Switzerland Lucerne Summer Festival 2025 – Mahler: Elīna Garanča (mezzo-soprano), Lucerne Festival Orchestra / Riccardo Chailly (conductor). Broadcast live (directed by Ute Feudel) from the Konzertsaal des KKL Luzern, 15.8.2024 and available free on ARTE Concert until 14.8.2025. (JPr)
Boulez – Mémoriale (… explosante-fixe … Originel) for flute and eight instruments
Mahler – Rückert-Lieder; Symphony No.10 in F-sharp major (performing version by Deryck Cooke)
Speaking to the audience in the KKL Luzern Riccardo Chailly said he was opening the 2025 Lucerne Summer Festival performing Mémoriale with members of the Festival Orchestra ‘as a dedication to Pierre Boulez [1925-2016]. As the composer, as the incomparable conductor, maestro, as a writer and very inspiring builder of this unique project for the Lucerne Festival Academy which he did with all his time and his heart and with great attention … Grazie Maestro!’ With Jacques Zoon’s fluttering flute to the fore, Mémoriale – which Boulez had composed on hearing of Stravinsky’s death in 1972 – proved a very haunting, yet wistful, short piece for the small ensemble.
Mahler’s five Rückert-Lieder are not a true cycle and more a ‘collection’ with the poetic theme of each having a distinctly individual thematic content and accompaniment. The music depends strongly on the poetry and Mahler – as to be expected – finds inventive ways to match the intricacies of Rückert’s verses. ‘Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder!’ warns the listener not to question the process of creation and suggests that the poet needn’t enquire too much themself, as it is the finished work which counts and not how it was achieved. ‘Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft’ expresses absolute contentment with someone, whilst the subsequent ‘Liebst du um Schönheit’ is the most traditional of the songs and the last composed. The first three stanzas are variants of one another whilst the fourth begins as if it were to repeat the same pattern, yet the stress here is on the words Liebe (love) and immer (always) to emphasise that love must be for its own sake, not for beauty, youth or treasure. ‘Um Mitternacht’ transcends the despair and anger of night, to achieve the spiritual comfort of day. Finally, ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’ is one of Mahler’s most beautiful and moving songs and evokes the peace achieved through the poet’s withdrawal from the everyday turmoil of the world and their absorption in the most meaningful and central aspects of their life: heaven, love, and song.
In ‘I am lost to the world’ Elīna Garanča’s use of words like ‘gestorben’ (dead), ‘Gebeit’ (realm) and ‘Lieben’ (loving) were deeply evocative, and it was sung as wonderfully as I can ever remember having heard it. Garanča – ably supported by concertmaster Raphael Christ, other soloists and Chailly’s supportive baton – appeared transfigured and she fully inhabited the songs with her rich, dark, well-focussed mezzo-soprano (verging on contralto) to make her account of the Ruckert-Lieder totally engrossing. Garanča had a compelling operatic approach to ‘Un Mitternacht!’ and agonised over approaching death, there was a radiant ‘Liebst du um Schönheit’ full of the renewed hope Spring brings and finally, that heart-aching ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’ which moistened my eyes!
On Mahler’s untimely death in 1911 the Adagio was one of two movements of the Tenth Symphony which he had virtually completed, barring any revisions he no doubt would subsequently have made. The opening searching theme in the violas is dark and ambiguous (suggestive of Wagner’s Parsifal) and there follows a deeply consoling – more optimistic – theme in strings and trombones. From Chailly and his excellent orchestra overall there seemed a sense of inconsolable grief juxtaposed with a danse macabre. The Adagio is rather like Mahler’s greatest hits as it is often reminding you of something else, for instance, the Adagio finale of the Ninth and Der Abschied from Das Lied von der Erde. Halfway through the movement comes the great nine-note dissonance, a great ‘scream’ chord. This seems to be Mahler’s reaction to the discovery of his wife Alma’s affair with Walter Gropius. It all ends with a quiet coda bringing with it an atmosphere of long overdue repose although the music does appear to hang on beyond its natural length. Anyway, nobody does Mahlerian repose better than Chailly and the virtuosic Lucerne Festival Orchestra.
The other four movements were left at various stages of composition, from completed (Scherzo) to unfinished yet partially orchestrated (Purgatorio) or simply sketched out (second Scherzo and Finale) and so began the (ongoing) process of musicological speculation instigated by Alma. It is Deryck Cooke’s ‘performing version’ Chailly used. On the rare occasions I have heard the Mahler/Cooke Tenth Symphony it has always seemed – whilst visionary – unpredictable, episodic and always, until Chailly, with jagged edges. Now Chailly revealed more of the echt-Mahler in Cooke’s version of the Tenth than I think I have heard before.
The second movement – the first of two scherzos – saw Chailly at his most animated on the podium. The somewhat sardonic music is dominate by the foot-stamping rhythms of a Ländler though a rampant, brass-driven ending is ushered in by Reinhold Friedrich’s elegiac trumpet solo (from Mahler’s Third?). The very brief ‘Purgatorio’ movement (apparently so named after a poem by Mahler’s friend Siegfried Lipner) seems to return us to the danse macabre of the opening Adagio and the more pastoral music of the first Scherzo (with the flute and oboe in dialogue, not for the last time) before it ends rather prematurely.
The intensely dramatic second Scherzo – short again – is another distorted waltz. This is where Mahler wrote ‘The Devil dances it with me!’ and the music is lively, lilting, yet demonic. The movement ends with the famous muffled bass drum stroke. Mahler wrote on the score (for Alma) ‘You alone know what it means’ and it was supposedly inspired by a fireman’s funeral they witnessed in New York in 1908. It links this fourth movement with the Finale. The tuba sounds particularly Fafner-like, then there is another flute solo and the ominous-sounding music reeks of desolation and mourning. The drum strokes have returned, then so does the first movement’s dissonance. Oddly despite cymbal crashes (the hammer blows in Mahler’s Sixth Symphony?) the music searches for more optimism and calmness. The flute highlights Mahler’s inscription ‘To live for you! To die for you!’ as the woodwind and brass combine in music which is reflective and rather quite lovely. It builds, subsides and dies away after a tutti chord as if Mahler composed the symphonic equivalent of ‘Non, Je ne regrette rien’.
Jim Pritchard