Enigmatic Boulez, dramatic early Mahler at the BBC Proms

United Kingdom BBC Proms 2025 [10] – Boulez, Mahler: Natalya Romaniw (soprano), Jennifer Johnston (mezzo-soprano), Russell Thomas (tenor), James Newby (baritone), Carlos González Nápoles (treble), Malakai Bayoh (alto), Constanza Chorus, BBC Symphony Chorus and Orchestra / Hannu Lintu (conductor). Royal Albert Hall, London, 4.8.2025. (CK)

Boulez – Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna
Mahler – Das klagende Lied

Boulez’s Rituel is perhaps his least typical work, and perhaps the most often performed. Least typical because this compulsive tinkerer with his own scores – he maintained that a piece of music is never finished – wrote it, premiered it and sent it on its way. It is a funeral march of sorts, but we listen in vain for emotional undertow: its hieratic and highly organised objectivity aligns it with Messiaen’s Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum, and perhaps with Birtwistle’s vast contemporaneous processional The Triumph of Time (which I remember Boulez conducting at the BBC Proms), though without that work’s crushing weight.

Boulez’s orchestra is, of course, deconstructed, the composition of his eight groups of players and the duration of their music organised incrementally on what one might call the Partridge in a Pear Tree Principle (which also goes into reverse). As so often happens, the hall’s wide spaces lent the work a strong element of theatre, not least in the platform’s mise en scène: a phalanx of 15 brass in the centre, a colony of gongs and tam-tams above it, a woodwind septet top left, a reed quintet top right, and so on.

The percussion (one player for each group, two for the brass) nags away desultorily, often in a short, steadily weakening series of strokes, suggestive of a procession in slow retreat, or a mechanism winding down. On the podium Hannu Lintu’s gestures were as clear and decisive as Boulez’s would have been, though his hands were more expressive (I am not sure I ever saw Boulez splay his fingers). I found the performance oddly moving, surprising me even, into a momentary nostalgia for the Glock era.

The performance of Mahler’s Das klagende Lied might be seen as a continuation of this concert’s homage to Boulez: I remember him performing the complete work with this orchestra on the Southbank and giving  the first Proms performance, and I believe he was the first to record Waldmärchen. It is an astonishing work for a 20-year-old to have written: one can point to Wagnerisms and whatever, but it really came from nowhere. The primacy of wind over strings; the startling vividness of musical imagery: how do we account for these, and much else besides? If someone asked me to introduce him to Mahler’s soundworld, I would play him the opening of Part 2, Der Spielmann (preferably in Wyn Morris’s recording, still the most graphic and unsettling).

It is also an extravagant piece, particularly in the original version. The only economy in this performance was the reduction of six harps to four (they were sufficient, both sonically and visually). With six soloists, two choirs and a band of 19 wind and percussion up in the Gallery, I imagine that in terms of the numbers of performers this yielded little or nothing to the massed Mancunian forces that performed the Resurrection Symphony just two days earlier.

Mahler cut Waldmärchen, the first of the work’s three parts, for the work’s premiere. Was he right to do so? As it begins, I settle gratefully into its Mahlerian soundworld; when it winds down, almost half an hour later, I am less sure. It is diffuse: the second and third parts provide a tauter musical and dramatic experience. Of course, it is good that we have the chance to hear the work complete; but if I were to hear a concert performance of the second and third parts only, I don’t think I would feel short-changed.

The second part, Der Spielmann, opened ominously, the music finely focused over the remorseless tramping of the double basses. Tension was not maintained throughout, though the final chorus was properly engulfing. The concluding Hochzeitsstück was superb, expertly controlled and stage-managed by Lintu, the Gallery band making a magnificent and perfectly synchronised racket (there were four flügelhorns and a pair of cornets up there, along with shrieking E-flat clarinets and much else). We were gripped all the way to the final, slamming A minor chord (prophetic of the Sixth, as the beginning of Part 2 is prophetic of the Second). The two choruses outdid themselves: they were incisive and responsive to the drama throughout, raising the neck-hairs with celebratory swagger or whispering horror. They and their chorus-masters – Joanna Tomlinson for the Constanza Chorus and Neil Ferris for the BBC Symphony Chorus – fully deserved the audience’s roars of approval at the end.

The music is taxing, with many exposed lines: the BBC SO were a shade below their disciplined best, though there was fine work from the ever-reliable Philip Cobb (trumpet) and Martin Owen (horn). The soloists all played their part; mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnston, to whom much of the narration is entrusted, providing the work’s still centre. Best of all, Mahler’s hopeful plea in the score (Womöglich durch eine Knabenstimme auszuführen!) was honoured – two boys’ voices, in fact, both from the Schola Cantorum at the Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School: first, alto Malakai Bayoh, then treble Carlos Gonzáles Nápoles – small of stature, but not of voice, skill or courage as he sent those spinechilling fortissimo leaps of more than an octave – a tenth – ringing into the hall.

Chris Kettle