Friday, August 26, 2022
Berliner Philharmonie, Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße, Berlin
The Berliner Philharmoniker and Kirill Petrenko opened their 2022-23 Season with Mahler Seven and is about to tour it, http://www.colinscolumn.com/berliner-philharmoniker-changes-in-cast-and-programme-on-festival-tour/. Petrenko has recorded the work, from performances in Munich, May 2018, http://www.colinscolumn.com/kirill-petrenko-and-the-bavarian-state-orchestra-release-mahlers-seventh-symphony-on-bayerische-staatsoper-recordings/, and there was a London visit with M7 at about this time.
Four years on, KP (following a foot injury and subsequent operation he was afforded a chair, although whenever I was watching he was standing) remains a swift interpreter of this enigmatic and endlessly fascinating five-movement masterpiece.
The opening movement, with its tenor-horn solo, well-nigh infallibly played, and the suggestion of motion through water, had a sense of occasion, and the Allegro enjoyed heraldic thrust, only slowing, somewhat, for the forest-legend radiance midway through before Petrenko drove the music onwards, deliriously, played heroically.
Two of the middle movements are entitled ‘Nachtmusik’. The first of these (advert music many years ago, Mobil oil) needs to be kept on the move, and was, otherwise it can drag, here it went somewhere; and the second, a serenade with mandolin and guitar – dusk, gentle breezes, love in the air, rapture – had charm and innocence, dark shadows, too. In between is a macabre Scherzo, like a slippery malevolent mouse a cat can’t catch, spooky details relished and heightened (antiphonal violins coming into their own), placed impeccably, ghostly knockings.
The Finale – launched here by a brilliant timpani solo and fearless trumpeters hitting the high notes – bids farewell to nocturnal adventures in exchange for a bright day and a festival, a cast of carnival characters, layers of music, some of it dance, some of marching bands, and the occasional allusion to other composers (Lehár, Schumann, Wagner?). If Petrenko doesn’t nudge (let alone wink at) certain aspects like Bernstein, he knows how to conjure a pageant and mastermind a big bell-fuelled finish. Seventy-three minutes in Munich, it was a couple fewer in Berlin. Maybe it was too pushed-through at times, however. I didn’t feel that on the recording.
Until about the dawn of the present century, Mahler’s Seventh Symphony was almost universally regarded as arguably his least successful, but since acquiring Scherchen’s ground-breaking premiere recording getting on for seventy years ago now, I have always rated this work very highly. Often stupidly termed as being in B minor, the overall tonal basis points inexorably to C major (in which key the brilliant finale is set). Emotionally the antithesis of the Sixth, Mahler 7 is the composer’s own answer to the tragedy of the previous work; Scherchen’s account is by no means perfect – give me either of Bernstein’s New York Phil versions (CBS & DGG) any time – but it truly is a life-enhancing Symphony. Bravo, Petrenko!
By coincidence I have been playing the Kurt Masur recording with great pleasure recently. A number of times.
I wanted to introduce my new bride to this astonishing work so started with the finale. She was blown away by the manic intensity (her word not mine) and took some time to recover her senses. On subsequent hearings of the whole symphony she grew accustomed to Mahler’s extraordinary range of expression, she says unlike any other Mahler symphony she now knows.
As Bob rightly says this marvellous work was shunned as being unworthy of all the others in the cycle. Now I regard it as Mahler’s most potent and forward looking score. The orchestration is astonishing and the fractured nature of the disparate movements is very modern.
Horrah for No 7.