Sunday, May 29, 2022
Southbank Centre, London – Royal Festival Hall
Guest Reviewer, David Gutman
Vasily Petrenko the Mahlerian is familiar to Liverpudlians. He conducted a Mahler series with the RLPO in 2010-11 and grander plans for 2020 were meant to climax with an Eighth summoning both that orchestra and the Royal Philharmonic to the Royal Albert Hall. The pandemic intervened and we are left with one-off London performances straddling this season and the next, the present programme among them.
Petrenko’s Elgar at least is a known quantity; his commercial recording of Sea Pictures features the same, sympathetic soloist. The songs have a slightly peculiar reception history, possibly not assisted by colourful reports of Dame Clara Butt’s attire at the Norwich Festival premiere of October 1899: she came on dressed as a mermaid. Is it because the texts are in English that detractors discern a lack of profundity that would not have worried Mahler (or Berg come to that)? Or is it, rather, some deficiency in the invention? The reality of oblivion lurks beneath some of the marine imagery and all but ‘The Swimmer’ were programmed (twice) by Mahler himself during his conducting stint in New York. More might have been made of this had Petrenko chosen to deliver one of his pre-concert homilies. Even in 1911 critics were divided, one welcoming the songs as “dreamy tone poems”, another pronouncing them “dull and uninspired”. The singer then was Louise Kirkby Lunn, doubtless another ‘real’ contralto. Nothing much to criticize in Kathryn Rudge’s contribution here, attentive to the meaning of the text if timbrally lighter than those celebrated exponents of the past. It was typical of Petrenko that the musical texture seemed more than usually translucent, never puddingy, phrasing sculpted with an expressive left-hand.
The Mahler proved more challenging. In a curious mix of the new and the old, the conductor favoured non-antiphonal violins and the movement order shunned by most younger conductors without restoring the third hammer-blow. Kirill and Vasily Petrenko (unrelated incidentally) have both taken up Elgar’s Second Symphony but when it comes to Mahler’s Sixth they do not agree about the proper sequencing of its middle movements. The dispute inspires strong opinions (Colin and David Matthews take opposing lines) and will doubtless continue for as long as the music is performed. Like Webern on the podium in the 1930s, Vasily made the Scherzo an immediate commentary on the first movement and the Andante an upbeat to the Finale, a double dose of negation. That said, it is clear that Mahler as conductor changed his mind about this and didn’t necessarily change it back as was once thought.
The results were radically fierce and hard-edged. Out for the most part went local colour, be it Bohemian, Jewish or Viennese. Instead Petrenko insisted on single-minded Shostakovich-like intensity, the dark mood maintained over the entire not-quite eighty minutes. Moments of repose felt provisional and perhaps slightly directionless, cowbells clunky and hollow-sounding as if by design. The first movement exposition (not quite spot-on first time round) acquired greater security and power in the repeat, the Alma theme kept on a tight leash as part of the symphonic discourse rather than an occasion for ebullience and sentimentality. Except for the lack of flexibility this was pretty much the goosestep of Bernstein rather than the slow march of Barbirolli. The Scherzo continued in much the same vein, Gemütlichkeit strictly rationed in the Trio.
Next a ‘slow movement’ reluctant to have much truck with illusory serenity. The Finale was predictably red in tooth and claw, anticipating the ‘Rondo-Burleske’ of the Ninth in its exhausting drive. Tempos overall were again not unlike Bernstein’s first, New York recording albeit with far less deployment of rubato. Idiomatic or not, the results were immensely impressive, the players straining every sinew to articulate significant motivic fragments with unaccustomed zeal. Whether intending to project a conceptualization of conflict (q.v. Britten’s War Requiem which the same team had performed only days previously) or a purely abstract structure, the conductor plainly wanted to sustain the silence at the end. Sadly, audiences no longer understand this. The brutal nihilism of the Symphony’s conclusion was followed almost immediately by energetic applause. A pause for reflection would have been nice!
Why not Walton 1 without the finale, and with the Scherzo placed third? After all, that’s how it was first performed by Harty and Sargent – and the public is expected to pay good money to hear something Mahler didn’t want, a travesty only first heard publicly ten years after his death? Was that distant rumble heard after the first movement Horenstein and Barbirolli turning in their graves?
I was lucky to be at this wonderful concert: as Mahler conducted some ‘Sea Pictures’ in New York, it was a clever programme. Sad that these days the RFH cannot sell a full hall: balcony empty. Mahler could have been wrong! The Ben Zander cd talk is quite interesting on this, talking of a crisis of confidence etc Many conductors feel that the music makes better sense with the Scherzo second and some cite key sequences as evidence, of course. Going against Mahler’s probable final wishes may seem sacrilege but I have never heard a performance that convinces me with the Scherzo third: Haitink, Bernstein, van Zweden and others convince me much more. It reminds me of Wordsworth whose final version of THE PRELUDE is the least effective and the resurrected early 2 part and 5 part versions capture the inspiration of his actual composition, as for some of us does the Mahler 6 as he first conceived it. These arguments have been repeated ad nauseam and in the end many of us cherish our position whatever the evidence.
But Mahler’s final wishes, from the first public performance, were not ‘probable’. He instructed his new publishers CF Kahnt to reprint the score that they had issued before the work was performed correcting the middle movement order to Andante-Scherzo; all performances in his lifetime (by him and others) were given with the now correctly published middle-movement order Andante-Scherzo, and so it remained until 1921 when Mengelberg’s nephew Karl got hold of a pre-first performance edition with the Scherzo-Andante order and drew it to the attention of his uncle. Mengelberg mounted a Mahler-Fest in 1921, marking the tenth anniversary of the composer’s death, and did the Sixth – for the first time in public (under any conductor, including Mahler himself) – with the Scherzo-Andante order,
Mengelberg never conducted the work again.
In 1960, the Editor of the Mahler Edition, Erwin Ratz, deliberately falsified evidence to support his own belief that Mahler had changed his mind again and printed a new Critical Edition with the wrong Scherzo-Andante order, which led many (but not all) conductors to perform and record the Sixth with the wrong middle movement order that Mahler had specifically clarified, and which reprinting of such a big score – plus piano duet version by Alban Berg, and a lengthy analysis of the work – all before the Sixth had been publicly performed, had virtually bankrupted CF Kahnt. Conductors such as Bruno Walter, Horenstein and Barbirolli did not believe Ratz’s assertions, and it was only 25 years ago that the new editor of the Mahler Edition admitted that Ratz had lied and manufactured evidence to support his own theory.
Mahler did, however, perform his Second Symphony with the second and third published movements reversed on two occasions: will Petrenko give the Resurrection Symphony (which Brahms admired very much) with the second movement third, and third movement second? After all, Mahler did, but Mahler never conducted the Sixth Scherzo-Andante. We should honour his wishes, and not think we know better than Mahler himself.