tommaso Rusconi), and there was much to admire in the playing of the outsize woodwind section. The offstage cowbells made a fine impression: but there was so much turning of heads, and so many puzzled or disapproving expressions among the audience – presumably trying to find where the sounds were coming from – that I was reminded of Pierre Boulez’s performance of the Sixth Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra in which a man in the front row – an American, I believe – stood up, strode across to a half-open door and angrily berated a pair of surprised percussionists for ruining the performance.
Plaudits to the first flute – the orchestra list suggests it was Madeleine Ratcliffe – for negotiating so skilfully those pianissimo moth-flutterings (Mahler marks them flüchtig) just before the trumpet heralds the return of the march tune: also to the pair of clarinets whose banshee wails raised the neck-hairs near the beginning of the shadowy (Schattenhaft) Scherzo. Conductor Joe Davies’s refusal to linger paid dividends in the second Nachtmusik: the guitar and mandolin were not very audible from where I was sitting, but there was eloquent playing from leader Fódha Dunne, first viola Olivia Tredre and first horn Rusconi.
The mighty outer movements, accounting for at least half of the symphony’s running time, are a test for any orchestra and conductor. Davies on the podium showed tremendous energy, clarity of vision and an ability to communicate this to his players: he worked extremely hard to keep everything together and to draw out the sometimes delicate, sometimes tumultuous sounds that characterise the work. Not his fault that the players’ response sometimes fell short, though in the end the orchestra’s corporate courage paid a dividend: bland it certainly wasn’t.
That said, Richard Robinson’s well-played tenor horn solo that launches the first movement was perhaps too polite: ‘Here nature roars’, said Mahler, but this horn’s mellow sound was more reminiscent of the bands that play carols in shopping malls. The marvellous moonlit episode at the movement’s heart felt as magical as it should: I remember Gilbert Kaplan remarking that it is as sensuous as anything Richard Strauss wrote (but how much more thickly Strauss would have scored it!). Just about every detail – the cries of the woodwind, the soft plash of the cymbals – was allowed to register. In the latter part of this movement and in the finale Mahler wrote some cruelly exposed, high-lying passages for the trumpets: this section’s fallibility proved to be the Achilles’ heel of the performance as a whole.
Joe Davies’s strategy for taking on the much-maligned finale – launched by the timpanist with rumbustious swagger – was to cavalry-charge it and take no prisoners. It was a thrilling and often dangerous ride: though in one of the quieter moments, shortly before the climactic cowbells-and-kitchen-sink bonanza, it was good to hear the first trumpet redeem himself with a gently nostalgic version of the march theme (pp Graziosissimo). The conclusion was a riot, a stampede – the strings threshing like a cornfield in a storm – that threatened not merely to blow the Sheldonian’s roof off, but to dismantle it completely. There was a second of stunned silence before the applause began. Having sliced off the final chord with the force of an Olympic javelin thrower, Davies turned to us ruefully with a broken baton in his hand. It seemed somehow fitting.
Chris Kettle